While Twitter may be struggling to find a viable business model, there’s a Twitter-related business that appears to be gaining tremendous traction: conferences about Twitter.
Jeff Pulver, who made his mark and a lot of money putting on VoIP conferences when VoIP was red-hot, recently announced plans for The 140 Characters Conference in New York City on June 16/17. As to why a Twitter conference, Pulver said:
My hope is to attract not only established celebrities, members of the media and advertising thought leaders who are now using twitter, but those who have become a celebrity, and a brand in their own right, through the creative and disruptive application that twitter continues to be.
I’m looking for first-hand accounts of how twitter is being used and the impact it is happening in the industry sectors this event is focusing on. My goal is to bring together the right group of characters to both lead and contribute to the discussions.
As far as I can tell, the conference doesn’t have a Web site yet so it’s impossible to tell what’s on the agenda. Without knowing more, it looks like Pulver sees a fertile conference opportunity so he’s decided to draw a line in the proverbial sand before others can stake a claim.
Meanwhile, the Parnassus Group is organizing the 140: The Twitter Conference, a two-day event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca. on May 26/27.
The first day of the conference is focused on business uses of the Twitter platform, while the second day deals with marketing, PR and business development opportunities.
The agenda looks interesting with the opening keynote by Alex Payne, who is Twitter’s API Lead. Other speakers include Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, StockTwits CEO Soren Macbeth, and Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella.
While both conferences could be terrific events with fantastic content, they do remind of the saying “There’s gold in them thar hills”. While Twitter may be having a difficult making money, the Twitter ecosystem is creating a growing number of ways to cash in on the microblogging phenomenon.
5 Comments
I've been mulling over topics for my talk at next week's Vancouver Third Tuesday. One topic was titled: "Is Twitter the be all and the end of blogging". While I love Twitter for all it can do and does do for my info and communication needs, it seems to be like business blogging in 2005-6. Blogging as the be all and end all for marketing and communication solutions. Neither blogging nor Twitter are the be all and end all of anything, just more steps, refinements, and iterations on communications.
Just sayin'
A key difference that I see is how the data that Twitter possesses is accessible in one place and an API exists for tapping into it. That's a central topic at our (Parnassus Group) event. There never was a good way to get to everything being blogged, and the platform is gamed by splogs, which is harder to do in Twitter.
Steve,
The conference looks interesting. Hope it goes well!
Mark
Updates for "140 Character Conference" will be posted to http://140conf.com and commentary can be seen in my blog – http://jeffpulver.com
Please follow http://twitter.com/140conf for conference updates and feel free to find me too – http://twitter.com/jeffpulver
Updates for "140 Character Conference" will be posted to http://140conf.com and commentary can be seen in my blog – http://jeffpulver.com
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