Aerospace eBusiness

US government and arms protesters better Twitter users than the Aerospace Industry? September 8, 2009

This week two major aerospace events are taking place on opposite sites of the planet. In Hong-Kong, the Asian Aerospace conference and exhibition started with several major announcements from about 400 exhibitors. In London, the annual Defense Systems & Equipment International (DSEi) takes place over the next four days with over 1400 exhibitors. The shows expect 10,000 and 30,000 visitors respectively. And yet, if you searched twitter you’d barely notice these events existed.

The technique used by every one else in the world to promote and track events on Twitter, the use of hashtags, doesn’t seem to have made its way into our industry yet. There are no official codes promoted by organizers or media outlets. The few people talking about the show are doing so to their followers and in an uncoordinated fashion. What a wasted opportunity! To be fair, FlightGlobal, always making good use of twitter and whose parent company is organizing the Asian Aerospace show, timidly used “AA09” in some of its posts and is tracking the term on its special show page. But that is not a hashtag and they should know better, especially when they are not using it consistently in their own posts. AviationWeek also started using AA09 late Tuesday, and they are also reporting on DSEi. They are posting news and photos on their home page, but did they take up where the organizers failed and create a DSEi hashtag? No! You know who did? Disarm, the anti-arm protest group did! They set it up at #DSEi. And they have been using all day to organize and report their protest efforts against the exhibitors at the show.

Even large organizations like Rockwell Collins and Thales, both tweeting their news from DSEi, missed the opportunity. Neither seem to understand this simple technique: if you tweet without a hashtag, you are likely to only reach your followers. For example, @thalesgroup has 150 followers on twitter. But if they added a tag like #DSEI09 (which should have been created by the organizers) they could have potentially reached the thousands of show visitors tuned to that stream.

So, show organizers, aerospace media, and large aerospace companies, let’s go over this one more time:

1. Select a hashtag early and start publicizing it before the event on website, conference material, and on Twitter itself (next up: #NBAA and #DXB09 (DubaiAirShow)).
2. During the show include the hashtag in your tweets (preferably at the end) and do it consistently.
3. During the show, track, archive and publish the hashtag stream, paying attention to what is being said and respond or collaborate as appropriate.
4. After the show, review the stream’s archive to find key lessons and impressions about the event.

That doesn’t seem like rocket science to me, does it? And it was done quite successfully at the Paris Air Show in June. So why are we not taking advantage of it? Especially when traditionally less advanced groups like the US Government “bureaucrats” are now fully embracing these techniques and making great strides in the process? You want to see how it is done, check out #gov20 and #gov20e streams. By the way that event had only 400 attendees!