03/05/2012 – Secrets of a good tweetchat
I confess to initially being quite sceptical about the benefits of social media tools like twitter. At my first speaker slot for Connecting Up Australia back in 2008, I had some sympathy with my fellow CEO Doug Jacquier's plea to staff in his opening plenary address - "if I start twittering, take me out and shoot me". However, four years on, and following Lasa's second successful tweetchat, I'm now more than ever convinced of the potential and power of the medium.
This tweetchat looked at online tools, and we harnessed the goodwill of a great panel of experts in the field (sourced via twitter and other methods). Participants on the day came up with a fantastic range of tried and tested tools, as well as sharing their insights. Even better, a range of useful tools such as Social Source Commons (a collaborative project brought to us by our US non-profit friends Aspiration), a twitter search widget and Storify have enabled us to take the conversation to a much wider audience, including via our ICT knowledgebase.
The event itself performed two key functions. One, it enabled us to source 34 tools which we've collated on the "third sector online tools" toolbox which was also updated live during the event. Two, we discovered 21 new tools that are not yet on the Social Source Commons platform, but which will be added in due course. We also discovered another useful tool, hashtracking.com, during the event, that told us this tweetchat had:
- generated 720 tweets;
- with 1,049,870 impressions (i.e. views);
- reached 288,584 followers in 24 hours, and
- was the 4th highest trending twitter topic in London (ranking higher than the infamous Samantha Brick!)
Now that is powerful!
So I want to say a big thank you to all our experts, to everyone who participated, and the team here at Lasa who were involved in organising the event. You all helped to make it a great success and showcased the potential of technology in a real way to:
- harness and share knowledge;
- engage an audience;
- deliver useful content in multiple ways;
- address the needs of different audiences; and
- promote an event.
Of course, organising a Tweetchat event alone won't achieve these objectives and we've written some tips on Tweetchatting to share our learning. A key lesson is that to get people to come along, you need to invest plenty of time "seeding " your twitterchat in the run-up to the event to keep it in people's minds. We took a personalised approach, contacting a lot of key influencers and contacts in our networks, through direct messages on twitter.
As they say, you cannot just "build it and they will come". It takes planning, integrated promotion across online and offline channels, as well as collaboration. There is an abundance of tech tools out there that can support these fundamental organisational processes. It's not about the technology it's about how the technology can support you to do what you do better. Whereas I may have agreed with David Cameron's views on twitter a few years ago, I think we've all moved on now in understanding the potential and the opportunities of this powerful tool, especially for charities.
Give it a try, you never know what you might find out there, and if you need some help, then give us a shout too. Good luck.
Posted by Terry Stokes on 03/05/2012