Enhance your events with these hashtag “backchannel” tips

Twitterprise: Rolls off the tongue. Use it in a sentence.

Today’s lunch hour was a fun trip to two enterprise collaboration webinars: The first was #Twitterprise part 3 put on by @ross and SocialText.  The second was Jive Software with #ihgwebcast “InterContinental Hotels Group Presents: Boosting Customer Loyalty with Social Business Software“.  Let’s just go ahead and spoil the surprise by saying that #Twitterprise was more fun.

What was great about the sessions?

#Twitterprise turns out to be an *excellent* name for a webinar series. It succinctly captures the topic of “enterprise microblogging” in fewer syllables and far fewer letters.  It’s fun.  It invokes the growing popularity of the Twitter brand.  You can use it in a sentence, when talking about the topic rather than the event itself. 

The magic of this can’t be overstated: Instead of paring what I wanted to say and then slapping #twitterprise at the end of each tweet, we can just skip right over saying “twitter” or “enterprise microblogging” or whatever and insert #twitterprise inline in its place.  The evocative brevity of this trick is perfect.  Kudos to whichever person came up with the name!

The #twitterprise backchannel was pretty lively.  There were  about ten different people participating over the course of a one hour (free) webinar.  Kudos and followups trickled in throughout the remainder of the day.

Jive ended their session with a link to a Jive-hosted forum for continued discussion of the IHG webinar.  It’s nice seeing everything aggregated into one place, but I imagine there will be lower attendee conversion over to this new destination than there might have been if discussion kept to Twitter.

What could be even greater next time?

My only real lament is a lack of subtle cues from other tweeters on the #twitterprise hashtag stream.  I dumped a lot of informative links into the stream as a way of supplementing the ongoing discussion.  I’ve continually refined this sort of behavior over on FriendFeed where I am a heavy contributor, but it might not play so well on Twitter.

Unfortunately, there’s really no way to know if other #twitterprise readers enjoyed my links.  They could quite likely have been irritating fellow viewers (or more likely first party presenters!) by clogging up the stream with third party content when people were really looking for more info from SocialText and the presenters from Pistachio.  A simpler form of feedback such as a FriendFeed [Like] could go a long way towards helping users self-evaluate their behavior in a public setting like this one.

Thank Meryn Stol for suggesting this particular idea.  I’d love to see it added to the Twitter hashtag following toolkit, but who knows if or when Twitter will see fit to add that sort of feedback mechanism.  They’ve already got the star/favorites feature – perhaps they can make it more immediately obvious when others react to our content.

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