Image by Gulnara Akhundova

"I have learned in these four days more than I have learned in three years of journalism training," the parting words of one of the enthusiastic Azerbaijani journalists after a four-day, intensive social media workshop at the Azerbaijan Media Center.

She was just one of the 25 journalists, bloggers and NGO workers who said they had picked up new skills and were keen to use them. In fact many had during the four days. Several said they felt they were now in the position to pass their new-found expertise to others.

And that's the biggest benefit of such workshops; building the capacity of local journalists and transferring skills so that they can then teach others what they have mastered.

Twitter - from a handful to a full house

When the course started only a handful were on Twitter, a few had blogs and, of course, all were on Facebook. By the end of day one all had set up profiles on Twitter, by the morning of day two all had Posterous blogs and were updating them and a team blog by email.

Day three saw them using curation tools such as Storify and Scoop.it to gather and share information assets, and by mid afternoon on the final day they were building interactive timelines using Dipity and interactive maps using Umapper.

They were using Hootsuite to find stories, Klout to check their Twitter influence and TweetEffect to try to find out which tweets worked and which lost them followers. Just before they left, several were invited to sign up for Quora, the online Q & A network.

Ready to transfer their skills to others

"I will definitely use all I have learnt in my work," said another who had successfully built an interactive timeline and map and embedded both in her blog in just a few hours.

Gulnara Akhundova, Project Manager for International Media Support at the Azerbaijan Media Center said that the initial feedback she had received was that all who took part had valued the course and reported that they had learnt a great deal.

"It seems everyone is extremely happy with the course and many said they had benefitted greatly," she said.

This article has been posted on the Media Helping Media Facebook wall where participants have been adding their comments. Thanks again to all.

Note: This article has also been posted on the Media Helping Media micro blog.

About the course

The course was designed and delivered by David Brewer, director of Media Ideas International Ltd, and founder and editor of Media Helping Media. The local co-trainer was Azer Nezerov @Azer_n, the translator was Parvana Persiani @parvanapersiani, who also helped run some sessions, and Valida Babayeva was on had at all times to take photographs and help participants set up their Twitter, Posterous, Storify, Dipity and Umapper accounts. The course was organised by the Azerbaijan Media Center and sponsored by the Council of Europe.