Can’t Make It? Follow It

UPDATE Presentations from the 2009 Apartment Internet Marketing Conference are now posted.

The conference season is well underway and I, among many others, am not traveling frequently. Nevertheless, I am very interested in tracking the sessions at the ACI/American Comfort conference, the Apartment Internet Marketing Conference, and the American Planning Association’s National Conference.

Thanks to the hashtag (#) feature of Twitter, I can follow conversations, receive session highlights, and find blog posts that provide even greater detail. You don’t need a Twitter account, just visit search.twitter.com and type in the event name. A search will usually reveal the #hashtag being used for a particular event.

Once you know the #hashtag, you can type it in and pull up all posts (aka Tweets) related to that event. In this case, I’ve searched for #aci09, or the Affordable Comfort conference.

If you have a Twitter client for your desktop (such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, or others) you can usually search from within the client for events like the Apartment Internet Marketing conference.

Perhaps the greatest benefit is that by identifying attendees at conferences of interest, you can then follow them in Twitter, email them for additional information, or just call them up.