How to Use Twitter for Conference, Workshop or Other Meeting

First of all, let me clarify what this post is not about. It’s not about how you can use Twitter to organize and coordinate your conference yourself. It can be wonderful for that, but today I’d like to look at the 3 things you want to do to take advantage of the viral potential of Twitter, moving others tweet about your conference/event. I will use the currently happening Affiliate Summit East 2010 to illustrate my points.

To have the attendees of your meeting live-tweet updates on what’s happening at it (thereby marketing the conference or workshop itself), you want to pay attention to 3 things:

1. Infrastructure — Ensure one is set up prior to the event. This means having an account dedicated specifically to the event, a hashtag everyone recognizes + a Twub wouldn’t hurt either.

2. Encouragement — Encourage people to tweet (and certainly live-blog) about the event through contests, viral ideas, and simply by setting an example and live-tweeting updates from the conference and even key points of individual presentations.

3. Rewards — And, finally, you want to reward people for tweeting about your event. These rewards will range from displaying their hashtagged tweets on big screens set up around conference rooms (Affiliate Summits are doing this well) to more tangible prizes (e.g.: tickets to parties, free passes to next conference, etc).

Affilite Summits are generally quite exemplary in the utilization of all three above-quoted points. How is your conference/workshop doing on these?