Posts tagged TweetUp
Live From the Launch Pad: Lessons Learned From the Shuttle Tweetup
Jul 20th
Spend your own money to travel to Florida during its least pleasant season, bum a ride to a rented house split with strangers, and wake up on a couch before dawn multiple days in a row. That’s no vacation – unless NASA requests your company.
The space agency invited a selection of its Twitter followers to the last five shuttle launches, including the July 8 liftoff of Atlantis, the last of the shuttle program. (I attended the Tweetup held in April and May for the final launch of Endeavour, then returned this month with a press pass.) Some 700 people have now traveled to its launch Tweetups, while hundreds more have attended shorter gatherings at its centers.
Sponsor
NASA first regarded Tweetups as an experiment, but they’ve become a key part of how it tells its story.
If NASA makes Tweetups look easy, that’s only because of mid-course corrections in response to lessons learned. Anybody planning for one of these Take Your Fans To Work Days would do well to pay attention – especially if they don’t have a spaceship to launch for the occasion.
Rob Pegoraro worked for more than a decade covering technology for the Washington Post. His blog can be found here and Twitter here.
- Talk to people before you invite them into your house. By the time NASA invited followers to visit its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in January of 2009, it had not only established an active Twitter presence, it had set up blogs for many of its personnel and even some of its spacecraft. Tweeps knew they could expect a conversation, not a lecture.
- Prepare for a crowd. “I was shocked people would fly across the country for a 2-hr event at NASA Headquarters,” emailed Stephanie Schierholz, the agency’s social-media manager. Its first-come-first-served approach for its initial shuttle-launch Tweetup in late 2009 had to be replaced by a random drawing (after screening out inert or abusive users) as the number of people applying soared, exceeding 4,100 for Endeavour’s last launch and 5,500 for Atlantis’s finale.
But NASA also sets aside guest spots – a good way to bring in people with oversized audiences and to reward fans who contribute extensively to its online community, if fodder for rare resentment over who gets this special nod. Compulsive tech blogger Robert Scoble made the cut in July this way; so did San Antonio Web designer Shannon Moore, who went to the first launch Tweetup and earned a sort of den-mother status by constantly sharing and curating other attendees’ tips and recaps.
- The conversation will go on and on. At both launches I witnessed, NASA’s program – talks by astronauts, managers and researchers; visits to the 526-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building and Pad 39A the day before launch; the exhilarating sight and sound of liftoff itself – fed into thousands of tweets. But the chatter spilled into private Facebook groups, Flickr albums, Google+ updates, Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins and such specialized applications as Storify, Scoop.it, and Beluga, making these Tweetups a generalized social-media hothouse. Among Schierholz’s suggestions to those considering hosting a Tweetup: “You have to ensure you don’t have any restrictions on what they can tweet or share (whether because of lack of bandwidth or because you don’t want a picture getting out).”
- A small, focused online community expands people’s trust. By the third launch Tweetup, travelers opted to share vacation homes instead of pricey hotel rooms near KSC – trusting that strangers would PayPal their share in advance. They did. And after a series of mechanical problems delayed Discovery’s final flight for 111 days, attendees had grown comfortable with a gift-economy approach to travel; Danielle Signor recalled that she “basically relied on others to get me to and from the airport.”
None of the four attendees of that Tweetup I reached recalled any hangups worse than minor personality conflicts. I had zero issues in the rented homes I crashed at during April and July (nicknamed “Skylab House” and “Serenity House,” in honor of NASA history and science fiction). In July, I didn’t even rent a car, trusting that the Tweetup hive mind would cover that if I paid for gas, tolls and an occasional meal. It did.
- People will find ways to extend the experience. A launch Tweetup promotes the same sort of accelerated socialization as the first week of freshman year in college, so I was not surprised to see people organize a packed party a day after Atlantis’s launch – “Endless BBQ” – that featured two kegs but also webcams streaming the festivities and a telescope parked in the driveway. Another independently organized gathering happened the day afterwards: a trip to Port Canaveral to watch one of Atlantis’s solid rocket boosters get towed in. And it’s assured that when a NASA 747 ferries Discovery to the Air and Space Museum’s Dulles International Airport annex in 2012, space Tweeps will gather there for her arrival.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
TweetUp, Now PostUp; Name Change Reflects Expansion into Facebook and LinkedIn
Aug 30th
Search engine meets advertising platform start-up, TweetUp, will now be known as PostUp, according to an article by Business Wire. Why, you may ask? Well because not only is it going to continue to be used in the same way it always has been, but now it will expand to include Facebook and LinkedIn.
When it originally launched in April, TweetUp was created to make it easier for users to locate noteworthy posts by other Twitter users that were relevant to their business or needs. Using an algorithm that calculates results by taking into account relevance, quality, and tweet and tweeter influence, the site then displays search results in ranked order. Combined with the ability of users to bid on specific keywords so that their results will be displayed on the top of results, PostUp utilizes paid advertising in much the same way as Google’s Adsense and Overture (which coincidentally enough used to be Goto.com – the company that revolutionized the business of monetizing search engine traffic past normal ads – which was started by PostUp CEO Bill Gross) for Yahoo.
Gross stated that there are over 12,000 tweeters that have registered over 200,000 keywords to date. With this expansion it allows users a broader range of search results from various social networking platforms, thus enabling companies to target followers who might be partial to one page or another all at the same time.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
TweetUp, Now PostUp; Name Change Reflects Expansion into Facebook and LinkedIn
View full post on Search Engine Journal
