The CMO's Guide to Tweetups

Organizing a Tweetup:

Lessons from a NASA Tweetup

By David Rosen

(Click here to download a pdf of the whitepaper)

On November 15 and 16, 2009, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration held a tweetup for the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis.
One of Makovsky's social media experts was one of only 100 tweeps to attend. As a result, we had a first-hand view of NASA’s impressive planning and execution of the event.

This was NASA’s fifth tweetup and it provides a textbook example of best practices for such a event.
What follows is a list of the lessons learned — some strategic, some tactical, some big-picture and some quite granular — that you can use to develop your own company’s tweetup.

1. Play by the culture’s rules.

The Twitter community, like any other, has a set of cultural norms and behavioral rules that you’ll need to observe to be successful:

• Use Twitter for at least six months to develop a following. NASA began using Twitter in 2008 for its Mars/Phoenix probe, using it to distribute information, answer questions, re-tweet insightful commentary, and encourage non-PR people, in this case astronauts, to use Twitter to directly communicate with the public. When it was time to organize a tweetup, NASA had a steady audience of dedicated followers.

• Establish common ground. The people who led the event were already on Twitter as individuals, a factor that cannot be underestimated. When the tweeps arrived in the presentation room, there was no “us vs. them.” Instead, there was only “us” — tweeps who worked for NASA and tweeps who have other jobs. Twitter wasn’t just a medium of communication; it was a badge of belonging.

• Employ a fair selection process. NASA selected the 100 tweeps who would have the privilege to participate in the event by setting up a website and letting the first 100 people to sign up “win.” The only qualifier was that you already had to be a follower of the @NASA Twitter feed. Plenty of notice was given; no one could complain that they had been left out for not being a booster or having too few followers.

• Recognize that the value of a tweetup to participants isn’t just the information they receive; it’s the interaction. NASA gave participants the space and time to talk with each other, hang out, learn and enjoy. Don’t fill every minute with your content – allow time for mingling.

• Give tweeps a head start. Before beginning the event, organizers gave the tweeps a full hour to settle in, plug in, boot up, and otherwise get their geek on.

• A tweetup isn’t a press conference. Because they're citizen journalists, tweeps need to be treated differently from reporters, analysts and others. That doesn’t mean Twitter users shouldn’t be invited to other kinds of events; just don’t call them tweetups.

2. Cultivate the new community.

Some of the people in the room at NASA knew each other before the tweetup. Others got to know each other in the weeks running up to the event.
But once the event started, the 100 people in attendance started to experience things as a group, and therefore become a community.

• Establish a separate Twitter feed for the event. NASA created a separate @NASAtweetup feed which streamlined their communications to attendees and freed up the @NASA primary feed for wider communication with the public. Interestingly, since this was NASA’s fifth tweetup, and they’ve used the @NASAtweetup account on a rolling basis, the newest tweeps were able to reference the comments of the previous ones.

• Designate a hashtag. NASA chose #nasatweetup before a community member could, picking the shortest and least used hash for their own use.

• Provide a tweep directory. Using Twitter’s new list-building feature, NASA built a list of the 100 tweeps that everyone could access and share. At the event, NASA handed each person a printout with people’s @names listed.

• Use round tables. At the first day’s session we sat at small round tables that made conversation and community building easy. This contrasted with the next day’s event which was set up like a press conference; long rows of tables facing a single podium. The first day’s setup was the model of social media, the next day’s exemplified the traditional media model. A NASA PR pro later shared that their next tweetup will feature only round tables.

• Hold an ice breaker. Given that everyone was there for the same reason, and many people had already gotten to know each other virtually in the weeks running up to the event, there was a higher degree of camaraderie and trust than you see at other events. Still, to break the ice, NASA put "space gadgets" in the middle of each table and asked people to figure out what they were. It got people talking with each other and was one of the earliest shared experiences.

• Use big screens with integrated feeds. Large screens, showing all the tweets using #NASAtweetup posted in real time, have become standard at Tweetups, but it’s a tactic never to be overlooked.

• Create a group “artifact.” NASA procured the wheel of a shuttle that had been to space and placed it outside the twent (Twitter “media tent”) for everyone to sign. It was yet another way to make the moment feel special and bring people together.

• Be open about glitches. At least twice, NASA’s PR staff asked everyone in the middle of the event if anyone was having problems with wifi. Several hands went up. Just imagine the frustration that builds if you’ve arrived for a tweetup and can’t tweet! NASA won a lot of people’s hearts in that moment, and you can do the same with your tweeps.

• Post signs galore. There were professionally printed signs everywhere: at the signup area, on the buses, outside the “twent”… It made everyone feel special and that NASA took us seriously.

• Drip, drip flair. At nearly every transition point, such as when people got back on the buses after a session, people found NASA informational materials on their seats. It gave strangers who hadn’t talked yet something to speak about and smile at together. A small but important touch.

• Provide special access. At several points, tweetup attendees were given special access to sites, such as a field across from the shuttle launch pad that is normally closed off from the public. They weren’t shy about saying how much the tours usually cost, or how rare access to a certain site is, making us feel privileged and special.

3. Match the content to the medium.

Here are some tips:

• Manage the stream. There was a steady flow of information, comprised of short presentations on a wide variety of topics. This enabled tweeters to switch back and forth between listening to presenters who interested them, and participants sitting next to them.

• Speak to wide variety of topics. Some topics made the engineers swoon; others were meant for the humanities majors.

• Feature interesting people telling interesting stories. Chief among these was Mike Massimino, who has flown two missions to space and was the first astronaut to tweet from space (he has more than one million followers; more than @NASA).

• Provide things to touch. Tweeps were given objects to touch and photograph and take videos of, like the shuttle tiles that contributed to the breakup of Columbia. Feeling the heat shield tiles crack under light pressure of fingertips made the danger of spaceflight more understandable.

• Employ professional multimedia. Sure, tweeps celebrate the democratization of media. But that doesn’t mean they won’t value or use a professionally created photo or video. NASA had a professional photographer and videographer on hand, capturing content that could be re-tweeted, re-blogged and otherwise distributed through each person’s social channels.

• Provide public domain materials. NASA provided pictures and videos that were explicitly in the public domain. The last thing a tweetup organizer wants is for people to hold back on posting because they’re afraid of violating intellectual property rights.

• Schedule with Twitter traffic levels in mind. If you’re looking to have a substantial virtual audience, take care with the date and time you hold your tweetup. NASA held the first part of their Tweetup early on a Sunday morning, a time when traffic is at its lowest. This made it easier for #NASAtweetup to get onto the “trending topics” list (a running list of tags posted on Twitter.com that shows which topics are being cited most frequently), which in turn attracted a wider audience.

• Purposefully incite tweets. As if all the previous techniques weren’t enough, NASA specifically incited tweets at certain points. For example, speakers steadily rolled out educational factoids, such as 80 percent of shuttle flights take off on time.

• Ask people to speak in 140 characters. Right after launch, one of the NASA people asked everyone to verbally express what they saw in 140 characters, instigating poetic descriptions that, in terms of brevity, put haikus to shame. The ship had already launched a thousand tweets; this request set off a few more.

• Ply the crowd with trivia games and prizes. Throughout the two-day tweetup, NASA’s PR team continually engaged the group with trivia questions and prizes. It’s important to note that the prizes weren’t valuable in and of themselves. (they were mostly from the tweetup). It was the opportunity for recognition that people enjoyed.

4. Rock the logistics.

There is one Commandment that must always be observed: Thou shalt not underestimate the amount of wifi, cell signal and tech support that will be needed at thy tweetup.

• Provide power. Have power strips in the middle of the table. Count at least four plugs for every person in order to satisfy numerous devices, some of which have plugs that will take up two sockets.

• Supply login info. Send the ID and password to the attendees days — if not weeks — ahead of the tweetup. NASA did this and it saved everyone a lot of time and headaches.

• Have IT support standing by. Have tech people on hand to help out with troubleshooting. Macs are popular at these events, so have people who know both major systems.

• Ask about problems. Once an hour, ask the crowd if anyone’s having tech problems, and have them raise their hands so they can be helped.

• Use multiple forms of communication. Include a dedicated twitter feed, email and even good old-fashioned phone numbers.

• Print the schedule and keep to the schedule. Set expectations from the beginning that everything will start and end on time. Remember, unlike most frustrated crowds, everyone in attendance is on Twitter and will be eager to use it to vent their frustrations.

SIDEBAR:
Ask the Journalist: How has social media changed the journalist’s approach?

“…What we discovered very quickly is if...a few tweets to the right people, you're going to find the right audience very quickly. That's the beauty of social networking. This exponential nature of friends telling friends. That if you get to the right group, if you can get to the choir, the choir knows instantly, and then the beauty of it is the choir has friends too and they start bringing other people into the tent.”

"There's an audience out there that really wants to bore in on a subject, an inch wide, 500 miles deep, right? And that's what you can't do in mainstream media."

“…You form these virtual communities that are actually taking the place of editors at CNN. Actually sifting through the information and helping people understand what's good what's not, what's true, what's not. And so it's kind of like an editorial board of the commons, and it works. And there is so much expertise out there that hasn't been [tapped]...and frankly, a lot of what you saw in mainstream media was just a few little people who were in your rolodex and were frequently put on television. And they were — that was deemed to be the expert. There's a lot more to the world, a lot of expert opinion out there that was never touched by mainstream media.”

Miles O’Brien, formerly of CNN
Watch the full interview at: http://bit.ly/miles-obrien-interview

SIDEBAR
Does your company have tweeps? Here are two quick ways to find out.

Option 1: Go to WeFollow.com. This site is a directory of Twitter users who have picked five words to describe who they are and what they tweet about. Type in keywords that describe your sector. The number alongside these terms shows how many people have chosen that term as part of their five-word identification.
Click on the term and a list of twitterers will appear, ranked by the number of followers they have. Those are the pillars of your community. They may not know it yet. But now you do.

Option 2: You can also do a search for keywords on search.twitter.com. Look for people with bios that match your target audiences, who have mentioned your company’s name, your product names, those of your competitors, and associated ticker symbols. Search for terms that are only used by people in your field; the more obscure the term, the more knowledgeable the person is who’s using it.

SIDEBAR
Ask NASA: How has using social media on a daily basis changed your job?

“It’s changed it primarily in how much time we spend on a new medium. But it has changed it in a more important way. Which is we have direct contact with people who have a vested interest in the nation’s space program. And that’s the people that we’re trying to reach anyway when we put out news releases or have a news briefing or whatever. The media is just our medium to get the word out. So with social media we get the word out directly to the people who are interested and I think that’s awesome.”

Stephanie Schierholz, NASA PR
Watch the full interview at: http://bit.ly/NASA-PR-interview