Enjoy the conference

A lot of great conferences took place this week: WWDC, TechEd, MarketingProfs B2B, Enterprise 2.0 and a lot of twittering to help enhance the conference experience. Some key essentials for me are to append the conference recommended hashtag to the end of your tweets and to take notes in your own voice. By using the hashtag, the tweets are all trackable chronologically on tools like hashtag and my favorite, twemes. Remember, if you choose to tweet conference notes, it is primarily for your own use. You are not a reporter, so write about your own thoughts and what you think of the speaker’s words.

Notable bloggers (and twitterers) Rachel Happe, Rohit Bhargava, and David Armano have written great advice on how to maximize your conference experience with twitter. In his blog post, Twitter like a Rock Star, Armano lists 5 tips for better conference twittering:

1. Filter the signal from the noise – Cut the fat from the steak and just tweet about the stuff that is impactful.

2. Color your commentary – As I mentioned above, express your point of view.

3. Talk to your audience – As you take notes, you will get responses to your tweets. Respond, answer questions, or ask the speaker the question.

4. Paint the scene – Describe what’s going on, so people can feel like they are there.

5. Do it for yourself – Use twitter as a notebook. If you are not getting anything out of it, then don’t feel tethered to your device and stop.

Happe presents 7 reasons how twitter transforms conferences:

· Prior to the event, twitter dialog creates demand for the event

· Share events with a broader audience

· Spontaneous planning of side activities at the conference

· Makes it easier to find people via location based tweets

· Audience participation

· Cementing the relationship bonds by meeting face to face

In How to speak at a conference without getting skewered on twitter, Bhargava gives advice to speakers:

1. Get a twitter account (of course, if you are here, you probably have one already)

2. Prep by checking out the event conversation

3. Focus on the audience reaction

4. Monitor mentions about you.

5. Respond to tweets

6. Learn for next time.

Great advice that if applied, not only will make you a twitter rock star, but will enable you to get a lot more out of the conference.