ILTA2011 in the Social Sphere

14
Sep
2011

Natalie Huha

It’s been almost a month since the infamous ILTA 2011 Conference took place at the lovely Nashville Gaylord Hotel.  The conference, if you haven’t heard by now, was jammed packed with great sessions, information, speakers, colleagues, food and vendor entertainment!  It was definitely THE CONFERENCE to be attending.

This year however, ILTA traveled into the social sphere a bit deeper than last year.  The dedicated hashtag for the conference in the Twitterverse was #ILTA11, although #ILTA was very popular too.  ILTA set it up so that each live onsite session had its own dedicated hashtag on Twitter.

For example the session which I was lucky enough to contribute as a speaker (along with several colleagues, one of them being Bill Caraher @williamcaraher) was on the topic Attorney’s and Social Media: What They Need to Know hashtagged with #INFO13.  Anyone attending the live sessions or those attending virtually could learn from the speakers and the audience tweets, truly allowing for “international” presence and knowledge sharing.

So, why is this a good thing? Isn’t this more work or things to remember? Well, it actually depends on your viewpoint, but since I’m a social media evangelist, I’ll focus on the pros.

Social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and now Google+ (along with blogging of course) allow the information to transcend across all borders.  Since ILTA was only able to dedicate 60-75 minutes per session, only so much information could be shared during that timeframe by the live speakers.  However, because of the social channels, much more information, tips, links to stats and so forth could be shared.  The information then became instantly available to anyone and searchable by the dedicated hashtag for the sessions.

For me personally, when I attend a conference, I tweet tips shared from the panelists and speakers.  These tweets then become my notes afterwards so I can remember what items I need to follow-up and convert into action items.  In addition, where can you do all this tweeting? On your mobile device of course, be it an iPad, iPhone, Droid or other.  ILTA has a very fancy mobile app and conference site that also listed the Twitter feed, so if you weren’t lucky enough to have a smartphone, you could still see them from your laptop.

With the help of Hashtracking.com, they set up an account for me to be able to track and report on the ILTA 11 conference hashtags.  Some of the stats for the information shared that week were quite impressive: over 7000 tweets, over 800 contributors and millions of impressions.  Hashtracking again provided the raw data for a transcript that’s now compiled nicely in a searchable format.  If you would like a copy of the full transcript of the conference tweets, please click here to access the download.

If you’re skeptical, have no Twitter account, or created an account and don’t use it, take a search around Twitter on a hashtag, start with #ILTA or #ILTA11 or another popular legal hashtag such as #legalchat or #legalit. You’ll be surprised how much good relevant information is shared, and it’s all free.

If you’d like to join a chat or follow a hashtag, there are many programs, but my favorites are HootSuite and Tweetchat.  Below is a quick video created with my colleague Samantha Collier @samtaracollier on how to attend a tweetchat around a particular hashtag.  So, for your next conference, be sure ask them, will these sessions be hashtagged?