Twitter Use at #STC12 Summit

Twitter Use at #STC12 Summit

For the two year anniversary of this blog, we’ll review Twitter use at the STC Summit conference. Twitter use among attendees continues to grow dramatically. Although this post only looks at tweets during the dates of the Summit (May 19-24), use of the #stc12 hashtag began months before the conference and continues today.

Methodology

Unlike previous years where I put a great deal of manual effort into compiling the tweets by pulling from my #stc10 and #stc11 RSS feed, this year I’ve relied on the suggestions and work of colleagues Kevin Cuddihy of STC and Karen Mardahl. Thanks also to Rick Sapir for his suggestion to use twdocs.com to collect the tweets.

Graphical Portrayals of #STC12 Information

Kevin Cuddihy published a Wordle of the most commonly used tweets at the conference in his Summit Blog post. Here’s the Wordle he compiled:

As Kevin has noted, you can see that a good amount of the Wordle is composed of usernames.

Karen Mardahl (@kmdk) uses The Archivist to compile an analysis of the tweets. The two graphics and lists below are taken from her archive.

Top Twelve Twitter Handles (% Total Tweets)

1. 10.68% by arnoldburian (Arnold Burian)
2. 7.45% AndreaJWenger (Andrea Wenger)
3. 6.12% dccd (David Caruso)
4. 5.67% rjhoughton (Rachel Houghton)
5. 5.54% seanb_us (Sean Bean)
6. 5.19% viqui_dill (Viqui Dill)
7. 4.39% ninjawritermama (Sarah Baca)
8. 4.08% phylisebanner (Phylise Banner)
9. 4.03% ricksapir (Rick Sapir)
10. 3.99% benwoelk (Ben Woelk)
11. 3.95% Paul_UserAid (Paul Mueller)
12. 3.90% MKGee (MaryKay Greuneberg)

Selected Key Words (occurrences)

1. STC12
2. Techcomm
3. Content
4. Summit
5. @AMP;
6. Thanks
7. STC
8. Session
9. Chicago
10. STCorg
11. Need
12. It’s

Observations

This year saw a number of new people “leading the way” with tweets. (Some of the usual suspects were quite busy behind the scenes, contributing to their drop in tweets. Of course, it’s also possible they were doing F2F networking!)

The week previous to #STC12, I attended the EDUCAUSE Security Professionals Conference (#sec12). The tweets at #stc12 far outnumbered those at #sec12. In my experience, security professionals are reticent about using social media. That may have been a factor in the difference.

If any of you are interested in doing a more thorough analysis of Twitter use at #stc12, let me know and I’ll send you Kevin’s document containing more than 500 pages and 87K words!

Let’s hear from you!

Did you tweet during Summit? How long have you been tweeting? What do you tweet about? Do you tweet more during conferences?

Related articles

• The Summit’s Cover It Live
• STC Summit 2012 wrapup – STC12 (ffeathers.wordpress.com)
• STC Summit day 3 – Lightning talks (ffeathers.wordpress.com)
• STC Annual Conference, May 20-23, 2012 (ttustc.wordpress.com)
• Rochester Chapter Members Presenting at Summit 2012 (stc-rochester.org)
• See you at STC Summit 2012 (ffeathers.wordpress.com)