B2B Presence » Twitter

Keep an Eye on Periscope and Other Participant-Driven On-Site Videocasting Tools

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:47:11 +0000

I enjoyed this front-line review on the application of Periscope employed as a real-time marketing tool at an established trade show event. Periscope enables live webcasting from your smart phone. This app, now owned by Twitter, launched in March and they’ve just announced that they’ve signed up over 10 million Periscope accounts. Nipping at the heels of Periscope is Meerkat, which created a lot of buzz at South by Southwest this year. B2B events producers would be advised to keep an eye on these tools that put the power of “presence” into the hands of your clients.

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 II

Bill Rutledge — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:39:59 +0000

We regarded Twitter as a forum for teenage chat until we gave it a try and found that it drove a lot of traffic to our web sites. Audience acquisition is an obvious application for Twitter, as I wrote previously. A quick look around the web shows that a lot of event managers are using Twitter to connect with attendees and exhibitors prior to events and on site.

BusyEvent in their blog entry described a number of interesting ideas for integrating Twitter into the activities of a conference, including digital signage. One comment: they suggest setting up a twitter feed based on the name of the event. I would suggest that the event Twitter feed be delivered under the name of someone associated with the event—conference chair, editor, association executive. A person-to-person feed always grabs the user much more than a “brand” feed. Great Idea: get attendees to provide their Twitter name when they register, and make this information available to other registrants.

Among other things, this blog entry from MeetingsNet contains some good ideas on the use of Twitter as a way to get your audience involved in building conference content, and to battle attrition. Here’s where getting attendees to “follow” each other comes in handy—when they see the feeds coming from their colleagues onsite, they’re going to want to jump in the car. Last week I saw dozens of feeds coming from SXSW conference, and I wish I had been there.

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.