Twitter Use at #STC11 Summit

Last year, I kicked off this blog by posting about Twitter Use at the #STC10 Summit in Dallas. I thought it would be interesting to look at Twitter use at #STC11 as well.

Methodology

I’ve only analyzed results from May 13-21, 2011. However, use of the #STC11 hashtag occurred for months preceding this year’s Summit conference. (This is a departure from last year, when the use of tweets with the #STC10 hashtag started much later.) Because my Google RSS feed for #stc11 was unable to handle the volume of tweets this year, I relied on three sources for this post:

• Karen Mardahl’s Archive of #stc11
• Rick Sapir’s TwapperKeeper feeds from 5/16-5/18
• The CoveritLive feed at http://summit.stc.org

Graphical Portrayals of #STC11 Information

Here’s a Wordle of the tweets containing the hashtag #stc11 from 5/13 through 5/21/11. If you’re unfamiliar with Wordle, it produces a wordcloud where the frequency of word usage determines the size of the words in the graphic.

Karen Mardahl*(@kmdk) began curating the #STC11 tweets in late April. The two graphics and lists below are taken from her archive.

#STC11 Tweets by User (from Karen Mardahl)

Top Twelve Twitter Handles (% Total Tweets)

1. 9.55 % by torridence (Roger R.)
2. 8.23% by techcom (Tony Chung)
3. 7.88% by sushiblu (Jamie Gillenwater)
4. 7.77% by bwoelk (Ben Woelk)
5. 5.28% bytechcommdood (Bill Swallow)
6. 4.89% by mojoguzzi (Joe Sokohl)
7. 4.5% by rjhoughton (Rachel Houghton)
8. 4.47% by stc_rochester (STC Rochester)
9. 4.43% by RayGallon (Ray Gallon)
10. 4.31% by willsansbury (Will Sansbury)
11. 4.31% by afox98 (Alyssa Fox)
12. 3.42% by ninjawritermama (Sarah Baca)

Selected Keywords (Occurrences)

Most Commonly Used Words (from Karen Mardahl)

1. STCorg
2. Techcomm
3. STC11LD
4. STC
5. Summit
6. &
7. Session
8. Content
9. I’m
10. Thanks

Observations

Again, contrary to some expectations, “beer” was not the most commonly used word in the tweets appearing only 13 times. (This was the same number of occurences as #stc10, but a much lower frequency.)

I’m not sure if there’s any correlation, but “karaoke” also appeared 14 times. The last two years have seen almost equal occurrences of beer and karaoke. Coincidence? I don’t think so!

Conclusions

Just like last year, Twitter provided a sense of community and a “conference within a conference.” Most tweets were positive, implying that many of the Twitter users enjoyed the conference.

I spent much of the conference meeting F2F with Tweeps gained from #stc10. If you’re not using Twitter at conference, I urge you to do so. You’ll find that it will create a new sense of comraderie with other Tweeters, and besides, that’s where all of the really cool STC people hang out!

I’ve curated the tweets into a 341-page MSWord document. This “raw” data is available upon request.

What are your thoughts and observations?

Ben

Postscript (5/28/11)

Vanessa Wilburn put together a more detailed analysis of the Twitter usage at #STC10. Her work focuses on the subject matter of the tweets. She found that after removing the “chitchat,” the twitter streams paralleled the key topics of the conference and that many of the tweets relayed content from or observations about specific sessions.

Communications Liftoff! Rocketing Your Community to the Stars

Society for Technical Communication Summit Conference Leadership Day Presentation, May 15, 2011

Join the discussion on MySTC at http://ow.ly/51WfG

Communications liftoff! rocketing your community v3

View more presentations from Ben Woelk

Private Information and Portable Devices

Image via Wikipedia

Today, I had the privilege of being interviewed by our local YNN cable news about the challenges presented by placing private information on portable devices. A surgeon at the University of Rochester Medical Center had lost a flash drive containing the medical details of around 800 of his patients. The reporter, Anne Lithiluxa, asked me how loss of data could be prevented.

Generally, if you’re going to place private information on a portable device, either the device or the information needs to be encrypted The likelihood of exposure of private information through the loss of portable devices has increased tremendously lately due to the proliferation of smartphones and their use in accessing corporate email accounts. Good information security practice is always a combination of safe handling practices and technical protections.

However, the bottom line is that people are always the weakest link. Technical protections can always be defeated by poor practices.

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Writing the Next Chapter

Change is necessary but change is uncomfortable.

We should ignore the past. We should value the past. We should just do it. We should learn from past efforts. Do we dash forward, make our mistakes and sort things out as we go? Do we assess the path forward and move carefully down it? How strong should our sense of urgency be? How fast can and should we move forward? How do we mold individual desires into a shared vision?

We need to attract new members. We want to retain existing members. We have many senior members who have contributed faithfully to STC Rochester. We have new members who may not know our past but who are willing to pour themselves into redefining our organization and positioning ourselves for the future.

These are some of the issues we face as the council charged with stewarding the Rochester Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. We are a chapter with a long history of excellence. It’s time to write the next chapter.

I’m trying to find a path that allows us to retain the  distinctiveness of what has made us STC Rochester while moving to a model that is sustainable and will foster growth. Part of this path forward includes implementing a marketing strategy. We’ve received our marketing plan from Neil Hair’s RIT Marketing Concepts class. The plan identifies key opportunities and strategies for growth. We’ve set up a subgroup to study the plan and bring forward recommendations to our October council meeting.

Our kickoff meeting is September 21st. We’re inviting prospective members and want to be sure we can articulate why they should join STC. There is a good bit of angst surrounding this.

We need to remember to have fun.

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Value Proposition or Vision Statement?

Our STC Rochester Council is working with Neil Hair‘s Marketing Concepts class at the Rochester Institute of Technology to develop a marketing strategy as we seek to redefine our value proposition as an STC chapter. Some members of the council had a status meeting with the Marketing Concepts class team earlier this week. The team is analyzing similar organizations in our area (ASTD, ISPI, IEEE, etc.) to determine how we compare on key activities and services.

The Marketing Concepts team’s initial slide was:

Value proposition

STC is the best network for excellence in technical communications

In our discussion at council and in following correspondence, we’ve had an extended discussion of what constitutes a Value Proposition. Although there’s been some confusion, including “what is networking,” I think we’ve decided that this is more of a Vision Statement than a Value Proposition.

Value propositions can be expressed in different ways. One way of looking at them is

Value = Benefits – Cost

When STC raised its dues for 2010 to $240 per year for International +  Chapter membership, membership renewals plummeted.  For many of the members, the perceived Benefits were outweighed by the Cost.

According to Rackham (stolen from wikipedia), a Value Proposition should include the following:

• Capability – what it is you do and how you do it
• Impact – what benefits or difference your capability will make
• Proof – what evidence substantiates your impact
• Cost – the cost (or risk) of your capability and impact

If our Value Proposition includes these elements, it’s obviously a bit more complicated. We would have different value propositions for members, employers in our community, etc.

What about Personas?

Usability practitioners use Personas to help programmers visualize the different users of the software they’re creating.  A Persona is a fictional person whose “attributes” are based on different types of users and the business processes for which they might use the software. (This is obviously highly simplified.)

Could we use the concept of a Persona to help develop and articulate value propositions? Would it make sense to start with testimonials of specific members? Can I articulate the Value Proposition of STC Rochester for myself?

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