As I approached the doors to the session after the classic cross convention center haul, I noticed about 4 or 5 people standing outside and a #sxsw worker seeming to guard the door. Max Capacity Reached – Fire marshal rules and ya ya ya… other rejects were collecting down the hall. Poof, we were gone to join them. About 50 of us collapsed together in an open area with a few chairs and a couch and had our own session. The rejected connected.
TweetHall – Rejected Connected from LunaWeb on Vimeo.
Maybe 75% of attendees were responsible for Tweeting for an organization. A third attending had been using twitter for less than a couple of months… and had LOTS of great questions.
How do you separate a business from the “unofficial” mundane personal tweets?
Answers varied from: “you don’t. you keep the business human”, to “have separate accounts”. In managing separate accounts, Hootsuite was named by a few as a viable option for the desktop and Tweetie for iPhone.
One attendee disclosed that he was associated with HootSuite. Turns out he’s a humble Founder & President of the company that built it. Another attendee Christi, the tweeting voice of Southwest Airlines, shared many insights. Additionally, SocialJulio (formerly aka “OracleJulio”) helped out with the conversation. It was truly a group discussion.
Reliably asked were, “What’s an RT, and a #hashtag ?”
Techrigy (and their “Freemium” account) for brand management , and BudUrl for URL click tracking were mentioned as great utility.
During the session, I passed my camera around to gain the unique visual perspective of any attendees that wished to shoot a shot or two. The result are found here on a Flickr Set of mine, and are also used in the posted photo collage. I didn’t not delete anything that might normally be rejected since the view/shot is unique to each participant and I feel contributes to the authenticity of the set as a whole.
TweetDeck was notably favored for grouping tweets.
TweetLater and Framed/Banner sponsored tweets took lite hits for authenticity and advertising respectively.
Key takeaways included:
- 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).
At the end of the session, it was universally agreed to that all would tweet #tweethall to find each other online.
An unbiased ;-) comparison was made with the planned session attendees and determined that the TweetHall session was a better session.
If you were at the session, please comment below on any of the many things I’m sure I failed to mention.
It was an open-conference session at it’s best and it was great to be a part of it with the other “rejected”.
More posts from attendees:
Otis regrets… or Not
March 17th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Hi Laluna, thank you so much for recapping your ad hoc “twitter for marketers” panel! I was one of the rejects that arrived just as they were announcing they were at maximum capacity. Does anyone know if the actual panel notes are posted online anywhere? I’ve been dying to know what went on in there! Disgruntledly yours, Ryan
And thanks again for summarizing the best practices from your hall meeting.
March 17th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Way to go, y’all! I was so bummed we had such a small room and couldn’t get any more people in. Your response is now one of my favorite stories of this year’s SXSW: an impromptu un-conference down the hall. Brilliant!
I’m not going to compare the panels. Not only can’t I, given I was in the room, but you probably wouldn’t believe me, given I was one of the presenters. ;)
If it’s ok, I would like to share with you something about how @MHJohnston, who Twitters for @Jetblue, and myself have approached using Twitter for our organizations and offer some observations for Small Business. I don’t know that anyone recorded our Core Conversation. I meant to and then at the last minute forgot, so I’ll go from memory…
I introduced myself: Ricardo Guerrero. I started the majority of Dell’s Twitter accounts, as can be seen at: http://www.dell.com/twitter. As you may have heard, Dell announced it sold a million dollars (revenue) of equipment in the first 18 months since launching @DellOutlet in June of 2007. I’m still a full-time Dell employee, but I’m *NOT* representing Dell at SXSW. I am launching my company (with our sad excuse for a website right now, it’s true): Stwittergy (@STWITT3RGY) – Twitter Strategy, Metrics & Consulting for Business.
I won’t go into such detail on Morgan as I don’t recall all the info he shared that isn’t in his bio here:
http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/panels/?action=bio&id=169665
We then described Dell’s and JetBlue’s differing uses of Twitter. When I set up @DellOutlet, Dell’s chief blogger, @LionelatDell, had already set up a Twitterfeed of his blog headlines at @Direct2Dell. Once I saw what he’d done, I realized that Dell was going to have many different accounts targeted to specific audiences. I ended up creating other Twitterfeed accounts for other Dell blogs and properties such as @IdeaStorm and @StudioDell. In December of 2007 I created @DellHomeOffers and later @DellSmBizOffers. Hence, Dell’s use of these Twitter accounts could not easily be characterized as either personality-driven nor very personal. The primary advantage as well as greatest challenge for Dell was in having multiple accounts, and given the current limitations of Twitter, this led to the creation of a strategy whereby all of Dell’s Twitter accounts only follow other Dell accounts as well as the individual behind the particular account one is viewing. So, generally in the bio of Dell’s Twitter accounts that individual is called out as the contact for comments/questions, and their “professional” account (i.e. usually @FirstNameatDell) is followed by the account.
JetBlue of course, has only 1 account. Morgan is typically the person monitoring Twitter and responding to customers, but the account does not provide his @MHJohnston account as a contact point. (Personally he admitted to me that he doesn’t Twitter that frequently from his own account, given how much he Twitters all day for JetBlue.) One of the interesting differences is how much JetBlue communicates via Direct Message (DM) with its customers, while the Dell accounts cannot DM customers because customers cannot follow back. The workaround is that Dell strongly encourages it’s employees to follow back everyone who follows their “professsional” account so they can turn the conversation over to DMs if necessary.
Well, battery is about to die, but want to share a couple of links for more info that could be of use to you.
1. A poll about how important it is for businesses to follow everyone back vs. exposing the employees who Twitter for the business:
http://www.twtpoll.com/vd7q1z
2. A SlideShare of a presentation I’ve done about Twitter for Business:
http://Budurl.com/Twit4Biz
Please let me know if I can be of assistance, and kudos again on rising to the opportunity to help each other out at #TweetHall!
– Ricardo Guerrero
Founder & Principal
Stwittergy
@STWITT3RGY
March 16th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Dave, thanks for capturing key takeaways, pics, and videos from the discussion. You’re excellent.
And thanks to all the attendees of the session and excellent contributions/discussion! We totally rocked!
Another important topic of our #tweethall discussion: For what purposes do Marketers use Twitter? There was a wide array of examples. To name a few: 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.
I really enjoyed the diversity of perspective that the group brought to bear on the identity management topic (historically oversimplified corporate vs. individual voice/engagement debate). The attendees provided excellent examples of different contexts, needs, and situations that led to very different, yet viable and understandable execution routes. For instance, at IBM, we use a variety of methods (e.g., corporate voices, individual, and a nice mix).
At IBM, our goal is to engage our employees with our customers, business partners, analysts, and stakeholders–not simply provide one-way messaging and news.
Another great tip that came out of the session: When you have multiple online personas, it’s helpful to keep Twitter environments separate so you don’t accidentally tweet an embarassing comment on your corporate Twitter stream. Several us reported making this mistake. :)
-Tiffany Winman (@rhetorica2 on Twitter. I also tweet as @ibmtivoli and @ibmpulse)
March 16th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Thank you @Lunablanca for this great post and thank you especially for recording all the best practices in such detail. You are a hero for having done that!
Re how you coordinate a corporate voice in tweeting, the session just before this one actually had some good answers from journalists who, of course, are accustomed to communicating with readers through columns, blogs and now tweets. I’ve posted some thoughts at http://www.otismaxwell.com/blog/2009/03/twitter-for-marketers-at-sxsw/ .
Thanks again!