Tweeting from a Conference, not the Same as Being There
By Bruce Rosard
April 21, 2009
I'm sitting here at my desk in Boulder, Colorado trying to follow the proceedings of The Travolution Summit via TweetDeck. There are tons of tweets for the group #travsummit coming from attendees as well as those of us on the outside and around the world.
The Travolution Summit, produced in association with PhoCusWright and held today in London, brought together an impactful and comprehensive list of topics, providing the opportunity to hear from the highest level speakers, network with top industry professionals and discuss at depth ripe topics of great importance to the online travel industry. The Summit is the most important online travel industry event in the U.K. each year.
Unfortunately, I'm not in London this year, and being 7 hours behind U.K. time, it has been a challenge to follow the proceedings live. But even if I was in the right time zone, is Twitter as good as being there?
That’s what Stephan Ekbergh said on his blog yesterday, actually he said this about The Travolution Summit: "What's more interesting is that this will be the first travel show which will be more interesting online than at the actual show."
With all due respect Stephan, I think not. I found that I could somewhat follow along with who the speakers were and get a small snippet of what they were saying.
Some sample Tweets:
@cobrophy - "Google: average holiday booked online takes 29 days, 12 searches, 22 different travel sites"
@eddmc - "couple of great quotes - Maarti of Dopplr: 'simplification as a competitive advantage' & 'user experience is the new marketing'"
@travelrants - "55% of Frommer's poll said that they would book with a site that offered destination information"
@Crustyfur - "Please can we have an iPhone 'charge bar' next year? All this tweeting has killed my battery, sure I am not alone."
@bencolclough - "tripadvisor interactions with facebook good for growing brand and content + experimentation. bad for ROI"
@TimesTravel - "Travelers search Google for 'cheap hotels' most often, then 'beach hotels' and 'luxury hotels'"
@harveydean: RT @MSSurface - "Hello all at #travsummit. Yes, Microsoft Surface is for sale in the UK. Pricing http://twurl.nl/cmxop1 (expand) icrossing NEED one !!!"
And a useful wrap up: "7 things I learned today" by Jeremy Head.
For the whole conference Twitter Feed, click here.
But I'm at my desk all day—I've had 3 conference calls. I have contracts to get out. How am I supposed to really soak it all in by listening for the tweets and trying to stay in tune? Where's the real networking (I did find some new people to follow, and some new people are following me, but I'd rather meet face to face over a cup of coffee or a cold beer at the end of the conference and trade business cards).
I also have an issue with how the hash tag functionality works for an event. There were probably a core group of at least 50 people at the Summit active on Twitter during the day. Whenever an interesting point was raised, a group of Twitterers sent out a Tweet about that point, marking it #travsummit. So following that hash tag meant that I heard the same point over and over and over again. Now I understand that each Twitterer wants to get the point out to their followers, but as an outsider looking in, I don't want to see the same thing repeated. Is there an application built for this purpose yet? Should someone build one? It could be called TwitDupe or something like that and could specifically search for common phrases in a Tweet to a group such as #travsummit and only include the first post.
When I go to a conference like The Travolution Summit (or The PhoCusWright Conference for that matter), I want a number of things:
- Great content from the leading speakers in the industry
- Knowledge and new, actionable ideas
- To get out of the office so I can focus on strategy instead of the day-to-day
- Networking and face-to-face time to meet my peers and potential business partners and clients
- Access to suppliers who want to sell me stuff and prospects who might want to buy my stuff
- Social engagement (i.e. cocktails) with my peers and the leaders of my industry
Sorry, but I can't get that from Twitter. It might be "the next best thing to being there," but it's still a long way away from actually being there.
