About Conference Session Tweeting
One of the most interesting uses of Twitter that I’ve found is the practice of Tweeting at conferences. It’s become commonplace for conferences to have an official hashtag, such as #irce at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition that I attended the last couple of days in Boston.
While this is useful for the attendees, it’s also a great way to extend the conference to those who haven’t been able to attend. If you know the hashtag, you can get a feel for the conference from afar. Even if you have been lucky enough to get to attend the conference, it’s often and likely that you can’t attend every session.
Another great benefit of conference tweeting is feedback. I spoke at two conferences this week – DM Days as well as the aforementioned Internet Retailer Conference (IRCE). The audiences could not have been more different, in both size and in what they were looking for from their speaker. The DM Days presentation (wDMDays09 gadgets presto final w BK), was geared towards a novice audience, while the IRCE was geared towards a specialized audience of email marketers.
Only one person tweeted the DM Days presentation, but it was by far the best live blogged session I’ve been involved with (the whole DM Days show tweet stream here). Here is the stream from my presentation as well as part of Ivanka Trumps’: DM Days Destination CRM. I’ll tell you one thing, it is hard to send a message with DM Days in it without a hashtag, since Twitter interprets the ‘DM’ as a command to ‘Direct Message’. Only a hashtag works.
It would be great for the less savvy conference promoters to get on the hashtag bandwagon. Not only would they provide a great feedback loop for their speakers, they also help extend their conference beyond the immediate audience. There is nothing that sells a conference better than the audience that is attending it – it’s why I go to conferences.
Dave Hendricks and 
Attentionization 
Lori Glauser 4:10 pm on June 21, 2009 Permalink |
Hi Dave,
I can’t agree with you more – I’ve been blogging from conferences for a couple of years, its one way to extend the reach of the conference.
In one case it backfired, however. One conference speaker made what was, in my opinion, controversial statements to a room full of 200 people. I felt compelled to make a brief, factual comment about it in my blog. I posted from my iPhone during the presentation. Within 12 hours, her company’s web crawlers found my comment, my phone was ringing off the hook, and within 24 hours I got a call from my CEO, who I hadn’t previously met. Turned out the woman worked for a client company.
I learned a big lesson that some things discussed at conferences are intended only for the conference attendees. From a different point of view, one should be very careful what they say to a room full of 200 colleagues across the industry. You never know who might write about it.
Another lesson learned – the largest reader segment of my blogs are corporate crawlers looking for anything and everything I might post about a particular company. Most comments I get are from thinly disguised employees of companies I mention. The net result – my blog is a lot less interesting than it used to be.
Dave Hendricks 8:41 pm on June 21, 2009 Permalink |
Lori
I couldn’t agree more. No one is ever off the record anymore. What’s worse is that something you say can be misinterpreted and you can’t approve that comment or mediate it. The only thing that seems to be private now, for the time being, is the one on one business meeting. It’s hard to tweet with someone sitting across a conference table from you.