Dave Barger, from LunaWeb, was able to make it to the interactive portion of South By SouthWest (SXSW) this past week. This massive, Austin, TX based, conference has a heavy focus on learning and sharing information on technology and Web 2.0. But what has typically been a festive, party atmosphere, took on a more serious tone in the face of a sinking a economy populated by businesses struggling to stay afloat.
One bright spot in the midst of this gathering, was the serendipitous and spontaneous creation of several unconference-like core conversations. Dave was lucky enough to be a part of one of these conversation, when several SXSW attendees converged on a session that had reached max capacity. These 50+ rejects went on to form there own conversation group, “The Rejected Connected”.
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TweetHall – Rejected Connected from LunaWeb on Vimeo.
The discussion became a valuable mindshare of best practices for Twitter. The group ranged from people brand new to Twitter, to Twitter application developers. Everyone was able to contribute, and everyone walked away with a headful of new ideas to ponder. The key takeaways for the session from Dave’s blog were:
- Using a good photo of only your face.
- Share your twitter handle everywhere.
- Don’t use the profile URL to merely link back to your twitter page.
- Multiple users of one org’s twitter account can end tweets in “/fl” that being /(first initial)(last initial) or state the person tweeting in the profile description.
- Be genuine and don’t be uptight about tweeting, just get out there.
- Don’t protect your tweets and still try and seek out people to follow (the analogy of “going to a cocktail party and locking yourself in the bathroom” was shared).
There was great discussion on the best way to manage a corporate identity on Twitter. Deceptively tricky questions like, “How much of myself do I put into my corporate Twitter account?” and “If I choose to have multiple Twitter accounts, what’s the best way to keep up with them?” were debated at length.
Tiffany Winman, one of the attendees, did a great job of nailing down the rationale behind marketers using Twitter. “Awareness/traffic; viral buzz; lead generation; increased customer satisfaction and loyalty via increased community networking, identifying and fostering relationships among employees and customers; generally decreases in costs and resources from traditional marketing methods; research on brand image, public sentiment, hot topics to improve messaging and product/service development.”
Otis Maxwell also had some valuable insight into how a previous session at SXSW provided further illumination on the spontaneous hallway discussion.
If you’d like to see the twitter conversation that resulted from this ad hoc gathering, search for #tweethall on twitter.
blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
