Aerospace eBusiness

I was very encouraged to see the organizers of the recent OGI conference  (1105 Government Information Group) embrace the use of Twitter from the on-set of the event planning. They established the #ogi tag early, made good use of the platform for early buzz, and enlisted the use of strong talent like @mixtmedia and @lostonroute66 for support. So, how did it all turn out?

The Statistics

I collected the #ogi statistics from July 10^th to 22^nd (8pm) and found a total of 4839 posts from 653 unique accounts (Full stats in Excel format). For a conference with about 500 attendees that is an impressive number. By comparison, usage of Twitter at the recent Paris Air Show (the largest Aerospace and Defense show in the world attended by tens of thousands of visitors) only generated 2471 posts in 5 days! The top 20 contributors (by number of posts) were:

AndrewPWilson (213)
salemonz (188)
moehlert (184)
mixtmedia (145)
debbieweil (140)
kayawalton (109)
skyemarthaler (99)
NoelDickover (96)
dslunceford (93)
sporing (93)
Pragmatics_Inc (92)
lovisatalk (87)
krazykriz (83)
jrick (82)
tjohns06 (81)
csukach (74)
GovTwit (70)
OGIConference (64)
lostonroute66 (56)
You2Gov (53)

Posting was fast and furious during the first day of the conference (3116 posts – 64%), actually causing #ogi to appear on Twitter’s Global Trending Topics at number 10 shortly before 9am and going all the way to number 4 (in the world!) by 10:30am. This was partly due to the keynotes generating so many posts:

Dave Wennergren (Deputy CIO – DOD) (198)
Aneesh Chopra (US Chief Technology Officer) (500)
Tim O’Reilly (766)
David Weinberger (273)
Vivek Kundra (US Chief Information Officer) (296)

With #ogi trending on Twitter we saw the activation of some spam accounts, but although noticeable it never became more than a small temporary nuisance with less than 50 spam posts in a period of two hours.

The Observations

Here are three twitter related thoughts I had at the conference, in no particular order:

• The twitter board (pic) showed at the conference was very nice. It showed a live feed of the #ogi stream. It is based on a development by Daniel Dura and you can get the customizable tool at http://www.danieldura.com/code/twittercamp. The placement of the twitter screen was of great debate by the attendees, starting with the feed on the two side screens and then later moving to the middle screen with the side screens showing the speaker slides. It seems to be distracting to some attendees who were trying to read the screen while following the speakers at the same time. My take is that a moderated version could have been better (no need to show irrelevant posts), and that two smaller screen on the extreme sides would have been less distracting (but can you really deal with 5 screens?).
• The twitter posts consisted mainly of notes taking. The organizers made good use of the tool to solicit questions but mostly ran out of time before they could be asked (should they be answered off-line?). There was a little bit of stream augmentation with contributors posting links to videos, books, surveys and websites mentioned by the speaker. I think this later use is in its infancy and will provide much value in future events. In addition, I think it will become essential for organizers to collect and distribute twitter account info for the speakers so they can be mentioned properly in the posts.
• When you have an event with over 500 attendees, how do you interact with the audience without going to the podium for boring announcements? You use Twitter! I was very impressed by how the organizers followed the stream and reacted quickly to the comments from the crowd. Issues with hashtags, wi-fi, screens, refreshments and other logistics that showed up in the twitter stream were handled promptly and smoothly. I regretted the organizers did not use electronic surveys for the break-out sessions (paper seemed a bit “old fashion” in this context). I am sure they were concerned that not everyone would be able to access them, but it would be an interesting experiment to have the feedback surveys online and publish results live! May be even provide rewards for reviewers and speakers!

All in this entire event made extremely good use of social media and I look forward to follow the evolution of the “digitally interactive conference” in the next few months.