10 Tweet Chat Tips: Social Learnings From the First KPMG/ServiceNow Tweet Chat

[stephenmann]

"Tweet chats" (or "tweetchats") — some people love them, and some people loathe them for clogging up their personal Twitter streams. Some organizations do them well, some not so much. And as ServiceNow and KPMG collectively tried their hands at tweet-chatting for the first time it was very difficult to find guidance in the form of freely available best or good practice. Nonetheless we steamed ahead and, in the spirit of "social," we thought we would share our tweet chat experiences — both good and bad.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "tweet chat," it's defined on About.com as:

"A pre-arranged chat that happens on Twitter through the use of Twitter updates (called tweets) that include a predefined hashtag to link those tweets together in a virtual conversation."

So ideally a tweet chat is a collection of likeminded individuals discussing a chosen topic, often during a finite timeframe, on Twitter the social networking service. People can join in or just listen to the chat by following a Twitter hashtag — this was #TransformIT for our tweet chat.

As with most things, preparation is key

The joint tweet chat related to a survey by KPMG, a global business services firm, and based on the results of a survey of over 275 attendees at ServiceNow's Knowledge 13 customer event in May 2013. The full set of results and KPMG commentary are here,there is also a related ServiceNow blog.

The tweet chat was well prepared, although in a short timeframe, by both the ServiceNow and KPMG organizers. It had been well-publicized by both parties (on Twitter, Linkedin, and in the ServiceNow Community blog), there were pre-prepared seed questions and a planned timeline, and the attending "subject matter experts" had created some canned tweets should they be needed.

Was the tweet chat a success? Well it depends. We have no internal reference to gauge ourselves against and little external info is available.

Did we get as much interaction as we would have liked? Probably not — but we really didn't know what to expect. However, it was a great start and we learned far more than we imagined.

So what did we learn?

We learned a lot. Most of what we did worked but we soon realized, in fact minutes into the tweet chat, that we could have done so much more. Not just in preparation but also during the tweet chat itself.

In terms of what worked: scripting tweets, dividing the tweet chat duration into sections, having internal subject matter experts on hand (and armed), having multiple moderators, and using a promotional landing page and blog. In terms of what didn't, we need to get better at turning awareness into attendance, better at improving audience engagement, and we could have chosen a better global time slot with hindsight.

In terms of what we learned, here are some tweet chat "tips" for your consideration:

1. Have ample time to publicize the event. As with a webinar, a month lead-time as a minimum.
2. Use a variety of channels (beyond Twitter and LinkedIn posts) to publicize the event. Don't over use a single channel. Use "Share This"-type facilities and get socially minded employees to amplify the message through their own accounts.
3. Use a calendar invite facility to at least remind interested people the event is starting.
4. Invite valued community members into the chat by tweeting at them both before and during the event. This includes pinning down the attendance of socially active, and available, employees (this might require investigation into employee social activities, i.e. who plays in the social space most).
5. Ask fewer canned questions and elicit more audience questions. Encourage audience questions as much as possible both prior to and during the event.
6. Have some great canned stats/factoids (valuable to the audience and retweet fodder).
7. Create valuable, in the eyes of the potential audience, canned statements including tweeting a link to any related subject matter prior to the session starting — in our case, the survey results.
8. Frequently reference related content during the event to give it more traction.
9. At end of the tweet chat offer a link to content as a thank you and further reading, and maybe even to further the discussion.
10. A tweet chat is a global event so be careful of the time slot you use — consider which time zones will be at lunch or have finished work for the day.

This list is by no means exhaustive, it's just stuff that we feel we would do differently next time and that others could possibly benefit from. Is there any other tweet chat advice you would like to offer others?