Our Twitcast.. Using Twitter to Write “Twitter Handbook”

Hundreds of tweets last night contributed to our first Twitcast and a whole lot of information for our book.

Thanks to all who followed and contributed.

Lessons learned.

1. Don’t expect anything social to go as planned.
2. The people rule and they don’t follow rules
3. People do want some guidance
4. Don’t count on technology, count on people

@CoachDeb and I spent only a few minutes deciding how to hold a TwitCast. We announced it for a start time of 7pm Eastern. Then, a few hours before, we postponed it to 7:30.

I got before 7 and had a few tweeps begging to begin. They were expecting something, but the “start” we had planned needed both of us. I handled it with twitter rules (“anything goes”) and posted a couple of ideas, links to hte blog post here where we wanted comments to be used as Twinterview for the book and answer questions.

@CoachDeb showed up and started posting about “getting started” while we figured out that twitter wasn’t responding near fast enough for her and I to go back and forth as fast as we do on chat. About then, I started getting questions about whether tweeps should post on twitter, the blog or both.. my answer “whatever you want”

I really thought it was dying down and posted instructions to read the feed using hashtags. That worked great except we soon discovered that the services for searching and compiling all follow a blacklist that has me banned (I follow too many people they say).

Once I figured this out, I stopped posting a lot of content and concentrated on replies. I couldn’t reply to as many as I would like, it would have totally been overkill for readers of my feed.

The messages went on for hours.. many times what we expected. Thanks again for all the great input.

Next time we do a TwitCast, we’ll be focusing on a more specific content, deciding in advance about the hashtag (or something else if the serivces don’t wise up how they are censoring users) and will try to give more advance notice.

All in all, a wonderful success. @AdamDesAutels was even more excited than usual in this video