William Sears, Founder and Vice President, Product Marketing & Business Development for PerfectMarket was at PubCon/WebmasterWorld last week.
Here's our first guest-blogger's take on the show:
There were a lot of hot topics at last week's PubCon/WebmasterWorld conference in Vegas: Google's Quality Score, Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, and more. But the biggest buzz was the technology everybody was using to keep tabs on those topics: Twitter.
Brett Tabke, the conference organizer, tweeted (yes, tweeted, if you don't use Twitter, you didn't even see this.) "last year, we had a max of 67 wifi users at peek. This year, we had 278 at one point. everyone is twittering."
It's true. The WiFi login page repeatedly had me retrying to login, saying that it already had the max of 100 users on the node. Everywhere I looked, people were tweeting. Scanning the audience I saw more than half the laptop screens on Twitter, others were peering at their iPhones (another very, very hot topic at PubCon) tweeting away (many using of several new Twitter front-end applications which have recently debuted for the iPhone). Often I would look to see the speakers tweeting, and then a second later I'd get their tweets. It was insane!
There was a subdialog going on with the audience via Twitter in nearly every session. Matt Cutts: "in a twitter world it seems like people have to kick their presentations up a notch or get mocked"..."hey! I swear like 71% of this #pubcon audience is twittering. The invisible signals are probably raising background radiation."
Everyone is twittering. If e-mail is so 1995, and IM-ing is so 2001, and blogging is so 2006.you really have to be tweeting (and following) if you want to keep pace with movers and shakers. Heck, I wouldn't even have known about the Zappos party on Tuesday night without it!
So what does this mean for your business? Communications and social network are becoming increasing layered. Not only can users now choose how granular, but also how synchronous they want their communications, all the way up to near real time. As publishers, we need to decide which channels to use to distribute our information, and to do so appropriately. We also need to explore how and when to attempt to monetize the publication. Can we use our content on one channel to drive traffic to others? My take at this juncture is that currently the informal/real time communications layers (like Twitter) are mainly useful for strengthening networks (social or, in the case of businesses, brand building). But who knows what the future will bring.
For a nice re-cap of some PubCon highlights, check out Brett Tabke’s post on the PubCon blog.
See you in the twitterverse! @wksears
William Sears
Founder and Vice President, Product Marketing & Business Development
PerfectMarket
Comments