How to Have a Fun (and Successful!) Tweet-Up...

Guest post today by Pat Romain of Vizion VA

If you are not familiar with the term “ tweet-up”, a tweet-up happens when a bunch of people who have initially connected through Twitter actually take it upon themselves to meet in person. A tweet-up is a fun way to meet your online friends and have a drink or a meal with them, it’s also a great way to expand your network with people who have the same interest as you; but such a meeting can actually come off very akward and highly disorganized; imagine all those online folks come out from behind their computers what would they actually talk about? (Preferably in more than 140 characters).

If you decided that you want to host a tweet-up, then kudos to you, but if you have no idea where to start, this blog post should help.  A tweet-up is just like any other meet-up; you have to plan and organize your tweet-up in advance to have a successful, and most importantly, a fun event because trust me… those people on Twitter love FUN. It also depends on what you want to achieve by hosting an event like this but let’s get clear, I don’t believe that you should go into any networking event with ulterior money making motives, it should be about the people and getting to know them.

Here are some key points that I have found to be helpful when organizing a tweet-up:

1. Plan your event in advance: I know that you are totally excited to meet your online friends if this is the first time you are doing this but don’t wait until the last minute to start organizing your tweet-up.
2. If you plan to have more than 6 people come, book a venue or at least reserve a spot at a restaurant, and go visit it beforehand, it would not be fun to get to the place on that day and discover that there is no WIFI, you know that your Twitter friends are going to tweet while at the event make it easy for them; don’t forget to think of your #hashtag for the event.
3. Be the first to arrive, you are the organizer, nothing is worse than arriving after the guests have arrived, this is not the time to make an entrance, this is your event own it!
4. Say no to open bar. PERIOD. You also want to be clear on the billing for food and drink, if you are giving one free non-alcoholic drink, what about the meal? Who pays for what? If everyone pays for their own meal and drinks , you should specify that.
5. If you are hosting an event with more than five people get good name tags and pens for them to write their Twitter name, yes their Twitter name since that is what we know them by.
6. Use a site like eventbrite.com or meetup.com to administer the details of the tweet-up: to know exactly who is going to show up but always plan for a bit more people, to list the event details for you tweeple to see like the address of the venue and the hours the tweet-up is taking place and all other services that could be available for them to get there (transportation etc..)
7. Make sure that you get your twitter followers involved in the process so that they can tell their followers who are going to be in the area that the event is coming up and where to sign up . Tweeple’s (Twitter people) are really good at spreading the word.
8. Decide on the mood that you want at your tweet-up: determine whether you want a casual-let’s-talk-about-Apple-products-over-a-glass-of-wine event or something really formal where you have booked a speaker.  Then, make sure that your Twitter friends know exactly what’s up.

Now that you have everything figured out, it’s time to have fun, meet new people and mingle!

Hosting a Live Tweeting Event...

This past spring I had the pleasure of hosting a special event called “Twitter Tuesday” for the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre.

The theatre wanted to generate some buzz around the final show of their season, a very Cirque du Soleil take on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass called Lookingglass Alice.  They also wanted to raise their involvement on Twitter, so I suggested that they allow select audience members to tweet during one of the performances.

From this experience I got several takeaways that would be relevant for anyone interested in hosting a live tweeting event:

• Make your participants feel special. I created a packet for each participant which contained a handout with some guidelines for the evening (tweeting must be done via cell phone, phones must be on silent, no photography/videography during the show, etc.) and some tips I found online at Twitter Journalism about how to live tweet an event, a copy of the show’s press release so that each participant would have some knowledge of what they were about to see, and a copy of a preview article that had been printed that day in one of the local papers.  I placed this packet on each participant’s seat so that when they entered the show they had something waiting for them, and we got so many compliments on that packet!  By treating our participants as special audience members we were able to put them in a good frame of mind before the event even started.
• Set clear expectations. By providing some tips for live tweeting, setting up a hashtag, informing participants of the correct spelling for the theatre’s username, and reminding them of the rules of the theatre we created a friendly environment that worked for our participants and the theatre.  In the survey we provided after the show, everyone said that it was very easy to participate and that they found the entire event to be approachable.
• Pick an event that is well suited for live tweeting. Lookingglass Alice was an extremely interactive, fun, whimsical show with lots of visually appealing scenes.  If we had done Twitter Tuesday with one of the theatre’s more serious, cerebral shows, I do not believe that it would have been so successful.  Live tweeting is very much about reacting to what it happening in front of you, so you want to make sure you utilize this technique when the presentation is full of energy and things worth commenting on!
• Prepare all of your audience and staff. Make sure that you let your staff (ushers, event volunteers, etc.) know that this particular group of people is live tweeting.  It may seem rude to some to see audience members using their cell phones during the show/presentation, so you want to make sure that the people monitoring the event know what is going on.  It also may be helpful to make an announcement before the event begins that lets all the other audience members know what’s going on.
• Make it work for your needs. We could have easily opened this up to everyone who wanted to live tweet the show, but instead we screened participants before we gave them free tickets by checking their follower counts and Twitter participation.  By doing this we maximized our bang for our buck with those free tickets.  We also picked a preview performance for Twitter Tuesday which meant that all of those great tweets and blog posts that followed were out there for the general public to see at the beginning of the run of the show, creating some great word-of-mouth to generate more audiences.

The live tweeting concept works well for performances, concerts, festivals, conferences, and galas.  I’d love to hear your ideas on how live tweeting has (and hasn’t) worked!  Be sure to check out my post at Tizzy Consulting with all the details from this live tweeted event.

VA TV Tutorial: Eventbrite #vatv...

When it comes to setting up virtual or in-person events, there are many ways that you can advise your clients to do so.  One way might be to setup the event registration page on their website, use their shopping cart and their merchant account.  However, what happens when you are working with a client that doesn’t have any of that setup yet?

Enter Eventbrite.

Eventbrite allows you to create events (virtual or in-person) and have the entire thing managed by the Eventbrite software.  It’s social network friendly, letting people auto-share the information to Twitter or Facebook, and creates a sense of community around your events.

Eventbrite can even handle your payments (using PayPal as the gateway) and limit the number of available tickets.  There is a high level of customization that goes along with Eventbrite as well to ensure that you have ultimate control over your events.

In this VA TV tutorial, we take you through the process of creating a new event using Eventbrite.

Video quality will improve as YouTube renders the video.

Here are a few screenshots taken from Eventbrite‘s website (both interior and exterior):

Eventbrite's Website

Eventbrite's Event Summary Page

Eventbrite's Event Registration Window