Micro-blogging is the act of sharing brief text messages among members within a social network. Sent and received through any Internet-connected device such as a PC or a mobile phone, these short (less than 200 character) messages provide insight into what fellow participants are thinking, doing, or going to do. Individually, they are often useless, but in the aggregate micro-blogging provides a running dialogue as to what’s going on in the community. Combined with other social behavior, micro-blogging can be quite valuable because it gives you a short history of your colleagues’ lives. These headline-driven status updates allow individuals to easily touch base with multiple people and know what they’re thinking and doing.
Transform that same type of communication to a live event, where a huge group of people, many of whom don’t know each other, have the opportunity to shout out desires, great finds, and other announcements during the event. Like-minded people can find each other quickly and everyone who stays connected can always be “in the know.” For micro-blogging to be effective, remind attendees to sign up, post to, and track the event’s micro-blogging channel. Offer them suggestions of what they can post to the channel. For example, use the micro-blogging channel to let everyone know:
- About something cool you just saw.
- That there’s a raffle drawing happening in five minutes.
- You’re looking for someone interested in a given subject.
- There’s been a room change.
- There’s an after party at a certain bar.
- You just posted some photos or a blog post (include link).
The top competitor in this field is Twitter. You can set up an event channel where people can post to the channel and follow everyone else's posts. To pull this off, create an event username and tell everyone who wants to participate that they need to follow that username. Then, turn on autofriending for the username which at this point requires a manual request to the Twitter team. At that point, for a message to appear on the event channel for all to read, users only need to send direct messages (messages prefaced with a "d") to the event's username.
If your conference is rather large you can set up a different microblogging channel for various tracks. Micro-blogging is the easiest tool for event announcements and empowers everyone to keep fellow attendees up to date as to what’s going on at the event.
