Since its inception people have found many creative uses for Twitter, but to my mind one of the most useful has been as the collective, real-time public notebook for conferences and special events. Smart conference organizers establish and publicize a hash tag for conference tweets, enabling participants to converse about what’s happening and for non-attenders to follow along.
For example, this past weekend the first TEDx conference (a localized version of the famous international TED gatherings) for our local area (the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina) made use of the hash tag #TEDxRTP to aggregate tweets from conference participants. Though I wasn’t able to attend the meeting, I could still follow the highlights through a Tweetdeck column built around the conference hash tag. In addition to as-it-happens impressions, these conference and event hash tag lists usually contain a treasure trove of valuable links to conference- and speaker-related sites and resources.
In fact, a conference Twitter stream may be so valuable that you’d like to save it and be able to refer back to it later. Google Reader, Google’s RSS feed reader that’s oh so much more, makes it very easy to do just that. Here’s how (prerequisite: a Google account that you’re logged in to:
- Go to search.twitter.com and search for the hash tag associated with the event you want to archive.
- The results page for any Twitter search is automatically an RSS feed. Right-click and copy the feed link.
(Alternative, but recommended: Go to TwapperKeeper and create an archive for your hashtag. Advantage: the TwapperKeeper feed will pull all of the tagged tweets into Reader, whereas the direct RSS from the Twitter search will only pull in about 25-30 of the most recent Tweets. Once the TwapperKeeper archive is generated, right click on the RSS Feed link and copy its URL.)- Go to Google Reader and click the “Add a subscription” button at the upper left.
- Paste the feed URL you copied in step 2 (or 3) into the Add box and click “Add.”
You now have a complete archive of the Twitter stream for your conference hash tag. Even better, Reader will automatically update this archive with any new tweets using the hash tag…forever!
Now that you’ve captured and archived that feed, you can put the power of Google Reader to work for you. Use the “Add Tags” link at the bottom of each post (i.e., tweet) and label the most valuable so you can easily find them later. For example, you might want to tag tweets from people or companies you want to pitch later as “prospects.”
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