expertSEM

Session con: the room was frigid. Session pros: I scored a coveted outlet; the session was very informative.

1. Michael Gray, Atlas Web Services — Michael urged us to use “please RT.” Personally, I don’t agree with this advice. I believe it’s a bit annoying and even desperate. If you tweet is interesting enough, people will retweet without you needing to beg. But Michael did have some good advice:

– You can’t do Twitter wrong

– Twitter is second largest referrer

– Retweet the most self-serving tweets of others, they’ll love you

– Leave about 20-25 characters so others can retweet

2. Joanna Lord, The Online Beat  –  The title of Joanna’s first slide was “Why should we stop tweeting and listen to this lady?” We all laughed. Because it was true.  But it worked and she got our attention for sure. Joanna recommended automating as much as possible–use tools and applications to find people, search for relevant tweets, etc.–but never, never spam people.

3. Craig Greenfield, Performics — Since I stopped tweeting during Joanna’s section, I needed to catch up and missed a good portion of what Craig was saying. But here’s a few things I did catch: repurpose your content for Twitter, push out using tools and use for reputation management.

Take aways from Q & A:

– Make sure your tiny URL service uses 301 redirects

– Use caution when creating your name–might not want to put brand name in your Twitter name, you might not always work there and your followers might get confused or angry

– Get your brand name now if it’s still available; squat on it if you don’t plan to use yet, but you’ll want it in the future.

– Twitter backgrounds/bios — They all recommended customizing as much as possible; personally, I haven’t used Twitter.com  in a long time. TweetDeck allows you to see bio info, but not backgrounds, so I wonder if it’s worth it. Not sure how many people use the web versions versus applications. I guess it doesn’t hurt.

– What about Twitter pollution? Don’t all these add tactics add to it? — The panel agreed that you can unfollow someone at any time; if your followers feel that you’re being spammy and polluting the Twitter waves, they can simply unfollow.

Post show update: Thanks to Joanna’s advice in the Q&As, I have changed my Twitter name from @AngieL3M to @angiepascale.  Not that I am planning to work at another company in the near future, I just feel that it makes my Twitter account more personal and makes me easier to find me. Also, my name was free and I wanted to scoop it up before someone else did.