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Twitter: A Series of Tubes

Bill Rutledge — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:09:57 +0000

As poor Senator Ted Stevens once told us, “the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” And then the laughter started.
I’m going to defend the Senator’s metaphor: The Internet is developing an underlying infrastructure (plumbing) that will support an impressive sprawl of new information communities. Chief among these is Twitter. Upon launch, Twitter in and of itself was easy to understand and caught on quickly but quickly earned the disdain of all of my busy colleagues, who saw it only as another place to try and avoid Kutcheresque gossipolemic. But with its open structure and immediacy, Twitter is emerging as an important piece of plumbing for enterprise messaging. I’ve seen more and more Tweetup references in conference coverage recently, and last month saw the first instance of an event trying to ban a tweetup taking place in conjunction with their event. I won’t mention the event, but you can search it out on Twitter.
I was also pleased to the closer integration of LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn doesn’t get enough popular attention, which is fine with me. I’m hoping to be able to use LinkedIn for free forever. At some point, I know they’re going to reach into my pocket.
I’ve also seen a greater awareness of TweetDeck, and recently learned that TweetDeck is linking to LinkedIn. This will make my life a lot easier. TweetDeck allows you to manage your messaging across multiple platforms. Anyone who’s ever had to copy and paste a 140-character message 30 times before going home at night will love TweetDeck.
Twitter is tubes: Someday in the future, you’ll be messaging effectively, without ever thinking about Twitter–just like you flush the toilet without thinking about the massive infrastructure that makes that simple act possible.
At some point, I’ll post the Top 10 Networking Trends for Events in 2009.

I Doubted Twitter and Twitter Forgave Me, Part I

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:19:41 +0000

We do a lot of posting to promote events and web sites. For almost a year, I’ve focused heavily on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Groups, Facebook. (There also seem to be a lot of Ning-based industry sites popping up recently.) Twitter seemed like a lightweight entry into the category of social media, and I regarded it as a playground for tweens with a lot of free time.

This month I finally got around to making a half-hearted promo effort on Twitter. I was surprised to see the number of “followers” we were able to acquire without much effort, and after a few brief promotional “tweets” I was startled to discover that Twitter was driving almost 20% of the traffic to the web site we were promoting.

So I’m sold on the potential, and trying to develop my own brief on best practices. A couple of orgs that seem to be doing a good job touting their events: Glue Conference, organized by Phil Becker, who built the impressive Digital ID World. Also I get a lot of messages from Lauren Touby of Mediabistro, who frequently mentions that she “has a few discount tickets” available to her events.

These messages seem personal in a way that email does not. Maybe it’s because this is new. I’d be interested in hearing about other events that are leveraging Twitter. I’ve also seen some interesting ways that Twitter can be integrated into an event on-site. I’ll write about that next.

Social Network/Mobile Convergence

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:25:34 +0000

I use LinkedIn and Facebook a lot, and frequently find myself thinking “this is almost useful.” The main problem I have with the networking sites in the signal-to-noise ratio, especially on Facebook, where a long-forgotten high school friend can “send you a teddy bear” in an effort to reach out of the distant past and waste your time. I establish LinkedIn groups for every event that I market, like this group on for the Smart Cards in Government conference. This group is still far from a self-sustaining density (which I estimate to be 2000-3000 names) so in the meantime, I try to goose interest by posting news items and discussion topics. This article on some undefined deal between Nokia and Facebook reminds me that the utility of social networks and wireless devices are destined to merge and catalyze in a way that could be game-changer for event producers. Event producers should think about this in terms of integration: How can you facilitate a network function that is integral to the supply chain? This is something that’s worth thinking about in the shower.