It’s no surprise that Twitter, the current darling of social media and one of the fastest growing web sites, is now becoming the subject matter of entire conferences. There is a tremendous opportunity for businesses and brands to use Twitter to their advantage, including through customer support, brand management, advertising, job search and much more. But everybody is still trying to figure it out. Let’s have a conference!
Twitter has yet to settle on a monetization strategy but is exploring different business models. Here are several conferences that are taking place in the near future (or have taken place recently) devoted to learning about all things Twitter. Do we really need so many Twitter conferences?
140/The Twitter Conference: Taking place in Mountain View, CA on May 26-27, this Twitter conference is bringing together developers, journalists, business executives, and others to discuss the business value of Twitter. Here’s a sampling of panel topics: Possible web services with the Twitter APIs, how organizations should be using Twitter, the branding opportunities of Twitter and more. Speakers include: Alex Payne, API Lead for Twitter; Anamitra Banerji, Product Manager for Twitter; and Loren Brichter, developer for Tweetie.
Twitter Boot Camp: Tim O’Reilly is sponsoring a boot camp in mid-June in New York to teach businesses best practices on how to use Twitter to their advantage. Notable speakers include O’Reilly, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and Steve Rubel, senior vice president at Edelman Digital.
TWTRCON SF 09: Taking place in San Francisco on May 31, TWTRCON focuses on discussing how to use Twitter as a business platform to reach and engage customers, influence opinions and activate markets. Speakers include Guy Kawasaki, Founders Fund’s Dave McClure and Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji.
140 Characters Conference: This conference organized by Jeff Pulver takes place in New York City from June 16 to 17. Participants will discuss Twitter’s disruption of social media and look at microblogging’s effect on celebrities, brands and advertising. John Borthwick, Fred Wilson, Tim O’Reilly (again), Tony Hsieh (again), Robert Scoble, Howard Lindzon, Steve Rubel (again) will all be on hand. (TechCrunch’s co-editor Erick Schoenfeld also will be speaking on a panel).
Perkins Madrona Twitter Conference ‘09: Law firm Perkins Coie and VC firm Madrona Venture Group joined forces to sponsor a Twitter conference on May 15 in Seattle, WA. The conference was targeted, like the ones above, towards discussing how businesses can leverage the power of Twitter.
Media140 Twitter Conference UK: This Twitter conference hails from our friends across the pond. Held on May 20, this conference brought together journalists, developers, and publishers to talk about how Twitter is effecting news. Topics included how Twitter will influence traditional local news sourcing and distribution and best practices of how to use Twitter in the news world.
I’m sure there are other Twitter conferences out there, so be sure to note the gatherings you know about in comments.
8 developers will be launching their Twitter applications on Tuesday at the 140/The Twitter Conference.
does anyone really care that 8 developers are launching useless twitter apps? name 1 app that’s actually useful and doesn’t repeat features in other apps… lol. what a joke!
Even if done before, the way an app does something matters. Style, design, and usability matter.
Google repeated the functionality of other search engines.
But to answer your question directly, yes there are new things emerging in the twitter apps space. I’m working on 3.
These conferences bring top-notch Twitterers together to think and rethink what they can do with Twitter. As news about Twitter keeps exploding here and everywhere else, there is something powerful inside Twitter that has not surfaced yet. When it does, it may revolutionize the microblog world and move our social networking forward somehow. Ah, maybe I’m just a bit dreamy here.
Twitter platform is going to be very interesting.
Companies like Twitvid ( http://twitvid.io ) are set to profit.
How will Twitvid profit? Right now they have a 20 minute limit on videos. But is there really enough people who need to tweet videos over 20 mins, and would pay for it? I don’t think so.
Twitpic has a good Ad model, and I think the opportunities for video sites are only greater than photo sites for Ads. It isn’t just duration, but resolution and compression quality that could be placed in the freemium model.
twitvid profit? ha! just like youtube or facebook makes profit! joke
Bolting on a business model after the act has proved unsucessful, but I suppose posts like this can help twitter get feedback in how to monetize their business.
With that said everyone is building twitter like functions, so the devil is in the competition,
I’m not a great fan of confrences and commites as they are only able to delay innovation and at worst allow people to practice risk aversion, better to get on with it.
I wish I would have known about the one in Seattle BEFORE the 15th. I would have loved to go.
obviously you don’t follow the right folks… good luck next time bud
I am really amazed on how far this thing is being taken. I really hope no bubbles bursts here as if all of you Valley guys didn’t learn the last time. Will the government need to “bail out” Silicon Valley because the U.S. “needs a technology innovation” hub?
Then the president will give a speech and tell the world how start-ups were over hyped and valuations skyrocketed not backed by real revenue performance evaluations. Much money was burned paying multimillion dollar yearly salaries to executives that never had a profitable company.
When all the money dries up, there will be another devastating time of layoff in the Valley, several founders will resign and retreat to a comfortable life living off the loot pirated from the internet darlings of the moment that never quite ever figured out how to make money from the millions of users they attracted.
Kudos to the few of you so lucky to hold the strings.
I agree with you about the hype but… is any of these CEOs receiving “multimillion dollar yearly salaries”?
The compensation they have is primarily equity-based, and at some point their bubble bursts and they lose out on that compensation. Plus I can’t see anyone from the Valley lobbying for more dollars.
(minor typo: link to Founders Fund should be http://www.crun...n/founders-fund)
thanks for the shout out leena
Not sure if you’re making a joke, but TechCrunch is very aware of what linking to crunchbase does. And good for them, it’s an awesome wiki.
I’m going to the 140 Twitter Conference in Mountain View next week and very excited. Why not gather like-minded people together to discuss a new platform we’re excited about and want to explore as a business tool? Twitter itself may not be around forever, but it’s worth capitalizing on this momentum now because the type of customer engagement it inspires will be
you missed out twitter sense that is happening in june in india chennai
Twitter developer meeting are very necessary as it is the latest innovation on the net, apart from the social networks like Digg, Stumble & Facebook, Twitter has created its unique brand name with its short messaging service. Such developer meeting can help to develop many applications and more features for twitter service.
#140conf has been described as the “Davos of twitter conferences” as the people who are speaking are joining us from across the world.
Please check out the schedule – http://www.140c...nf.com/schedule to get a feel of the depth of the content an the people who will be heard from.
O’Reilly Media and I have teamed up to offer a special price for people who wish to attend both of our events. More details over at http://140conf.com/register
There should be some sort of rule of thumb, that any conferences are premature if the conference admission fee is more than the profits of the entire company being conferenced about.
Love how 33% of comments on all Twitter news posts *still* basically say:
“Twitter is /stupid/going to fail/not worth my time/. They have no 1990s era written business plan, printed on paper, so they will never succeed”
All you Twitter haters need to follow Arrington’s example and flip/flop – say you now think Twitter is great ( after publicly going on record and guarantying it will fail ) because you realized its responsible for 50%+ of your advertising page impression revenue!
I wish one of these conferences is free.
I love these conferences, wish more people would go to them.
What the attendees are missing is branding themselves with a Twitter centric name.
Just pay a visit to Twit Store and see the numerous api’s being launched. Simply attending conferences just won’t do. Those sleeping on branding their Twitter marketing will lose. Bigtime.
Its funny that the only people pitching Twitter is narcist celebs, news people (selling content) and business people trying to make a penny off selling their products.
What about the User? did they get lost in the Oprah limelight?
Twitter sucks for the average regular person. I hope to create an innovation one day that USERS love and respect.
what’s Twitter? Are they on the Fortune 500 List or something?
Will there be a related financial conference where I can short the stocks of all the participants?
Looks like a lot of conferences.
If nothing else, it seems like they would all be GREAT places to meet really cool people with similar interests.
Do one in Irvine
Do we really need so many twitter posts?
I’m waiting to see the next conferences..
In the UK we have twitter unconferences, they are great, usually with live video streams and tweets come in from all over the world, free to join and soooo easy.
#dbuc09 was a great series discussing the #digitalbritain report and giving people the chance to add their voice to Lord Carter’s plans for a 2 meg USO in the UK. As you can imagine, people didn’t agree with it and most want the legacy copper network replaced with fibre. amongst other things… Twitter made these unconferences accessible to everyone.
Don’t forget about getting trained online if your boss won’t let you expense a trip to get twitter knowledge in person. Lynda.com has a great video series that actually helps you get more out of your tweets – some free lessons:
http://www.lynd...e.aspx?lpk2=783
Don’t forget TwitCrunch 50…
http://www.vulo...7twitcrunch.png
Lets hope they tweet them.
never mind that shoite Leena… Leinster just won the European Cup!! Whoo!!!
twitter clients are so dumb if they think they have a business model, they are fkd
twitter is no business – most of these guys forget that you make money!
and vc money doesn’t count! just because vc is retarded and gives away money… called a donation!
good luck fools! tc
Twitter is huge but if its going to take hundreds of ‘business heads’ to all get together and spend hours trying to figure out a business model for such a simple site they’ll be there all night. Put simply, if there was a viable business model for twitter they would have found it already.
Helllo Everi Boddie…
Not sure how to use twitter. Am going with the buzz blindly
But while on twitter I almost feel like being in a meeting. Everyone talking and no one listening. Total chaos. While that’s home to being a meeting nazi.
We have abt 18 followers and the guy/gal who bashes us in twitter with 451 hate tweets @appstop has more followers than us.
So twitter gurus please shed some light on how to use twitter better? IS it for personal and corp brand building? and not for an app?
Thanks “No Tweet For You
”
What do you need followers for ?
Leena, did you know that the very first microblogging conference of the world was on January 23-24, 2009 in Hamburg, Germany:
http://www.mbc0...ence-thank-you/
Almost 200 attended.
The next one by the same folks will be on September 4-5, 2009 in Cologne, Germany. We expect about 400 people:
http://de.amian...om/mbc09sc.html
Happy to see Mike Butcher from TC UK at the conference.
@CemB: You were faster in mentioning the MBC09…
No need to go to these conferences. Just read Techcrunch for all you need to know about Twitter.
It’s amazing that so many hours and days can be dedicated to talk about a site that is based on 140 character sentences. I like Twitter but honestly think it’s just a little over the top having all these conferences…
Twitter was used at the recent Net Prophet conference in Cape Town, South Africa to field questions from the audience. There was a twitter fountain running on a large screen and invited participation. Twitters real time nature combined with #hashtags makes it a great conference tool for easy access to questions, allowing speaker and crowd answers. Check out http://www.netprophet.org.za for more info on the conference.
What are they doing?
Hi,
You forgot about http://cooltwit...conferences.com
Thanks,
Bob
Well I’m speaking at http://socialre...itingsummit.com which incorporates twitter but takes a look at how we’re using media sites to recruit and hire people.
Much better than some trendy conference topic, right?
Hi Leena –
The recruiting function has embraced social media as much as any other, and on June 15th at the Googleplex in Mountain View, over 200 recruiters come together for the Social Recruiting Summit (http://socialre...itingsummit.com). This first ever event has sold out and will also be streaming live for free on the site.
Reid Hoffman kicks off the event, followed by recruiting thought leaders and practitioners who will provide a business case to incorporating social media into the recruiting function.
Twitter of course plays a huge role in this, along with others tools such as LinkedIn & Facebook. The event was also primarily marketed through Twitter with a marketing budget of $0!
The SDForum semantic web SIG is going to devote its July 1st event to interesting twitter applications. Twitter api guys will introduce twitter api, and then 5-10 developers/companies will show off their twitter projects. If you are interested in presenting your twitter app, see the detailed program at http://web2expr...mantic-web-sig/
aj chen