20 objectives for organizational use of Twitter for events

In an ideal world, every organization should start their social media efforts by listening on the social web, finding out where their stakeholders are, then analyzing what value could be derived from embarking upon building an official presence in those particular social spaces so they can begin to participate strategically in those conversations. Note that WHICH social spaces (which tools) to experiment with comes AFTER the listening part!

But every once in a while, there's an opportunity to act fast, to try an experiment with a particular tool. We're working with one group who had exactly this scenario - a fairly big event coming up quickly, and members asking about their social media presence, and they figured they should just jump in and set up an official Twitter account to see what would happen. We held a brainstorming session with a large group of staff from all different departments and they came up with a nice list of objectives which I thought I'd share. In no particular order:

- to keep up with things happening around exhibits, and communicate with exhibitors
- to be the cool kid
- to experiment with a different kind of communication
- to find out who uses Twitter within their community
- to see if members are interested in using this forum
- if it works for meetings/events, could it be used for other activities?
- to hear buzz from the community
- to respond to their members (customer service)
- to reach potential donors, learn things about them that you wouldn't know from any where else
- to explore a new way of communicating (two-way)
- to communicate more concisely, faster, more easily
- to facilitate interaction with members who couldn't attend in person
- to communicate event-specific announcements very easily, as soon as they come up and repeatedly
- to find out what members are particularly interested in (via links shared)
- to drive/listen to conversation about specific topics
- to promote/reward members e.g. contest winners
- to have some fun
- to give staff a voice, allow people to get to know them
- to help exhibitors promote themselves
- to extend the life and space of the event.

Awesome, right? The event itself went great, and especially considering that the staff who were tweeting were pretty new to this, they did a fantastic job. They achieved a lot of these objectives - and those that weren't immediately apparent this time still gave them the impetus to do it bigger and better at their next (much bigger) conference in a few months.

Want to try this at home? Just make sure you go through the exercise of thinking about what you hope to achieve with your experiment. Make a list. Whether you have 3 objectives or 30, keep them in mind during the experiment. Have a debrief afterwards, check things off the list, add new things, figure out how to make it even more awesome next time. If some things don't work like you expected, understand why not. Evaluate, learn, do it all again.

Rock on.

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