Twitter for Dummies (38 page)

Figure 13-8:
The RPM Challenge Web site.

Planning an event

If you plan events — whether they’re small, impromptu meet-ups or large weekend workshops or seminars — Twitter can help. You can use Twitter to find speakers, scout locations, score discounts, locate equipment, and drive attendance.

Here’s how you can make the most of Twitter for your event:

1. Create a landing page.

Even though you’re doing most of your organizing on Twitter, Twitter itself isn’t feature-heavy enough to provide all information to your potential event-goers and volunteers. Make the landing page an off-site location for signing up, recording offers of help, and generating interest. Your landing page can be a blog, a Web site, or an event page on a site such as EventBrite, Amiando, or Upcoming. TwtVite is a relatively new event-planning site purpose built for Twitter that incorporates the Twitter avatars and profiles of those who sign up.

2. Choose a hashtag (keyword) for your event.

Take a minute to check Hashtags.org (
www.hashtags.org
) or Twitter Search (
http://search.twitter.com
) to make sure that no one else is using that hashtag. A unique hashtag will eliminate confusion.

3. When your event landing page is ready, set up basic alert tracking for your event.

Several free services such as Google Alerts or BlvdStatus conversions (see Chapter 9) will meet your basic requirements.

You can also use a paid media monitoring service such as those offered by Radian6 (see Chapter 9) to track your event. When you need to decide what to track as your keyword, your hashtag is a great place to start. You can also track the venue, the theme, and other related keywords.

4. Now that you have laid the foundation for tracking interest and attendance to your event, start spreading the word!

Don’t let talk of the event completely dominate your Twitter stream — you can lose followers that way — but make sure to highlight your event adequately. You can generate interest and allow the tweet to get legs and be retweeted (RTed).

If you’re planning something larger than a simple two-hour tweetup, make sure to keep up with who has volunteered assistance, who signs up for the event, and venues that have offered help (see Figure 13-9).

Figure 13-9:
A tweetup in Lowell, Massa-chusetts, on TwtVite.

Can you plan a full-blown conference by using Twitter as your main tool? Yes, you can! Planning a conference takes a little more finesse than a short tweetup or business function, but it’s very doable.

If you do plan to go big by organizing a large event on Twitter, keep thorough records to help you manage all the tweets related to it. You can even use a free tool such as WebNotes (
www.webnotes.net
) or EverNote (
http://evernote.com
) to track what people have offered to do, who’s coming, and other logistical issues. Coupled with your tracking methods, you may find planning a big event the 140-character way relatively painless.

Engaging in Citizen Journalism

You may have first been turned onto Twitter by hearing about it in the mainstream media. News outlets such as CNN (
@cnn
,
@cnnbrk
) and popular shows such as
The Ellen Show, The View,
and
The Oprah Winfrey Show
have all begun to incorporate Twitter and the global, real-time conversations it fosters into their on-screen time.

Twitter is cropping up in print media, too. Celebrities are adopting it as a way to beat the paparazzi at their own game and give their fans a more direct voice to listen to (see Figure 13-10). Musicians are tweeting to bypass regular radio and sell more music, as well as interact with more fans. Twitter is even making it into nontechnical print publications such as the
New York Times.

Even before its exposure on mainstream media, Twitter had already become a natural outlet for the phenomenon known as
citizen journalism.
Thanks to services technologies like mobile phones and portable video cameras, real people can report on real events as they’re unfolding.

Figure 13-10:
Ashton Kutcher (
@aplusk
) and his wife Demi Moore (
@mrskutcher
) dive into Twitter, full force, by using TwitPic.

Citizen journalism hits the mainstream

Mainstream media outlets have been turned on to the social-media craze, and CNN has been at the forefront with its
iReport initiative
(see Figure 13-11),
which allows anyone to upload photos, videos, or stories to CNN’s Web site; CNN then features some of those iReports on TV. Twitter is a big part of this phenomenon. We don’t know whether CNN was the first national news outlet to embrace citizen journalism, but they were the first to embrace it so openly via Twitter. Now, thanks to Twitter; the CNN iReporter interface; and other technology, such as Pure Digital’s popular Flip video camera, and better phones with Twitter-friendly services (such as Qik); man-on-the-street reporting has become a reality — and an important part of 21st-century journalism.

That man on the street can be any person who has access to computers, phones, cameras, video cameras, or audio recorders. Now, anyone can be the journalist, and Twitter brings that roving band of citizen reporters into sharp focus.

Figure 13-11:
iReport and citizen journalism.

How does Twitter fit in? Twitter is the darling of the instant-gratification crowd, and it allows you to report events right away with no fact-checking at all, so do take everything you read with a grain of salt. If it’s a story that’s not being reported on by the major, respected media outlets, do a little fact-checking before you take it as the gospel truth.

Being a Twitter journalist

Twitter, like user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia, seems to be very good at self-policing. When a fraud starts making the rounds on Twitter, sharp-eyed users are quick to catch onto it and are just as quick in telling their friends and colleagues what’s going on. Twitter users offer a kind of natural checks-and-balances system for the twitterverse.

A January 2009 news event that highlighted Twitter’s potential for citizens to act as journalists was the emergency landing of a plane in the Hudson River in New York City after a run-in with migrating birds led to the loss of both engines. Twitter users were arguably the first people to hear about it because eyewitnesses posted instant reactions.

Janis Krums,
@jkrums
, a Twitter user on board a ferry that raced in to rescue passengers, took an incredible iPhone picture of the floating plane and the passengers being evacuated. He instantly posted it to Twitter (
http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133
) using a third-party service, which hosts photos and tweets a link to them on the user’s Twitter account. The astonishing photo was retweeted and passed around Twitter so quickly that it hit international media outlets within minutes (see Figure 13-12). The Web traffic going to the photo was so overwhelming that TwitPic’s servers temporarily went offline.

Figure 13-12:
Pictures of the plane that landed in the Hudson River first ended up on Flickr, Tumblr, and TwitPic, directed by the Twitter users who took them.

Citizen journalists can do more than just observe — Twitter’s immediacy and portability (because of its availability on mobile devices) makes it possible for people to report during the moment, not just afterwards. During the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Twitter was used to pass word of a blood drive to help victims.

As a part of the citizen-journalism movement, Twitter is helping make the world safer for children. Recently, the number of Twitter-generated
#AmberAlerts
has risen, and several children have been reunited with their families because of the observations of regular people who cared and paid attention (see Figure 13-13).

Help Find My Child and other similar organizations have also been working on finding lost children through Twitter. Unlike the unofficial
#AmberAlerts
, which don’t come from a centralized source,
@helpfindmychild
is an organized international effort coordinated through one office to use Twitter to find missing children.