Twitter joins the mainstream at the GRI Conference - sort of

Twitter microblogging was actively encouraged last week at the Amsterdam GRI Conference. I took advantage of this and enjoyed the twitter back channel enormously. Indeed it kept me awake during some of the longer slide presentations. Here are some reflections on things that occurred to me for actually mainstreaming twitter and social media at big events like this - I welcome your ideas too. Thanks!

Bring in voices from outside

My main advice to conference organizers in the future is to focus on the power of social media and twitter to draw in useful voices from outside the conference, as opposed to using it to talk to participants or as a channel for simply releasing content about what happend at the conference. I realize this is an adjustment but it would make for a more impactful event.

There may have been 1200 people at the conference and indeed that may be a large proportion of people working in the field of corporate sustainability reporting, but there were still many more people who could not make it and have opinions they'd like to share.

Strategies for doing this include:

• promoting the twitter hashtag well in advance
• seeding themes to relevant bloggers you know who aren't coming to the conference
• recruiting a handful of bloggers who are at the event to live blog as many sessions as possible and feed the twitter stream with insights and questions related to the sessions as they happen

Have an authentic participatory approach

A theme that came up often in the sessions I was in (probably because I kept raising it) is that people can tell when a website is not truly participatory even when it says it is right there on the web page. Put another way, if you are going to ask for engagement via your website, then you have to both provide the means to contribute in a meaningful way and then be responsive and show that the contributions are appreciated and worthwhile. Increasingly this is expected on conference websites, and there are some excellent online tools for doing this.

JustMeans, the social media partner for the conference, provided a live at the conference widget on the conference website which is described on the conference site this way:

This widget gives you access to content including video interviews with speakers at the conference, daily blog entries from ‘The Emerging Voice’ Sustainability Blogging Competition winners, as well as a live Twitter feed from the conference. Keep up to date with the conference here or embed this widget on your own website by clicking the ‘share’ link in the lower right hand corner!

The widget itself, which I cannot imagine putting up on my own website, was the only way the conference offered ordinary non-tweeting people to follow along, and unfortunately it was a unidirectional feed of videos and other content being put up and linked to periodically by JustMeans.

This is all well and good, but not "live." And an opportunity was lost to engage stakeholders at a crucial time just when everyone was watching. For people like me who like participating remotely in events and are used to more interactive conference websites, it was a bit of a let-down.

Shorter presentations - and more discussion

The best part of conference sessions is usually the Q&A, not the presentations. By far the most tweetable presentation was that of Stefan Seidl from PUMA in the Learn about Transparency in the Supply Chain session (Watch Part 1 below or Part 1 on YouTube and Part 2 on YouTube). The slidedeck was attractive, had lots of pictures and visualisations, and any words tended to be just a few phrases at a time. 

Shorter twitter hashtags please!

Conferences organizers should put some thought into creating short hashtags. #griconference is simply too long - it takes up too many precious characters in the 140 we have for each tweet (and also is cumbersome to type in on a blackberry). #griconf or #gri2010 or simpy #gri would have done the job superbly.

Use tweetups to coordinate tweets

One of my conference tweeps spontaneously organized a tweetup on the first day and it was fun to see the people I was chattering with face to face. It would have been nice to have a conference organizer among the tweeps to encourage us and get feedback from us on how they can help us to tweet the sessions more effectively.

Give kudos to tweeps

There was some great twitter activity on the #griconference hashtag - mostly we all did it for selfish reasons to keep our own networks informed and as a way of capturing the most interesting bits of information. It would be a great idea for conference organizers to acknowledge this effort nonetheless. Reviewing the #griconference history from the days of the conference, I see lots of tweeps to thank.

Here are some of the tweeps I appreciated reading and am now following - let me know if I missed anyone:

@kabissa @elainecohen @gri_secretariat @chaininfo @futurechat @pbbsrealm @bbaue @fabianpattberg @vikingbridge

Have a bit of fun - and refer to your twitterwall

I had the most fun with Twitter during the Learn about Trends in Online Sustainability Reporting session. Early on one of the presenters pointed out that "eBay has a Twitterer in Chief" which a neighbor and I were amused by and which I promptly tweeted. Various participants and one @kabissa follower caught on and began suggesting amusing names for the role. We came up with TWINCH (thank you @nnenna in West Africa), Tweep in Chief, twief (my suggestions), and some others. A twitter pun that also came up was @sustwainability which I have now reserved. Let me know if you want to use it to promote sustainability reporting. :)

Our twitter fun ended up on a Twitterwall projected on the screen (see screenshot below, also on Flickr) during the Q&A part of that session, which was amusing but unfortunately ignored by the panelists. Meanwhile the other tweets that happened to appear on the screen with the #griconference hashtag were also ignored which made me wonder why it was up there in the first place. I think they were just running out of time.