Creating a Conference Twitter Community

This year at EclipseCon we decided to use Twitter to create an online community for the conference. Twitter is still relatively new to most people so I thought it might be interesting to write a report about our experiences.  Hopefully other conference organizers can use some of these ideas and results for their events.

Goals

1. Encourage more people in the Eclipse community to use twitter and follow people in the Eclipse community. The Eclipse community is gradually embracing twitter but it is far from mainstream.  EclipseCon seemed like a great opportunity to encourage more people to start using twitter.
2. How can we promote EclipseCon to a wider audience than just the on-site attendees? Lots of people can’t make it to EclipseCon but thru blogs and now twitter they can get a feel for the conference. Hopefully this will encourage them to attend in the future.
3. Can we use twitter to make it easier to connect with conference
   attendees and speakers?. Close to 1000 people attend EclipseCon, can twitter be used to communicate with the session attendees and make it easier to connect.
4. General promotion of the Eclipse community. I am the Eclipse marketing guy, so I am always looking to raise the awareness of Eclipse with the general developer community.

What Did We Do?

1. Hashtag #eclipsecon. Well before the conference we identified a conference hashtag, in our case #eclipsecon. For those that are new to twitter, a hashtag is something that everyone adds to their tweets to be identified with the conference. This allows you to use twitter search to create a conference stream of tweets. More on this later.
2. @eclipsecon twitter id. Thanks to Chantal Yang at PageOne, who created the @eclipsecon twitter ID early in the process. This gave the conference an identity on twitter.  It also became the means to join the EclipseCon twitter community.
3. EclipseCon Birds Nest. We wanted a way to visualize the EclipseCon twitter community, so we created the EclipseCon Birds Nest. This is a web page that shows the avatars of all the people following the @eclipsecon twitter id. It provided a way to find other people in the Eclipse twitter community.   However, we also used the Birds Nest to encourage people to tweet about EclipseCon and their participation.  People were encouraged to tweet if they were a speaker, attendee, exhibitor or follower. We supplied hyperlinks on the Birds Nest to make it easy for people to self identify. We also used special hastags that allowed us to visualize each individual’s participation on the Birds Nest.
4. EclipseCon Twitter Stream. Using the twitter search api, we were able to create a stream of EclipseCon related tweets. We showed the stream on the EclipseCon home page and the Birds Nest. We also installed a large monitor at the conference site, so on-site attendees could see the tweets.
5. Updating conference attendees. The @eclipsecon twitter id was used to send out tweets about the daily EclipseCon events, reminders about keynotes, receptions etc.
6. Final Q&A via Twitter. Twitter was used to submit questions to the panelist at the closing plenary. The EclipseCon Twitter Stream was displayed on a big screen so everyone could see the live questions and banter.
7. Marketing. We took a very low key approach to marketing the EclipseCon twitter community. The only communications was done via my blog, my twitter id, @eclipsecon twitter id and the EclipseCon web site. We made the decision to not promote it on the eclipse.org web site, since we weren’t really sure if the Birds Nest technology could handle the traffic. We also did not promote the twitter community to the conference attendees via regular conference e-mails or during keynote sessions. Frankly, we just didn’t have time or think about it.

The Results

1. 250+ people joined the EclipseCon Birds Nest. We set a goal of 200 people, which was achieved by the start of the conference. 50+ people identified themselves as speakers, 14 as attendees and 4 exhibitors. I believe we succeeded with the speakers since they were able to promote their session. They could see value in participating.   I was disappointed that we had a small number of exhibitors and attendees. However, we never actually sent them an e-mail or formal communication asking them to participate.   They needed to find it via my blog or on twitter. Next time I more actively encourage attendees and exhibitors to participate much earlier in the lead up to the conference.
2. Thanks to Rob Konigsberg we have an analysis of the EclipseCon Twitter Stream. 265 people used the #eclipsecon hashtag and generated a total of 2174 tweets. 50% of the tweets were done by the top 20 people. I am pleased with the results and hopefully they will serve as a benchmark.  Btw, EclipseCon had around 1000 people attending.
3. We were trending. The ultimate for any twitter campaign is to hit the top 10 twitter trending list. This is the list of most popular terms on twitter at a point in time. The list shows up on twitter search and the twitter web client.

For any marketing geek, this is the ultimate in reaching a broader audience, since lots of twitter users will see you term, in this case “eclipsecon”. The time eclipsecon started to trend was during the closing plenary session. Obviously the opportunity to see you tweets up on a big screen, in front of hundreds of people, are pretty inviting. The obvious lesson learned is if you want lots of tweets make them very public.

Improvements

1. Next year I would do more marketing to encourage more of the
   attendees to participate.
2. Look for ways to incorporate twitter into the Q&A for more sessions.
3. Incorporate more value into the Birds Nest to encourage a larger
   Eclipse twitter community.
4. Spend more time thinking how the @eclipsecon id can be used to
   communicate to the attendees during the conference.

Overall

I think we achieved our goals.  More Eclipse people are now on twitter.  I personally have found lots more people to follow and more Eclipse people are following me.  It seemed that people not attending were watching the #eclipsecon and enjoyed the live news.  Finally to have reach the top 10 trending list hopefully exposed Eclipse and EclipseCon to a wider community.

We can do better next year and I am sure we will.  Next up though is how can we use twitter to create awareness for the Galileo release.  Let me know if you have any ideas.

Kudos

Lots of people helped make this happen.  Most everything I have learnt about twitter is by following James Governor at Redmonk.  He innately gets this stuff because he lives it.  Chantal Yang from PageOne had the foresight to setup the @eclipsecon twitter id early in the process and provide most of the content.  Nathan Gervais is the web guy at the Eclipse Foundation.  He took my half-baked idea for the Birds Nest and got it up and running in about 48 hours. Finally, thanks to everyone for participating in the EclipseCon twitter community.

EclipseCon Video: Sun and Glassfish

Sun was a gold sponsor at EclipseCon.  As you can imagine we are thrilled to have Sun participate in the conference.  I had a chance to catch up with Arun Gupta, Glassfish evangelist and really nice guy.   Arun talked about Sun’s participation in EclipseCon, specifically their Eclipse plugins for Glassfish and JavaFX and the OpenSolaris support for Eclipse.

[video link]

btw, Sun had the best SWAG of the conference.  Very cool Glassfish beanies to take home for my kids.

EclipseCon Video: What is XText?

This year at EclipseCon I have heard a lot of people talk about XText.  Being the onsite reporter at EclipseCon, I caught up with Wolfgang Neuhaus from Itemis to ask him about Xtext, which turns out to be a toolkit for domain specific languages.

[video link]

Cloud Day at EclipseCon

Seems like today is going to be Cloud Day at EclipseCon.  The keynote, ‘Building Applications for the Cloud with Amazon‘ features Peter Vasholl from Amazon and Don MacAskill from SmugMug.

Amazon has also announced a new AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.  In addition Salesforce.com has announced a new release of the Eclipse based Force.com IDE and Aptana has announced new Java and Eclipse spport for their Cloud offereing.

Great to see these new releases and products being announced at EclipseCon.

Winners of the Eclipse Community Awards

Monday night we announced the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards.  Congratulation to all the finalist and all the winners.

I had a chance to interview some of the winners at EclipseCon.

Best RCP Commercial Application – Chord Scale Generator
[video link]

Best Commerical Developer Tool – WindowBuilder Pro

[video link]

Best Open Source Developer Tool – Acceleo

[video link]

Sun to Sponsor Twittervision at EclipseCon

Sun is now the proud sponsor of the Twitter-vision at EclipseCon.  This means EclipseCon attendees will get to see the live tweets right at the conference.

We are thrilled to have Sun’s participation in EclipseCon.  They are also a Gold sponsor and are sponsoring the Wednesday evening Poster Reception.  Sun is planning to show-off their Eclipse plugins for Glassfish and JavaFX plus Eclipse running on OpenSolaris.   Make sure you check them out at the conference and of course on twitter.

btw, today is the last day for advanced registrations at EclipseCon.

Twitter at EclipseCon

Twitter is the shiny new toy tool that everyone is talking about.  Twitter is a great tool for listening and interacting with a community, like the EclipseCon community.   To make it easier to find the twitter people at EclipseCon, we have created the EclipseCon Birds Nest. [1]

You can join the the Birds Nest by following @eclipsecon.  Then you can participate in four different ways:

1. As a speaker and add a url to your session.

2. As an exhibitor

3. As an attendee

4. As someone who wants to follow EclipseCon via twitter.

Note: It is important to include the hashtags that we have setup since that is how we parse the response.

During EclipseCon, you will be able to check the Birds Nest to find  attendee twitter ids, speaker ids and sessions.

At EclipseCon, we plan to have a big Twitter monitor in the lounge area.   People can watch real-time what people are saying about #eclipsecon on Twitter.     We will also make the same feed is available on the EclipseCon home page and of course anyone can use Twitter search yourself.   btw, if anyone company wants to sponsor the Twitter monitor let me or Donald know.  It will be great; trust me. 

Finally, we have the tweetup on Sunday night.  Let me know on twitter if you plan on coming.

Check out the Birds Nest.  Let us know what you think and how we can improve it.   Kudos to Nathan for putting it together over the last couple of days.

[1] Thanks to @bmuskalla for suggesting the name; of course provided via twitter.

Financial Services BOF at EclipseCon

The final countdown to EclipseCon, just one week away.  Luckily I don’t have a presentation to prepare but I am organizing an Eclipse in Financial Services BOF on Monday evening at 19:30.

The intent is to have an informal conversation with people in the financial industry that are using Eclipse and maybe explore how they can collaborate.  In attendence will be people from the new Eclipse Financial Platform project and someone from NatTable, a grid table widget, that is used by some of the banks that develop RCP applications.

Hope to see you there.

Countries Represented at EclipseCon

EclipseCon is just two weeks away.  Taking a look at the registration data shows  we will have a truly international conference.  So far 31 countries will be represented, including United States, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Russia, Brazil, China, Japan, Norway, Czech Republic, India, South Korea,  Belgium, Ireland, Netherlands, Finland, Israel, Turkey, Australia, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia.

See you in 2 weeks.

Eclipse and Open Source in the Real World

The best thing about the Eclipse Community Awards is discovering new and interesting ways Eclipse and  open source technology is being used to solve interesting real world problems.   For instance,

1. MAEviz is an open source project, from the Mid-America Earthquake Center, that performs seismic risk assessment and is used by the earthquake research community.  It provides the software to do “what if” models and risk reduction strategies to determine the best response to earthquakes. It is an Eclipse RCP application that can be extended to analyze bridges, pipelines, etc.

2. NeTS is a Track Management System that is used to plan the Swiss railway train schedule. It is being used to develop the 2010 rail schedule. NetCetera is the company that helped build NeTS and they have some nice demos of this RCP application.

and to prove Eclipse has an artistic side,

3. Chord Generator helps you play plucked and string instruments.  I am not a muscisian but this looks like a really cool RCP-based application.

Congratulations to all of the finalist for the Eclipse Community Awards, they are all great products.  The winners will be announced Monday, March 23 at EclipseCon.