If a tree falls in a forest and no one Tweets it, did it happen?

In hindsight, my colleague @benmnorth saved our face at Unica’s annual customer conference, “MIS”, which was held in Paris last week.

Ben’s leadership aligned us behind a common hash tag (#unicamis) for the conference. A big screen station running TweetDeck was set up in the coffee break area. And, thanks for these, the conference “was tweeted”.

Now, I had admitted my own difficulty with saying anything useful in 140 characters earlier. And, I don’t know how much the marketing professionals in attendance gained from the tweets.

But the following small anecdote opened my eyes a bit.

A little Twitter success story

The closing keynote was by Forrester’s Christine Overby. She had many great comments during her presentation including the following that was irresistible to tweet:

“customer intelligence to become the molten core of marketing“.

So, this became my one “good tweed” done for the conference.

Next day, I am on the phone with Forrester’s John Lovett in far away New England to learn more about his upcoming webcast in regards to next generation web analytics.

And to my surprise …

He had already picked up his colleague’s quote from Twitter and found it to be a good fit to underline one of his points in his slides. Meanwhile, other industry observers from Boston to Singapore re-tweeted the quote as well.

From one person’s mouth to the twitterverse and back into the real world.

The moral

Of interest was not only the viral effect here.

But being that the re-tweeters were often industry influencers (e.g. analysts) themselves, this was just a small reminder that social media are no longer really a choice but a necessity.

In this case, tweets have become a metric for engagement.

Like all engagement metrics, volume and content of tweets are not a perfect measure.

But if there hadn’t been any tweets, worldwide industry observers would be excused to wonder whether the conference was not worth a Tweet, or attendees weren’t up to the Twitter.

When in fact, attendance was up 50% over last year, and many of the cutting edge customer presentations on online and offline integration had me sitting on the edge of my seat.

So, tweet it, just tweet it.

Thank you Ben!