140: The Twitter Conference – Who’s in?

Every day we hear about Twitter’s popularity - Record number of users, new celebrity members, Ashton Kutcher and his 1,000,000 followers. Another indicator of Twitter’s growth and popularity is the number of conferences popping up. Jeff Pulver is putting on his 140 characters conference in New York on June 16 and 17th. There is a one day conference, Twtrcon, in San Francisco on May 31st. And on May 26th and 27th, the Parnassus group is presenting the 140: The Twitter Conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

So where will I be? I am excited to join the 140: The Twitter conference as a speaker. I will be co-presenting a session titled: "Mining Twitter: Extracting Value From Conversations and Connections", where the latest tools and techniques for monitoring your brand will be discussed. I think this conference is fantastic because I will join fantastic speakers like 3 members of the Twitter team including API lead, Alex Payne as well as Jeremy Pepper, Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, fellow Seattleite Kathy Gill, Warren Whitlock and Jennifer Leggio. Great company, don’t you agree?

I agree with Jennifer when she says on her blog, “I might be slightly biased, but the topics at this particular Twitter conference seem to be centered and focused on real-world use scenarios, not just grandiose marketing ideas. If you’re serious about implementing Twitter as part of your strategic marketing practices, or want to use it to build a brand, this is the con to be at”. This is also the only conference that has a very strong developer track as well!

To register visit the official site. The conference is an extremely affordable $249, but you can save 10% off the standard two-day pricing by entering the code 140tcr6 when you check out. And if you tweet about it, make sure you use the #140tc hash tag.

Please let me know if you are coming as I am sure there will be some great tweet-ups and I'd love to chat face to face. It’s an event not to be missed.

Where was the NFL?

Last night we saw one of the most exciting regular season football games in quite some time as the Jets beat the Patriots, 34-31 in overtime. Twitter was rocking, as it often does during events. Between people tweeting about their team and the #patsjets hashtag, there must have been over 1000 tweets from football fanatics. Personally, it was even better winning a bet with Jim Storer and seeing him change his avatar to the lovely NY Jets logo. I am anxious to see all of the nice Jets related comments that Jim will be making (also part of the bet).
I’ve written before about how much Twitter enhances watching a sporting event at home. it’s like watching the game in your living room with a few hundred friends. And that was certainly true last night. However, based on the Twitter brand survey that Peter Sorgenfrei and I just completed, I think there could be so much more for fans.
How great would it have been if representatives of the Jets and Patriots were tweeting along with us? Especially if it was former players. Who wouldn’t follow @CurtisMartin or @SteveGrogan? What if the tweet stream was picked up by the NFL Network and displayed on the bottom of the screen like CNN and Current did during the election. The NYTimes live blogs on the Fifth Down during games. Wouldn't you like to see their tweets during the game? Or wouldn’t it have been great to have a dedicated NFL.twitter.com page like the Twitter election page where all of the posts could be flying in, so we don’t have to keep a search window open? And I’m sure some of the NFL sponsors could get their message up on the chrome. I don’t want to focus on monetization ideas now, but this seems like a natural fit. Would the experience that I described, enhance your game watching/ Twittering? Which brands would you like to see engaging with you while you were watching the game and in what way?

Related articles by Zemanta

• How the NFL Network is Destroying America
• Twootball.com - Where Twitter Meets NFL

Seattle Tweet-ups

Over the last 24 hours, I've attended two excellent local tweet-ups.  Unlike the usual social events, these tweet-ups were more than social, they were cause-oriented.  Last night I attended The Pitch, an awesome meeting devoted to Thoughts on the future of publishing organized by Jason Preston. About 20 people debated the viability of the newspaper in today's wired world.  Kathy Gill pointed out the importance of newspapers to community and the fact that technologies like electronic ink will make newspapers viable for a long time. As Kathy said, "newspapers are going to stick around longer than the early adopter geeks think."  Journalist Monica Guzman stated "the internet is doing wonderful things for journalism. We'd be busting out the party hats if we could afford them". She felt that it may not be worth the effort to find a business model that supports a daily.  At the end of the night, we voted 13-4 that print daily newspapers would not exist 25 years from now. You can read the rest of the tweets here.

Early this morning, I attended a different kind of tweet-up organized by likemind. Likemind is an organization which plans meetups all around the world on the same day.  The topics may differ, but the date is always the same.  likemind Seattle is organized by Jason Gingold, an online advertising strategist. This morning was a light crowd, but it turns out that each of us had worked in the account planning/strategy world and had a NY background. Small world, go figure. Given the composition of the audience, then it should be no surprise that we talked about the social webs and energizing community for politics.  And the always witty, Tim Frommer kept us laughing and thinking.  likemind Seattle will put together a survey for the discussion topic of the next meeting, so follow him to learn about it in advance.