Ten Weeks to Prepare… and Ten Seconds to Tweet Eileen Boswell Community Transportation Association of America February 25, 2011 The Catholic University of America’s Bridging the Spectrum Symposium

CTAA EXPO

Overcoming Skepticism

 It’s a no-brainer.”

Five Simple Rules 1.) Be prepared. 2.) Enlist allies. 3.) Every conference has a beginning, middle, and end. 4.) Embrace place. 5.) Take it easy.

From California to the Heartland

Ten Weeks to Prepare

Before the Conference  Build relationships  Get the password  Branding the feed  Know your event  Build a following

Building a Following  Conference attendees  Members who can’t attend  Partners  Industry leaders  Local businesses

Embrace Place

Marketing the Feed  On Twitter  In s to attendees  In print materials announcing conference  In print materials at conference  At coffee stations during the conference  On CTAA home page

Getting the Feed on CTAA.org  Using Twitter's open source code, we created feed widgets run by javascript to pull a user's "profile" tweets and display them via XHTML/CSS on our Web pages.

Ten Seconds to Tweet

During the Conference 1.) Pay attention 2.) Pay attention 3.) Pay attention

Name Dropping, Twitter-Style

Don’t Forget Hashtags!

“When” not “If” Lessons Learned

Real Content…with Personality!

Capturing Conversations

Announcements

Fun Stuff, Free Time

Unexpected Benefits

After the Conference  Close the feed  Document what you did  Discuss lessons learned  Celebrate success  See who was Tweeting

Closing Thoughts

Capturing a Conference

Little Things Mean a Lot

Suggestions  Follow conferences on Twitter  Make it a team effort  Use last year’s feed to enhance this year’s conference

Eileen Online   twitter.com/CTAAEXPO  twitter.com/NRCtrans  twitter.com/eileencan  embeddedlibrarian.blogspot.com