This time last week I was at home, recovering from the Isle of Wight Festival and basking at the sheer joy of being home, and clean, and on a proper bed, and clean, and having had more than three hours sleep, and importantly…being clean.

The idea to go the Festival was first seeded over a bottle of wine, when I asked my friend whether being the tender age of 32 and 13 months made me too old to go to a festival. A gentle 'No babe' was given in reply and a plan was hatched. Yes it might rain a bit, yes it would involve camping and I'd be cold, but we'd have each other and booze, which would make it all okay, right?

Wrong.

Our plan first seemed at risk when the weather report in the week ahead looked shoddy at best. 'No fear', I said. 'I have a Kagool and Jack Daniels, it will be ace.' The closer it got to the event, the more it rained and the more nervous I became about it being a mud-fest. So, I put my hope into modern communications to aide me. After all, knowledge is power.

I became obsessed with weather reports and following anyone vaguely useful on Twitter, from official festival organisers and ferry operators through to anyone tweeting about their journey. Come Thursday afternoon, day 1 of the festival, tales of woe were literally flooding in and there was a Twitter frenzy with people complaining of being trapped in their cars and on ferries in the Solent.  No one could get into the festival site due to mud and social media was awash with panic. Rumours were spreading that thousands were trapped, the main stage was sinking and the whole thing had been called off.

People wanted answers. What they got were two tweets. One at 2pm in the afternoon saying that there were some difficulties getting people on site. The next one six hours later saying 'Cerys Matthews is opening the Big Top' which was understandably met with a torrent of expletives from people who were still stuck on the road and hadn't moved in eight hours.

It comes down to this. If you have a Twitter presence, use it. If people have questions, answer them. If you have nothing to say or update people on, tell them. Just keep in touch. The organisers said that they were busy helping people get on site which is why they were unable to talk to media or put updates on Twitter. This sounds noble enough but just doesn't cut it in an age where everyone is online. Knowledge is power but if you opt for radio silence, you lose that power and the online world will make up their own reality.

In the end, after purchasing an extra groundsheet and an extra bottle of Jack Daniels to see me though, we had a surprisingly easy journey to the festival. Yes we renamed it 'Mudfest 2012', yes the mud will haunt me for years to come and yes it was a brilliant weekend in the end, but poor social media management meant that we could have called it off altogether.

So, my two 'take-aways' from the weekend are as follows. Silence isn't always golden, and white isn't always a sensible choice for festival attire - evidence below.

Helen @fablett