How to Use Twitter to Report “Live” from an Event

On Friday, January 23, I had the pleasure of sitting in on “Making Sense of Social Media for Your Business,” a webinar presented by Alf Brand and Jenna Jantsch of VerticalResponse.

It was time well spent, yes, but what I particularly enjoyed about the hour-long event was using Twitter to share live updates with our network of some 200 followers.  Tweeting about such an event in real time is not only fun, it gives you the opportunity to treat your constituents to valuable information and insight that they might not have gotten otherwise.  It is also of tremendous benefit to those who are putting on the gig, as you are in effect acting as a journalist, or even an evangelist, propagating their content, helping them get the word out to a larger audience. You can…

• Ask questions of the presenters, assuming they are logged on to Twitter themselves
• Post some of the best sound bites verbatim
• Share key data points, highlights, observations, etc.
• Offer your opinion – like a critic – on the quality of the presentation
• Add your two cents to what the presenters have to say
• And much, much more

Hashtags

Ideally, of course, when people are using Twitter to do such reporting on an event, they will include a hashtag – a short character string, or keyword, preceded by a hash (#) sign – in their tweets.  This makes it much easier for those who are interested to find and follow these reports.

Colorado-based media consultant Amy Gahran has an excellent article on the matter of using hashtags for event coverage on her blog, Contentious.

If a hashtag is being used, interested parties just have to go to Tweet Scan, type in the hashtag, click on the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) link and follow all the action in the RSS reader of their choice.

My Twitter Transcript

All that said, what follows below is a “transcript” of my actual activity (for the purpose of this post, I have inverted the order of these tweets, so that you can read them sequentially, as opposed to reverse-chronologically) on Twitter during the course of this VerticalResponse webinar.

What do you think?  In addition to my tweets, what else might you have reported if you were me?

Bob’s Actual Tweets During VerticalResponse Webinar, “Making Sense of Social Media for Your Business”

Sitting in on a Vertical Response webinar on social media right now.

From Vertical Response Webinar on SM I’m listening to now: “39% of small businesses in Inc. 500 are blogging.”

From Vertical Response Webinar on SM I’m in now: “Your blogging policy should say who will write, when they will write and about what.”

@VR4SmallBiz What you said about a blogging policy, I might refer to as a blog editorial calendar.

From Vertical Response Webinar on social media I’m sitting in now…high praise for Yelp.

From Vertical Response Webinar on social media I’m sitting in now: “Don’t be scared of bad reviews.” I totally agree!

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on social media: I like how they refer to networking online as “instant brand management.”

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on SM: Talking about Facebook now, which I just wrote an article about…http://tinyurl.com/84dqxl

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on SM: I just joined their Facebook Fan Page, which you can link to from here http://tinyurl.com/b4eezr

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on SM: They’re talking about Twitter right now (and, yes, they mention TweetDeck)!

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on SM: Just started following @VR4SmallBiz.

Live from Vertical Response Webinar on SM: Before I sign off, I just want to say thank you to the team at VR for staging a great Webinar.

Note:  By the way, from the second tweet on in the list above, I used TweetDeck, an Adobe Air desktop application which allows me to set up our main feed into two columns, one for tweets from all of our friends and the other only for tweets that mention Nowspeed.

Note: On March 3, 2009, Bob Cargill will be conducting a half-day seminar on “Social Media Marketing 101” for the New England Direct Marketing Association at the Microsoft Seminar Facility in Waltham, MA.  For more information and to register for this event, click here.

For more social media strategies, check out our webinar, “How to Build your own Blog and Social Media Marketing Strategy”