We’ve all heard about Twitter and there’s been a lot of head scratching as to how it will be used in business. At searchenginewatch.com they are covering The Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York 2009 Conference and Expo. They’re top story is about Twitter and it gives some clues as to how this will be useful at live events like tradeshows:
The opening keynote was by Guy Kawasaki, a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, who spoke about “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media.”
You can read the full post here: Link
They describe this opening day as starting a “Tweet Storm”. We checked Twitter (TSF Twitter) and, indeed, there are many, many, many entries on Guy Kawasaki and his keynote on Twitter. (Search Results Here)
So you have someone speaking at a tradeshow about Twitter and then that talk is defined on Twitter itself. You have to look past a few layers of weirdness here to get to an essential truth which is: Twitter (or something like it) will define almost every live, public interaction we have in business in the near future. In some businesses, this is already happening.
Guy Kawasaki is essentially being defined by these individual perspectives on his talk. Yes, he’s a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, but that public profile has been further enhanced by all of these tweets. For the folks tweeting, their public profile has been enhanced or at least clarified by the fact that they were at this talk and have told their readers about it.
Confused? Think about it this way: a few years ago, just adding tradeshow dates and booth numbers to a companies website was a big deal. Now you have the means to update information from you and your entire tradeshow team and what they’re doing at a show in real time. Who cares, right? Well, you should when you consider how all of this adds to your overall online profile.
Case in point: Search for Guy Kawasaki on Google and you’ll get a pretty good idea of who the guy (ha-ha) is. But search Twitter, particularly during a tradeshow, and you get an idea of what he is doing at this moment and who is watching him and what they think — and you can join the conversation. That’s very powerful.
This all goes to show that Twitter can be a very valuable tool in enhancing live, one-to-one contact that you get at a tradeshow. Of course, this tradeshow is a self-selecting group. It’s going to be a while before we see this kind of interaction at more industrial shows — but it won’t be long.
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