What we learned from our latest Twitter party

Last week, we produced another client Twitter chat. We do these on a monthly basis with the twin goals of fundraising while building relationships. Once again, there were takeaways that we’d like to share. You can read what we learned during our last chat here or, check this out to learn what a Twitter chat is all about.

Marketing– we continue to be successful in driving interested and interesting peeps to our chats. Putting the right message in the right hands drives the right people to your event– it’s that simple. We use Twitter to deliver our message and rely on past, active attendees. It turns out that Twitter is great for getting the word out about time sensitive events. We try to be insistent that people use our #SOSFood hashtag when spreading the word. 115 ppl showed up for this chat, down from 175 for the first but… the conversations were more robust.
It’s always about people, not the technology– some things don’t change. From the earlier days of the WELL to The Virtual Community to other luminaries, it’s always been about community building. Twitter is one of many solid community building tools. We’re seeing a community start to form that returns, gets involved and tells other peeps about it. Folks are courteous, respectful of differences and threads or conversations develop during chats. Like we said, a community is developing.
It’s all about the technology– boy did we have a slow night on the networks. It seems as if nothing was going our way. Twitter chats are notorious for tech gaffles and ours was no exception. Twitter tools like TweetDeck, TweetChat, TweetGrid were all running slow. This means delayed postings and reactions- tough if you’re trying to run a live chat or communicate with your moderator!
You learn a lot by listening!– We have a great moderator. Even though we call Kate a moderator, she’s actually a facilitator. Our chats are producing creative, crowdsourced ideas. The only way to get there is by listening. This works well with Twitter chats where everyone’s on the panel and can participate.
Everything has to work together– the client does a great job with communication vehicles like it’s website and social networking tools like Facebook, youtube and it’s own Twitter feed. Can’t overstress how important it is that all traditional and new/social/digital media work together to deliver a consistent message.