Twitter Demystified - Internet World panel discussion

It was great to see the Twitter debate kick off at Internet World today. The hugely popular panel session saw visitors queuing for nearly an hour to get in, giving an indication of how Twitter's reach and popularity continues to grow.
Having negotiated the queue, I was keen to find our what kind of questions were going to be put forward - looking forward to a meaty debate on the future of Twitter and perhaps what the next big innovation might be.

The panel line up promised some great debate:

• Guy Stephens @guy1067 - Knowledge and online help manager at Carphone Warehouse
• Kai Turner @kaigani - Head of information architecture at agency.com
• Ashley Friedlein @ashleyfriedlein - CEO at Econsultancy
  

Once a hash tag had been established the debate kicked off only to be stalled momentarily by the lack of Wi-fi at Internet World (can you believe it). With the aid of a dongle we were soon able to follow our Tweet stream on the big screen (not sure if this is a practise I would always welcome). For those of you interested in looking back at the Twitter feed it can be found at #iwtd.

The crowd at the debate was really diverse, with Twitter newcomers sitting alongside early adopters and with a couple of hundred people in the room, it soon became apparent that we were only scratching the surface. This could have kicked off into a really good debate given more time but for now, here are a few of the questions asked:

• If one person in an organisation Tweets - who should it be?
• Should Twitter expand?
• Is 140 characters enough?
• How might I use Twitter to drive traffic?
• What if negative feedback spirals out of control?
• Does the amount of followers I have increase my search ranking?

It was great to see so many people coming to find how they can improve their communications using Twitter as a channel. The session highlighted that although businesses know they should be using it, they are still not clear on how and when. And whilst some of this may be common sense, like any form of communication, it needs to part of an overall strategy.

As a footnote, one clear message came out of the session - if your business has not already registered its Twitter name, do it now, before anyone else does!

If you want to learn more about Twitter and how it can help your business please feel free to drop me an email.