I did it my way!

It was a day of I did it my way, yes the old Sinatra tune is playing in my head as I type on the plane home back from TWTRCON SF09. I was one of the lucky ones to be selected to go standby. They accepted a lower registration fee from me, helping me make the trip to where Twitter was born, San Francisco.

I heard things like twitter is like a phone, we don’t have to train people how to use the phone. However we need to have programs in place to get a desired outcome from using the phone. You can use phone for a social conversation, as well as for a telemarketing campaign.

Other key takeaways from the Sunday event include a surpriser for most, MCHammer. He was articulate and shared a twitter success story by being authentic. “I have watched who I am in the magazines for 20 years, I don’t know that guy!” Taking back control with help from @adventuregirl, Hammer has 700,000 followers and has his own ideas of the future of Twitter like actors themselves advertising their upcoming movies on Twitter, saving the industry millions of advertising dollars.

Twitter stories were told including the Kogi BBQ truck that utilizes Twitter to let their customers know when and where they will be as they drive through the streets of LA. Now they have BBQ truck groupies who have developed a culture for themselves which all began on Twitter! Charities such as the one that piggybacked the TWTRCON conference, Operation Smile, have promising results from viral messages going throughout Twitterville. A Twitter user panel offered tips and shared how they found Twitter to be successful. These included having a strong personality behind your Twitter account, being a utility, and going in with an objective and measuring your results.

It was a conference that we created. We were asked to write down what we would like to talk about during lunch on a white board. As attendees we participated throughout the event as there was much time dedicated to Question and Answer whether you wanted to get on the mic or tweet your question to technologizer who was monitoring the twtrcon twitter account. The sessions weren’t about powerpoint presentations, the whole event was a long conversation as the speakers for the most part sat in lounge chairs as if they were in their own living rooms. Even Steve Rubel, built out the future of Twitter with what he called mind mapping. Steve showed how Twitter can act as an OS or Ecosystem building out the tree using the audience’s input. We voted for the 6 vendors that we wanted to hear from. And in true Twitter style they only had 140 seconds to pitch us their product. I was happy to get my CoTweet account as it is in Beta and they release the version to select few.

What I found most interesting when recapping the day is that everyone has an opportunity to make their own story. Everyone has an opportunity to be a success or become more successful with Twitter. Whether that means being a good citizen alerting a large group of an earthquake that happened or solving a big challenge at their company like KogiBBQ, Twitter empowers everyone to do good and others to share the story around the world.

To see video coverage of the TWTRCON SF 09 Conference, check out TWOOTING