As a board member of the Indiana Chapter of The American Massage Thereapy Association, I had the pleasure of attending the National Board of Directors meeting in Chicago this past weekend. Chapter presidents from all over the country were gathered to attend the board meeting and report key details back to their chapters. This year, I tried something a little different – I posted updated from the meeting in real time using Twitter.

Having already set up a Twitter account for AMTA-Indiana, I logged in at the start of the meeting from my laptop poised for action. Each time their was a significant point to communicate, I posted a tweet and attempted to add commentary as appropriate. When the presentation displayed documents that were available for download, I searched the AMTA National web site for the document and then posted a link to it via Twitter to make it easy to reference the material discussed during the meeting. It ended up being a lot of fun and I received notes from members who were not able to attend telling me that they appreciated the updates because it kept them in the know. I was even able to post some photos of the boardroom and dinner with our National president via Twitpic from my iPhone.

Twitter has many uses, but this illustrates one of the most valuable, in my opinion. Membership-driven organizations need to be sensitive to the fact that their members want to know what’s going on and feel informed. By using Twitter to distribute information in real-time, I was able to open the box a bit and hopefully bridge the gap between the closed boardroom in Chicago and our membership back home in Indiana.