By Jonathan Rogers

As the NRLC convention staff slowly peek our heads up through the mast of post-convention unpacking and return to a normal sleep schedule, we can finally mentally debrief and start composing thoughts for next year's Jacksonville convention by looking at the impact the 2010 convention had.

So let's look at one way the convention had an impact: Twitter.

NRLC Communications Staff worked creatively to promote the contributors of speakers such as Monsignor Jim Lisante.

If you're a reader of Today's News & Views or National Right to Life News Today, you know we've talked a lot about Twitter and the ways it can help boost (and spread) the pro-life message to the world at large. A good shorthand definition is "Twitter is a free social networking website that lets users share short messages, known as 'tweets', with their circle of friends." (The maximum number of characters is 140.)

The NRLC 2010 convention gave us a chance to see if we're practicing what we preach.

Without getting too geeky, you can analyze the level of Twitter traffic by searching for "hashtags" (like keywords in a Google search). Beginning at twitter.com if you add the # sign and a keyword like "nrlc," "abortion," or "pro-life," you can track the Twitter updates ("tweets") relating to your topic.

Searching for "nrlc" on Twitter, I found almost two-hundred individual tweets going back to Wednesday the 23rd of June using the "nrlc" hashtag.

If you think of each individual tweet as (in a sense) an email forwarded to ones list of friends and contacts, that's a lot of traffic.

But that's not all. Consider that there were only a few dedicated Twitterers on site at the convention generating that traffic. A high percentage of tweets using the #nrlc hashtag were from "retweets." These are Twitter users who saw this online traffic and of their own volition forwarded it.

I had the great pleasure of using Twitter to meet new pro-life friends at the convention. Two young enterprising pro-life bloggers considered the convention worth the time and effort to travel to all the way from New Zealand.

Through Twitter I was able to meet them, get to know them, and eventually have a very enjoyable face to face conversation in Pittsburgh.

It's worth mentioning that one of them has six hundred followers on Twitter who saw his constant tweeting of the convention online all weekend long!

How can we think about how our social media efforts can help us increase the reach of our pro-life message? It helps to think of the process as one very large conversation amongst individuals who are trying to find like-minded people who share a common interest.

To give a real world example, office "water cooler" talk is a chance to talk about things that interest us and educate others. F;kydor example, "Say, did you hear about unborn pain? I was at this convention and found out that children in the womb can feel pain as early as twenty weeks.") Online social networking tools give us the chance to do something similar.

Nothing is as effective as real world face-to-face interaction with those around us. But as people take to the internet to communicate and gather information more and more, we have a chance to amplify the reach of our message to an ever wider and wider audience.

I'll continue to re-iterate the point that taking to the web always requires extra diligence and care in checking for accuracy and3125ooooooooooooo tone in our message. But of the individuals who took the effort to retweet content about the convention, many might not have otherwise even heard of the convention and the material presented there, or had the opportunity to help in turn spread the pro-life message.

A very good effort on the whole for us at the 2010 NRLC convention. Just think how many more pro-lifers we can have online for us in Jacksonville next year...

Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha