#140tc was held in Los Angeles so it attracted a lot of stars. Some, like Star Trek’s LeVar Burton are media moguls while others are tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki. Everyone was all a-Twitter about building brands, integrating media, and using social media strategies to monetize and drive traffic to products and websites. Tony Robbins gave an arousing keynote that had everyone jumping out of their seats, yelling, and hugging strangers. It was great fun meeting our own Twitter favorite: Dr Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie), senior analyst covering customer service and customer experience at Forrester. Getting down to business meant focusing on the medical device industry and finding ways to use Twitter for clients with stringent FDA requirements.
The highlight of the conference was the new application launch pad. Klout is an application that will allow Twitter users to determine the success of their campaigns. Tidy Tweet will have a big impact on our clients. It allows approval of Tweets, bad word filtering, competing product name filtering, black or white listing, and auto spam rejection. It has a very intuitive user interface so clients can control their own campaigns. Justbought.it is going to be another big winner. This is customer driven purchasing or Twitter on steroids.
Guy Kawasaki is a nice guy full of enthusiasm for new media. He also gets the dad-of-the-year award for carrying around a skateboard with a pen taped to it so he could get Tony Hawk’s signature for his son. He has a very clever Twitter strategy: every link he posts to Twitter is posted to his Alltop website. This drives traffic to his site even as it helps him grow his Twitter follower base. You can guess his demographic when you see his bright orange logo and plastic business card sticker meant to be stuck to an Apple laptop. (Guy is not a PC.) He is also not very keen on health care as a business opportunity. It is too vertical for him.
No event would be complete without Gavin Newsom being beamed in on Skype. Running for governor against the former CEO of Ebay can’t be easy for a non-technical guy but this really had a very Fahrenheit 451 feeling to it.
The panel called Media Integration Strategies: Incorporating Twitter into your Existing Properties was quite good.