Twitter As a Practical Tool

Twitter may seem like a toy, but it can be used to accomplish practical business goals. Of course, it helps if the core element of a Twitter promotion is goofing off.

Client

Chicago Chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA)
Chicago IL
http://www.chicagoama.org

Note: as Vice President, Strategic Marketing (volunteer board role)

Description

Chicago AMA is the largest in the American Marketing Associations 70+ chapter network. Each year, the American Marketing Association hosts a Leadership Summit to train new and upcoming Chapter leaders. The President and President-elect from every Chapter flies in to Chicago, and often other officers from the Chapters come in as well. The full audience pushes about 400 attendees.

Problem Statement

Well … time to be honest. There wasn’t really a problem being solved here. Unless you count a mild case of boredom as a problem.

As with many conventions, the first night included a networking reception before the formal dinner and keynote address. Well, we were the Chicago delegation. The event was in Chicago. We figured we’d be good hosts, so we handed out some Xeroxed copies of some downtown hangout recommendations. It was nice, but a little boring.

This was back in 2009 when Twitter was still a fairly new thing. People had heard of it, but most people didn’t get it. That was doubly true in the marketing world. We were all reading about this amazing new tool. A few of us Tweeted. Very few had any practical idea of how Twitter could accomplish something useful.

Resources Available

We had Twitter.

We had mobile phones – most with text packages and some with Internet access. It was back in ancient times.

Finally, we had two people in on the conspiracy – me and the Chapter president.

Program

We were going to hijack the event.

The goal was to get as many of the attendees to a “secret” Chicago AMA hosted party that was downtown on Saturday night.

A few rules:

1. People had to get to the party through Twitter – and only Twitter.
2. This was a word-of-mouth program
3. No cheating. Only word-of-mouth. No grabbing a microphone during sessions.

That’s it. As many attendees as possible had to be convinced to go to the secret event, and only Twitter could get them there.

Chicago AMA was going to show them what Twitter could do. Or, we were going to flop down on our faces.

Execution

At the breakfast session the next morning, we got to work.

At the breakfast session we started telling people at the table.

“Chicago AMA is having a secret party downtown. To get there, you have to follow out hashtag on Twitter.”

In most cases, we got that polite, “yeah, whatever” look.

We were Tweeting madly during the day as well. By mid-morning we’d picked up on the hashtags that other attendees where using and started spreading the word there too.

By lunchtime, some of the people at our table had heard of what we were doing.

By early afternoon, some people were approaching us to tell us to follow the hashtag to get to the party.

By late afternoon, we were known as “Those Twitter guys” as we walked down the hall between sessions.

It was working. Word was spreading rapidly through the conference, and it had grown beyond our own efforts. Others, completely unconnected to our group, had joined the chorus on Twitter and were promoting the event. It was awesome.

Well, except for one detail. In all the excitement, we had neglected to figure out how we were going to use Twitter to get people to the secret party (which was at a since-closed wine bar where customers could make their own wine from scratch).

At 5 pm attendees were starting to ask where the party was on Twitter.

At 5:30 they were threatening to boycott if we didn’t start giving hints.

We came up with a game of follow the leader. As we made our way to the party we started dropping directions on the Twitter hashtag. Follow the leader and they were at the party.

 

Actual picture of a Chicago AMA board member

Results

Out of 400 attendees, we managed to get 35 to show up to the party. We were ecstatic!

With no pre-planning, just some creativity and grit, we had managed to get 10% of a conference to show up to a secret party.

The next day at the morning session, Chicago AMA was the talk of the convention. By pure coincidence one of the morning sessions was on social media, and the AMA leadership asked us to come up on stage and share the story.

Lessons Learned

Social media is a powerful tool. It didn’t require any pre-planning. It didn’t require a budget. It just needed some creativity, a sense of fun, and the right conditions.

In this case, the right conditions included a relatively small, closely engaged audience. Without this, Twitter is powerless.