Boston Cool Twitter Conference Experience at Harvard Club
Posted by Dan Ronken
The Boston Cool Twitter Conference was in town recently at the Harvard 
Club. It was a more intimate gathering than I expected, so it presented us with a great opportunity for everyone to get to know one another. I'll be reviewing three of the speakers from this event which I found to be most intriguing. I may do a follow up post because the the other speakers were certainly post worthy as well. Just follow (me) along.
Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot, an inbound marketing firm, was the keynote for this event. He claims not to be a public speaker, but I beg to differ. Just take a look at this photo of him during his presentation. His energy is palpable right through the computer screen. Can you feel it?
This man is passionate and takes measuring social media marketing for business to a level unlike anything I've ever seen. That's right folks; it all about metrics you can measure. And that's a beautiful thing because HubSpot is teaching business owners how to succeed by improving their return on investment (ROI) for their marketing dollars and how to properly engage in social media. *Disclaimer, I'm a HubSpot partner and customer. But this is separate from their awesomeness.*
Dharmesh begins the talk by stating, "Don't worry about interrupting me during my talk, it won't distract my train of thought, because there is no train of thought." He speaks fast and inserts some quick witted 'one liners' throughout the presentation, and you'll miss them, if your not careful.
This man is up at 3 am writing sick code and creating super tools such as Twitter Grader which helps out the Twitter community by by grading Twitter users on a scale from 1 - 100 (higher is better) . I don't know about you, but this seems like an invaluble tool to help me weed out some of the spammers or just people that I would prefer not to follow.
It was a very enjoyable talk, and he ended on with some humor saying, "by the way, I do have another speed at which I talk, and that's much faster." *Hands Clapping*
Dan Zarella
Following Dharmesh is another Hubspotter named Dan Zarella. Dan is a 'Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist.' A what?? Keep reading and you'll see why. If the audience was planning on giving their brain a little break, 
they were sorely mistaken. Dan is also up at 3 am working on projects such as analyzing millions of Twitter accounts (using Excel) or having fun grinding away on one of his many other projects, like
Tweetpsych. His presentation was on a practical twitter topic; the science of ReTweets. Here are a few pointers:
- Use bit.ly or owl.ly for you URL shortener
-
Minimize slang (lol, hey, gotta, etc)
-
Hyphens, periods, and colons, are most ReTweetable punctuation (Dan was hoping the use of exclamation points would lower the number of ReTweets, but nope, they work pretty good, too).
Dan was gentle with us though, and I'm sure that everyone appreciated that, because we just finished lunch and needed some time for the blood to get back into our brains from our bellies.
Michael Bourne
Michael Bourne, VP of PR and Social Influence for Mullen Agency (I just love the new job titles I'm seeing these days) and he's also the man behind Bourne Social. His talk was very entertaining as 
he shared personal stories like how he used to play in a rock band in Berkeley, CA with this guy named 'Tom.' You probably know Tom, too. Well, you do if you've ever had a MySpace account. He was your first friend whether you liked it or not; the friend you never knew you had.
Then Michael transitioned into a story about their client, Olympus, and how they decided to launched their new E-P1 camera solely through social media.
By reaching out the Blendtech (the company behind the wildly popular 'will it blend videos'), they were able to create a clever little video of their own. The end result was an empty warehouse. That's right folks, they sold out of these E-P1's!!
This conference was a great opportunity to explore the different ways people are using Twitter. Uses ranged from customer service software for teachers, police department best practices, to a couple of cool kids from Cape Cod making their mark in the music business. Exciting times, indeed!
How do you use Twitter? What are your favorite tools? Share your experience with us and leave a comment and don't be afraid to Re Tweet this article if you found it interesting. It's easy. Just click on the Twitter link at the top of this post. Thanks for stopping by.