#140tc
I had the pleasure of attending the first ever twitter conference this past week. To take a step back and look at the big picture, I’m grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of the thing that’s going to define our generation – and I meant the evolution of the web in general, not twitter.
And while I definitely see the twitter value proposition for immediate feedback & response in PR and customer support, my personal work style still lends itself to sitting and digesting things before commenting. Which is why I’m writing this now. I’ve attended my share of tech and media conferences over the past several years on both coasts, and was still surprised by a few things.
1. My estimate is that 80+% of the audience had their laptop open and was multi-tasking the entire day. Of course, several of them were tweeting with folks in the same room. I imagine that as a speaker, looking out at the tops of 100+ heads who only occasionally glancedf up, that might be a little disconcerting.
2. Add to that the the real-time tweets are being streamed to a giant screen just to the right of the presenters, and it makes me happy to be in the audience and not on stage. Actually, many of the tweets were valuable, until the spam started flowing through. It just didn’t make it a very good conference for networking, unless you were doing it virtually. It’s kind of like those husbands & wives you hear about who are both sitting on their computers in the same room, flirting on facebook. I don’t get it.
So why do you need a whole conference about 140 characters? And not just one! I’ve seen no less than 6 twitter conferences advertised in the next six weeks alone! The short answer is that twitter is new, growing like wildfire, has all the hype, and simply because it IS such a simple utilitarian tool. The simplicity of it makes it applicable to all sorts of businesses (big brands & small, local ones) and can have several different objectives.
My Takeaways First off, Twitter set the record straight. Someone is making a tv show about twitter, but it’s not the twitter guys. 
Second, there’s a great opportunity still to build a killer app that pulls together all the great features that are being built now. Here’s just a sampling of some of the tools mentioned:
twitterific, twitterdata.org, tweetdeck, peoplebrowsr, tweetbeep, backtweets, tiwtt(url)y, twist.flaptor.com, twendz, twitrrator, yfrog, radian5, jobaba, bit.ly, hootsuite, cotweet, chatterbox, chirpcity, twitterlocal.net, citytweet, twellow – and I’m sure I’m missing a ton.
My Top Three
1. I came away with some fantastic examples of how businesses are using twitter to share with my clients. To name just a few @comcastcares, @jetblue, @hrblock, and@nakedpizza
2. Twitter’s business model was reflected on by just about everyone who spoke (@jowyang, @JasonCalacanis), except Twitter. They were in attendance and spoke, they just didn’t share their plans, perhaps they aren’t sure themselves? Best bets are a combination of advertising – most likely lead gen and integrated ads (see www.exectweets.com) – and premium services for brands (reclaiming brand names, analytics).
3. @jowyang and I agree on much of how to use (or not use!) twitter for your business. First rule – go where your customers are. If your customers aren’t on twitter, it’s not going to do you much good to spend your time there. Enough said.
I’m also really interested in the hyper-local uses of tools such as twitter and enjoyed the session on local & small businesses. In general, I love the idea of using the world wide web to connect back to your neighborhood.
