The Proof is in the Pudding with BarCamp Tampa 2011

This past September 24th we at Head of Lettuce Media had a lot of involvement in BarCamp Tampa. We used our new Hybrid Twitter program to drive traffic and conversation around the #barcamptampa hash-tag, we even hit an event high with 379 people attending. That remarkable number pales in comparison to the online audience of 357,000+ people who saw the  hash-tag and tweets using it over 2.5 million times, all in a 24 hour window. This was emphasized by the fact that we did get #barcamptampa trending locally in the Tampa area. Hashtracking provided us with a complete report around the Hashtag #BarcampTampa, Thanks Hashtracking

I decided to do a talk this year and after much deliberation came up with the topic “How not to suck at Twitter”. The room was packed and I even had people sitting on the floor and standing along the sides and back, my first thought was “boy, someone got these people over excited to see me and they were in for a big disappointment, luckily things went well. My primary message was to treat Twitter like a networking event, use the same etiquette. I tossed out one of my favorite terms “twitter vomit” and the importance of avoiding it. We discussed my thoughts on auto dms, which I have never hidden from anyone. I shared that SocialOomph, responsibly offers an opt out so you do not have to endure auto dm’s from their users. I shared two of my favorite tools Tweepi & Tweetstats.

Tweepi offers some really great tools for maintaining your twitter account, here is an example of searching the Hashtag #BarcampTampa and who has been using it. Note I sorted by Klout giving me an idea of who was involved in the conversation and giving me an easy way to add them to a list, or follow them.

Tweetstats offers some great visualization tools that let you look back at your activity on twitter, and more importantly you can look at a twitter could of your tweets, which gives you an idea on the underlying message you are putting out via twitter. Here is a twitter cloud for all conversation on Twitter today.