Interview with Tony Uphoff – on using Facebook and Twitter to network at events

Tony Uphoff runs UBM’s TechWeb (a sister company to my own) which runs Information Week and the Web 2.0 Expo co-produced with O’Reilly Media.

Tony is very active in social media with a blog Uphoff on Media and a Twitter. Here he talks about how he uses Facebook and Twitter to network before and during business-to-business events.

This is my sixth and last interview from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and my second interview with Tony.

I’ve got my digital kit ready for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (plus shades!)

I will be travelling to or arrived in San Francisco when you read this, on my way to the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco. I’m really excited.

Several leading and up-and-coming social media experts have arranged to meet me. I wrote in an earlier post that I was going to use permission rather than assertive networking – that is only approach people if they made it clear they wanted to network. It has worked better than you could imagine.

So I’ll try and video, photo and record as many of the important ideas that they mention. So I’ve taken my digital kit with me.

When I was a traditional editor, I would have taken the lot to report with them ie broadcast from the event.

Today my goals are quite different. They are

• to use the kit for networking, 
• to test myself as I try to make all the kit work together,
• to record, rather than report, the important points in videos, pictures and words.

The picture shows my

1 Dell laptop. I am hoping there is Wifi because I want to be able to follow Tweets about the event via the #w2e hashtag identifier on Twitter Search. It is also essential kit back in the hotel room to keep up with the office in London, process all the material I will be gathering and knock out a regular blogpost.

2 Flip video camera. I’m going to ask several of the people I meet the same five questions and record them.

• How long have you been in social media?
• What social media kit have you got on you?
• Which part of your social media activity are you most proud?
• How are you using your social media footprint to network at this event?
• What one thing have you learnt this week that will help your business?
• What’s next in social media?

Then I am going to upload the recording to my Vimeo profile before posting it on my blog as a post.

3 Blackberry Storm. I’m concerned whether the battery will last each day but otherwise Twitter on my Blackberry Storm is going to be an essential cog in keeping me networked throughout the day.

4 Keyfob. All these years later, I am still so excited to be able to sit at my work desktop wherever I am in the world. What will it be like working through the company Wiki for the first time?

5 Exilim digital camera. I cannot get the quality of pictures with my Blackberry Storm that I can with my trusted digital camera so I will put up with the inconvenience of downloading. It’s not in the picture above because I had to take this picture!

6 Shades by Cartier. Heh, it’s the Web 2.0 Expo.

Guest post: what you should do if your Twitter profile is going nowhere quickly

Ruth Galpine, a marketer on one of our exhibitions TFM&A, had set up a Twitter account but it was evidently not thriving (disclosure: my colleague). So we asked ourselves six questions of her Twitter activity. Within days, leading people in her community were reTweeting her Tweets. 

This is her story. 

We decided to start using Twitter as an additional “channel to market” for our forthcoming exhibition. With little previous experience of social media marketing or of Twitter, it started as a learn-as-you-go immersion. And, as we discovered, full of the classic social media ‘marketing’ blunders!

At first we naively saw Twitter as an additional marketing channel through which to push our event messages. Our initial Tweets were dry snippets of information about the show. All was good, we thought, as our initial followers were people already on our show database. But we didn’t seem to be getting any viral growth.

“Why not?” we thought.

“How can we get more reach into Twitter; how can we build a community and how can we encourage them to push TFM&A to their communities?” So we went through the following process. Why don’t you try it?

1 Have you asked yourself “what is your community”?

Our initial assumption on our community was that it was “anyone who is interested in TFM&A”.

Hmm, that’s not really a community, is it? TFM&A has a diverse range of audience groups within its attendees and any one of them is a community. We chose to focus on the marketers who would be interested in the show, and within them, those with an interest in social media. After all, they were more than likely to be on Twitter already!

2 Have you done research so that you do not overlook the social network the community is already in?

We hadn’t had time to do much research into this. So we went with our intuition and reckoned that social media marketers were more likely to be already on or interested in Twitter than your average person.

So that was that! A quick look at our followers on Twitter Sheep just 2 weeks later reassured us our assumption was a good one!

3 Have you been listening to the conversation in your community? 

Again, we hadn’t been doing enough of this but now we have, we know how invaluable it is!

A few quick look-ups on Twitter Search showed us a wealth of “chatter” about our show – from exhibitors discussing what they were doing at the show; potential visitors asking if each other would be there; plus people asking us questions on what was at the show. Great – now that we knew who was talking about us, we could join in the conversations!

4 Have you been sending out only Tweets pushing the brand?

Yes, we had… guilty again!

We read John’s post on his blog – Six types of Tweets if you Twitter every day. We also realised that the TFM&A website already boasts a social media news feed of real value to our community. We realised we could send out Tweets linking to that. And, it worked! Three reTweets from just the first few Tweets.

We had finally gone viral!

5 Have you set up a hash tag identifier?

A what? A hash tag identifier is a short word or acronym that you attach to every Tweet you make – you encourage those tweeting about you and re-tweeting you to use it, helping you to track ‘chatter’ on Twitter Search.

We went with #tfma but people were using TFM&A as well – that is what the show is commonly named. Having both enables us to cover our bases.

6 Have you thought how you will assess your effectiveness?

A quick five-minute check each morning on Twitter Search and typing in our show keywords – TFM&A, tfma_event and #tfma – and we can see the increasing growth of the TFMA Twitter in our community. 

See how well TFMA is doing in real time.

Do you have a story about how you have changed your use of Twitter?

Photo credit: Dappers

Five predictions for the economy and what to do about it

Roger Martin-Fagg made five predictions for the economy at the AEO Conference 2008. This is the Client Director Henley Management College economist who has made many gloomy predictions in the past and said at the same event last year

there has been a huge party and we lost our senses. Now for the hangover.

But it was not all gloomy. Martin-Fagg also came up with suggestions as to what to do about it. First the predictions.

1. UK economy to remain in recession until end of 2011 and the US until the end of 2010.
2. UK economy to shrink by 6% over next three years or £50 billion.
3. Asian economies to suffer far more they had imagined.
4. UK banks to go to government for £60 billion of further funding by next summer, effectively nationalising them.
5. UK savings ratio already going back up but needs to get to +4%. Each 1% represents £7 billion out of the economy. 

What to do about it?

1. “Take market share by being distinctive”. Expensive, top end and cheap, bottom end will do far better in any business sector. It is those in the middle who will suffer.
2. “Invest in anything to do with old people”. Care homes, drugs for the elderly.
3. “Invest in new kit”. Any company with money should continue to invest, particularly in innovative, new technology.
4. “Don’t drop your prices, rather introduce small price increases”. Keep your margins up and put any price rises down to exchange rates or whatever.
5. “Only start buying assets again when people still don’t think that we have reached the bottom of the recession”. He suggested not for another 18 months at least. 

The launch of Call Centre & Customer Management 365

Today, my company launched a new product – Call Centre & Customer Management 365 – at Call Centre Expo 2008. It is a virtual exhibition or enhanced directory produced by WebEvents.

“Exhibitors” pay to maintain a “stand” all year round, populating it with company brochures, press releases, white papers and videos. The site is optimised so that potential clients use google to look for specific services and end up on this site.

Users must then login after which all their details are handed on to the clients. This is a high quality leads business. We already run successful 365s in two other markets – ECM365 and SM365.

All clients rebooking for Call Centre 2009 were given an “opt-out” to the new product. Endaf Kerfoot spent two days presenting it to clients. I joined him for two presentations. Simon Mills and Melissa Roberts were the driving force behind its development.