My Experience Working A Live Twitter Event

I did my first live Twitter event this past Wednesday. It was for the book launch of Denise Spatafora's "Better Birth: The Ultimate Guide To Childbirth From Home Birth To Hospitals." Me and Denise did a "dry run" on a "tweet-up" a couple of weeks before that, but that was just us and two laptops in her apartment. This, on the other hand, was a huge gala party at Donna Karan's Urban Zen headquarters. You know: waterfalls, on-site massage therapy, bourbon & sweet potato-favored ice-cream, and tons of awesome people.

To be honest, I was a bit petrified when I first got there and found out that not only would I be moderating the live tweets – but I'd be conducting a steady stream of off-the-cuff interviews to fill up time for their live Ustream video feed. Basically, I was going to be on-camera, live, a lot.

But I quickly got into the swing of things, and the experience was very fun. Plus: I learned a bunch about the "next step" in social media: the live Twitter/video streaming event.

One of the first things I learned is: you need one person focused on nothing but the tweets & streaming chat. I was initially dividing my time between the interviews & the social media, and it just didn't work.

Users can get impatient with unaddressed tweets & posts – and also with too much "dead air" or gaps between conversation. What you are really looking for in a good live Twitter event moderator is somebody who has the play-by-play twittering skill of a Howard Cosell, and the care and conscientiousness of a best friend.

But there were such great moments at the book launch when the social media really meshed, when we were getting live tweets from attendees and announcing our Twitter contest winners on a live video stream. When text and video and real-time meshed, it meshed BIG.

Looking forward to the next one! :-)

you can follow Better Birth on Twitter here!