I virtually attended my second conference this year – the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco – over the last several days.
I previously attended the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford where I began developing my strategy for virtually attending conferences from the convenience of my laptop.
The cool thing about virtual attendance of conferences is that regardless of where I am at in the world at the time of the conference – I can “virtually attend” via those who are actually attending.
Its pretty efficient because I don’t have to hop on a plane and spend several days traveling to and from an event.
More importantly, I can attend events while also remaining focused on my primary work almost without interruption.
Also, I can do all of this without having to watch hours of video or read through a bunch of transcripts or blogs to figure out what was said by who.
How?
By grabbing all of a conference’s original Tweets.
Its not perfect, but I have found all of a conference’s gems are best surfaced in Tweets by those audience members in attendance.
Granted, there are some semantic issues from one Tweeter’s Tweet to the next but even having different transcriptions produces value.
Once I have grabbed all of a conference’s Tweets, I read all of them and determine which ones best captured the speaker’s point.
After that, I assemble a list of the top 50 or 100 Tweets and publish them in a WordPress blog.
The top 50 Tweets from the Web 2.0 Summit 09.
With the new WordPress “publicize” feature, I then Tweet them to my Twitter account.
This process accomplishes at least two things:
1. The WordPress blog post and its content eventually gets crawled and then indexed in Google search engine results pages.
2. The Tweets get grabbed and published in real time by search engines like @Bing.com/Twitter.
Bing Twitter #w2s
As you can see from the screen shot above, my Top 50 Tweets post from #w2s @SearchMarketingCommunications.com were grabbed by Bing.com/Twitter and placed under the most recent Tweets about #w2s.
Further down the page, Bing.com/Twitter then provides a list of top links shared in Tweets about the keyword Tweeted.
In this case, my Top 50 Tweets from the Web 2.0 Summit 2009 post reached the seventh position on this particular Bing results page for #w2s.
Bing Tweets Links
Publishing this blog post will in turn push this blog into the most recent Tweets for the same keyword again.
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