Schedule

8:30am – 8:55am

Business Twitter Basics: Growing Your Followers and Beyond

What good is Twitter for your business? How can you use Twitter to fulfill your marketing or customer support needs? Sure, Comcast is using it, and you know that Google and Microsoft are doing something with Twitter and search, but what does that mean for you?

In this breakfast session, Jason Preston will talk about the basic uses of Twitter, how your business—large or small—can step into the social media space, and what kinds of lingo you’ll need to know to hang with the best of the twitterati.

Retweets and Twitter lists * Basic Twitter client use * Why should businesses be using Twitter? * Support and Marketing via Twitter * Growing your followers

9:00am – 10:00am

Keynote Address: A Conversation With Ben Parr

Ben Parr has been closely tracking the world of social media for years and his writings for Mashable have covered all the relevant platforms that define what is called the Real-Time Web.

In this casual “fireside chat” interview, Ben will discuss the arena that the Twitter service lives/works/competes in, and what opportunities and threats Twitter and the other major services face over the next few years.

Some of the points he will touch on include:

The importance of the application ecosystem and robust APIs * Twitter vs Facebook vs Buzz: Strengths, weaknesses, and how users can take best advantage of all three platforms * The tools and services he uses, and why * Twitter and the future: IPO? Acquisition? Or…?

10:15am – 11:20am

March Microfinance Madness: The Vittana Education Challenge

What if you knew in the 4th grade you’d never go to college or do anything beyond high school? In most developing countries, student loans just don’t exist. Even if you have the best grades in your school or already been accepted to the best law school in the country, if you don’t have the money, you just can’t go.

Kushal will talk about how the Vittana community is changing this for the first time. Vittana has built some of the first student loan programs in developing countries and lenders from 19 countries have funded over $100,000 in loans to nearly 200 students across the world.

10:20am – 11:15am

Mining and Monitoring Twitter

It’s easy to perform a simple search on Twitter.com, but basic monitoring is only the beginning of what a business can do with the data generated on Twitter’s platform. Understanding what fields are provided by the Twitter API and how they can be manipulated to provide demographic information, product research, or competitive intelligence is essential to bridging the gap between research and revenue.

Steve Broback will share the details of how the Parnassus Group extracts and distills valuable, actionable information from the social data generated by millions of users posting to Twitter every day.

Basic monitoring tools * Rules of using the Twitter API * Interpreting the data that Twitter Provides

11:30am – 12:30pm

Scaling and Securing Your Brand on Twitter

When you’re a small company, using Twitter can seem like a real no-brainer: grab your brand name account, talk about what you’re doing, interact with the crowd. Large brands face a whole different world on Twitter as they seek to deal with location (do you have multiple stores or offices?), scale (how many people can you respond to, and what tools do you use to do so?), and security (how can a brand protect their users and themselves?).

Our panelists will discuss the hurdles facing large brands as they work to engage their audience and customers on Twitter.

Responding effectively to large audiences * Common pitfalls in security

12:30pm – 1:45pm

Lunch Topic Tables

Lunch plus discussion equals win.

@nansen – “Political Influence” with Twitter

@wandia_info – Using Twitter to Transition to Mobile Monetization

@ProfJonathan – Real World Twitter Law

@tap11 – Twitter Business Analytics: How Brands and Marketing Agencies use Analytics to monitor, grow, and engage their Twitter audience.

@andruedwards – The New Way to do PR & Marketing To Bloggers

@thinkmaya – Social Media 301

@Yush – How to Make Money on Twitter

1:45pm – 2:30pm

The Media Panel: Social Media Stories from the Front Lines

Learn about how innovative local media organizations are using Twitter and other social tools in their work.

2:35pm – 3:00pm

Afternoon Keynote: Twitter – Past, Present, and Future

To visualize the future of Twitter, one need only examine the lessons of history. A part of its inception, Dom Sagolla tells the story of Twitter’s humble beginnings and the lessons learned along the way.

A compelling vision for the future of short messaging concludes this talk, influenced by experience traveling across the US and abroad in recent months in support of Dom’s book “140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form.”

Why is Twitter a social phenomenon? * How did Twitter get started? * What kinds of behavior does Twitter encourage? * Where Twitter and other social technologies are headed

3:15pm – 3:25pm

Unlocking the Power of Twitter Lists

Twitter’s latest major feature push–Lists–brought a whole new social dynamic to Twitter. Lists allow people to build out subsections of their followings, keep tabs on topic verticals, publicize a set of personalities, and a million other things.

Does it destroy the meaning of a “follow”? Would Twitter survive competition without Lists? How can Lists help you and your business?

3:25pm – 4:15pm

Turning Keystrokes into Cash: How to be a Business-Savvy Developer

Writing code comes naturally to Seattle. This city has become a hotbed of Twitter development over the past year, giving birth to some of the earliest and most pervasive Twitter applications, including Twibes, TweetStats, TweepSearch, and Hotwall.

In this session, successful developers Damon Cortesi, Adam Loving, and Loren West will share the business tricks they have learned from turning their coding skills into small business success stories.

Building a business plan * What kinds of advertising work? * Do you need legal documents or licensing? * How to find good partnerships * What platform do you build on?

4:30pm – 5:30pm

License to Tweet: Applications and Services To Die For

Twitter is more than just 140 characters. Twitter is a platform that grows more powerful every day, as developers, entrepreneurs, and people with too much time on their hands create thousands of tools and services that do everything from sending direct messages to tweeting on behalf of your houseplants.

This panel of Twitter elites will share their favorite Twitter applications and services, and how these apps help them draw value from the Stream.

Managing the Twitter Stream * Top Twitter Applications and Services * Applying Twitter to the Real World * What Apps Do You Wish Someone Would Build?