Two events in the past week, barcampsg3 and blogout!09, saw a new trend in communications at events emerging that could be things to come for events targeted at bloggers – The Twitter #tag brigade.
Twitter is a site for microblogging under 140 characters per post. It works well for events as it allow attendees to post their thoughts or report on the event instantly and share it with their followers. Twitter also allows for communication between attendees and speakers who are also tweeting on the same event.
#tag or hashtags is an adaption from mIRC days where you type in join #channel to join the channel. In Twitter, #tag helps to group the conversation of the event or topic and makes it easier to search on search.twitter.com.
Web applications like twitterfall.com and monitter.com makes it easier to group #tag tweets to make it seem that a “live” conversation is taking place.
Why is this new trend significant?
#blogout09 saw 189 tweets on first day; 176 tweets on second day
The number of the tweets on for the two event were significant enough to appear on the main page of search.twitter.com and other twitter trend websites. This meant that not only are you reaching local audience at the event, you are also capturing their readers almost instantly and also a worldwide audience.
The number of tweets may seem low to you but it is the person behind the tweet and his/her followers that are most important.
For example, @lenovo_sg has about 117 followers so far and this means that the moment he tweet, 116 followers get to read about it. Lenovo_sg 116 followers will have lenovo_sg’s tweets on their own twitter account and this means lenovo_sg is actually reaching out to 155,134 second-order followers (stats from http://twinfluence.com/)
@claudia10 currently has 419 followers and 1,471,176 second-order followers reading her tweets!
| No | Name | Followers | 2nd-order followers |
| 1 | @lenovo_sg | 117 | 155,134 |
| 2. | @claudia10 | 419 | 1,471,176 |
| 3. | @litford | 301 | 906,055 |
| 4. | @socialpr | 563 | 2,976,374 |
| 5. | @mhisham | 180 | 608,763 |
| 6. | @kooicia | 36 | 274,086 |
| 7. | @hongting | 156 | 2,258,560 |
| 8. | @suyuen | 203 | 399,633 |
| 9. | @benkoe | 394 | 610,941 |
| Total | 2,369 | 9, 660, 722 |
If you read into numbers, a total of 2,369 followers of the above-mentioned twitters would have read their tweets on the event.
A total of 9, 660, 722 2nd-order followers might have also read about the event. Even if 10% were online at that time to catch the post, that would be 966, 072 readers of the tweet.
So PR and marketing, are you tweeting yet?
Comments
But still yes, twitter is one powerful tool especially for such an event. Do hope to see more people using this as a form of notetaking as compared to writing down on paper and pen. Another form of sharing notes and ideas. And growing your followers all at the same time!
Spoke to Joel about this, but both of us agreed its about the herd mentality.
For example, MissLoi was interested in Blogout!09 because she saw many of her followees tweeting about the same subject.
So I would say that is a good thing rather than a problem.