The Good News About Tweet Streams
Eric Lundquist | Date: 06-10-09 | Comments: 22
- With Twittering becoming all the rage, conferences can't go wrong setting up Tweet streams. Here are three good reasons to use hashtags to bring more value to Tweets.
What
can you learn from a Tweet stream? A lot, in my opinion. A Tweet stream is a
focused set of Twitter messages identified by a hashtag. Say I were having a
conference about this topic, I would set up a hashtag of #tweetlearn or something
like that. I'd make sure that everyone knew about the hashtag identifier at the
start of the conference, and then I would stand back and let the Tweeting begin.
So, if I set up that tag
would I only be adding to the Twitter static that threatens to overwhelm the
universe? I don't think so, and here are three examples.
First, a hashtag can bring
some order to the chaos. When I attend a conference, one of the things I always
look for and ask for is, What is the tag? Without a tag, people start making up
their own and never really connect. Conferences that go out of their way to
appear digitally hip gain points by helping us Twitterers (I'm @ESLundquist)
find their way and focus. Conferences (whether live or digital) that don't set
up a hashtag in advance do themselves a disservice.
Second, a hashtag helps
build a collective mind. Recently I attended a very well-produced conference on
business-to-business marketing (#mpb2b) in Boston. How many times have you
been at a conference and wondered if there were better panels going on, if
there was someone who could answer your questions or where people were going
for happy hour? All that information is in the Twitter stream. The connections
you can make run from the trivial to the business changing. A big effort by
conference organizers is to make space for people to introduce themselves and
make connections. Twitter can help this enormously.
Third, hashtags let you be
in two places at the same time. For example, I really wanted to go to a session
recently put on by the Innovate
MassTech group. It had a good lineup, and it was being held at the new
Microsoft facility in Cambridge, Mass., which has become one of my
favorite places to attend events. Alas, the difficulty of being in two (or
three) places at the same time made this meeting impossible. But all was not
lost. By tuning my Twitter search to #innovatematech, I was able to follow a
real-time stream of information coming from the event. I knew many of the folks
Twittering at the event, and I could quickly get a feel for what was being said
and get varied opinions about the presentations. It was almost like I was there
except I didn't get to drink the coffee or eat the bagels. Now I can decide
which speakers and topics I want to catch up with later in the day and develop
some story ideas.
Tweet streams when used
correctly don't flood, but instead focus, us with information.
