tweet archivist

The most important thing you need to do is pick a hashtag for your event and promote it. Without a hashtag, there isn't much you can do. It is essential that all attendees know the hashtag and use it. Typically, it is short and memorable, aka #IDC2013 or #SXSW. If your event is an annual event, you need to decide whether to attach the year to your hashtag or not.

Once you've picked the hashtag, you should activate an archive on Tweet Archivist for that hashtag immediately. With an active archive, you can rest assured that you won't miss a tweet with that hashtag in it.

There are lots of things you can do to promote the hashtag and start getting value out of it before the event:

• During registration At the conference registration process, provide a mechanism to allow the attendee to tweet that she is going to the conference, automatically inserting the hashtag for them.
• In communication with attendees In emails sent to attendees before the show starts, encourage them to tweet about the conference using the hashtag.
• On the conference website On the conference website's session pages, encourage attendees to tweet what sessions they are excited about.
• Have speakers use the hashtag Your speakers are your ambassadors. Let your speakers know about the hashtag.

During your event, Twitter can be a great back channel conversation about how the event is going. Again, it is important that attendees know the hashtag to use, so make sure it is posted in signage around the conference and on speaker's opening and closing slides. Encourage your speakers to annouce the hashtag in their sessions.

Once the conversation gets going, Tweet Archivist can help bubble up the gestalt of the conference. Here's some ideas:

• Display the top user visualization as a leaderboard People love gamification and leaderboards. By displaying the Top User visualization, you can start a (friendly) competition for who tweets the most at the conference. Here's an example.
• Promote the Top Words visualization The Top Words visualization is a beautiful word cloud of what people are tweeting about. It often captures the themes of a conference quite compellingly. Here's an example.
• Capture pictures with the Top Images visualization If your attendees attach images to their tweets, they will be displayed in the Top Images visualization. Here's an example.
• Capture pictures with the Top Images visualization Did someone famous tweet about your conference? Use the influencer index to find out!

It is worth noting that when you embed the visualizations in a webpage, they auto update once an hour. So, you put a visualization up on a monitor and attendees can always see the latest.

Everyone knows how hectic it is when you are in the middle of a conference. Often there isn't time to sit an monitor Twitter for what people are saying. By using Tweet Archivist you can capture all the tweets and then download them to Excel or PDF after the show.

At that time, there's lots you can do with the data:

• Scour the tweets for attendee complaints When you find a complaint, tweet the attendee back and/or use the data for improving your conference next time.
• Find out what you did well Discover trends on what attendees liked about the show.
• Figure out who your influencers are The Top Users chart and Influencer Index chart are mechanisms to find the most vocal and most influential people tweeting about your conference. Reach out to them so that they are in your camp!