ExactTarget Connections, Twitter, and Me

I’ve just returned from Indianapolis and the amazing three-day ExactTarget conference. The experience was profoundly interactive, largely due to the extensive opportunities available to connect via Twitter with presenters, hosts, and fellow attendees. By the end of the event, my three coworkers (none of whom are current Twitter users) were excited about the benefits of the service and asking me to help them set up their own accounts. So without further ado, the anecdotal proof.

Part One: Administrative Assistance In My Time Of Need

Sitting in the conference room where my first session was to be held, I tried unsuccessfully to access the hotel’s internet. It wanted a password, which I did not have. Luckily for me, I did have my smartphone, complete with Twitter app, and the conference’s hashtag – #ET11. For those not familiar with the concept, hashtags are labels used to join and view conversations about a given topic – in this case, the ExactTarget conference, at which all attendees were encouraged to make use of the tag. I tweeted: “What’s the password for internet access? #ET11” and sat back to await my white knight.

I wasn’t the only one having problems. A couple of users re-tweeted my request, apparently eager to find out the answer as well, and it only took a few moments for the answer to come back. Within five minutes of discovering the problem, I was successfully logged on to the conference internet connection, thanks to Twitter.

Part Two: Word Travels Abnormally Quickly

I fired off a quick tweet about what I was learning in my first session of the day. The speaker was talking about a program called Klout, which allowed you to measure your influence on a community. “I have a Klout score of 42!” I announced via Twitter, including the #ET11 hashtag so my tweet would be broadcast to fellow conference attendees. By the time the speaker had finished, three of my contacts had also registered on Klout and tweeted their own scores. Influential indeed.

Part Three: I Raise My Hand In Class

Sometime around about the third session of the day, I got the hang of things and started tweeting at the presenters directly. They’d say something, a question or comment would occur to me, and I’d submit it and get a nearly instantaneous response without interrupting the flow of the speeches. The first time I did this, I was a little intimidated – after all, who was I to be tweeting at these clearly important people? – but by the end of the day I was an old hand at it and made sure to offer at least one comment to each presenter I saw. If I didn’t have a question, I thanked them for their time or let them know what I’d enjoyed, and most of them took the time to respond to me personally. Occasionally I’d realize much later that I hadn’t understood something as well as I’d thought at the time, or that I wanted more detail, and in those cases I had a network of connections available to help me out. Even now that I’m back home, I have plenty of reliable resources available at the push of a button.

Part Four: My NASA Moment

Anyone who knows me, or has met me, or has read this blog, or follows me on Twitter will be well aware of the fact that I’m a nerd for NASA. Imagine my delight, then, when I found that one of the space agency’s social media representatives was speaking on my afternoon panel. “Holy heck,” I tweeted, “there’s a NASA rep on this panel! I’m in heaven! #ET11” It didn’t get any better than this! I followed up with a tweet directly to the NASA representative, informing her of the presence of a huge NASA fan in the lecture hall. About a minute later, she had added me as a Twitter contact and sent me a tweet inviting me to join her and some other space buffs for drinks that evening.

It was the ultimate case of business meeting pleasure. Here was a young professional working in my field, social media, but for an organization I’d idealized since childhood. Talk about a dream job! That night I had the opportunity to meet her and discuss not only the direction of NASA’s scientific efforts, but also the details of their social media outreach. If I hadn’t been tweeting proactively, it would never have happened.

The interactive nature of Twitter made the conference come alive for me in a very real way. Rather than listening to lectures, I was engaging people, making connections, and networking it ways I’d never thought possible. As one individual stepped down from the podium after having accepted a marketing award on behalf of her company, I leaned over and showed my colleague the conversation the winner and I were having on Twitter. It’s the difference between watching passively and really being a part of things. At the end of the day, that’s what social media is all about.