West
Phoenix CVB Uses Twitter Hashtags to Entertain, Inform Meeting Attendees
By Matt Alderton
October 11, 2011
When they attend meetings in Phoenix, convention-goers have a new tool to help them explore the city during downtime: The Greater Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau is using dedicated conference hashtags to communicate with meeting attendees via Twitter, it announced last week.
Using its own Twitter handle, the Greater Phoenix CVB broadcasts messages to attendees who are "following" their conference on Twitter.
For example, the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration held its annual meeting in Phoenix Sept. 10-13, 2011. That meeting had its own Twitter hashtag — #ASHHRA — so that attendees could subscribe to conference news and updates via the popular social network. During the conference, Nina Simmons, online marketing manager at the Greater Phoenix CVB, authored tweets to notify attendees about local events, deals and destinations.
Read one such tweet, notifying attendees about local happy hours: "#ASHHRA Attendees: Ideas for your free time tonight—@districtkitchen has a great HH 3-7p, @cibopizzeria (603 N. 5th Ave.) for fab pizza."
"By communicating with meeting attendees through their conference hashtag, we act as a real-time concierge," said Simmons, who co-founded CenPho.com, a web portal dedicated to ultra-local living in Central Phoenix, before joining the CVB in May. "We deliver the resources they need to navigate our city directly to their fingertips, then we give them the ability to engage us in a digital dialogue."
Founded in 2006, Twitter claims to have 175 million registered users. The social media tool features networks of people, called "followers," who sign up to receive one another's posts, called "tweets," which are short messages that are limited in length to 140 characters. Added to a tweet, a "hashtag" — the "#" symbol followed by a descriptive word or word string — gives the message context and groups it among subjects of similar interest. For example, Twitter users writing about the Super Bowl might affix the hashtag "#superbowl" to their tweets, thereby integrating their comment into a stream of Super Bowl-related tweets that carry the same hashtag, allowing other Twitter users who are interested in the Super Bowl to type "#superbowl" into a search field and view tweets about the game.
"Conventions, conferences and trade shows rely on Twitter's hashtag system more than almost any other entities," the Greater Phoenix CVB explained in a statement. "Meetings and event organizers use hashtags to deliver information to attendees, and to facilitate communication between them. Hashtags can help attendees track conversations about a keynote speaker or find a post-event social gathering. Many conventions post their official hashtags on monitors inside meeting venues, and others list hashtags on special web pages created to inform event attendees about the social-media resources at their disposal."
Meeting planners and attendees can follow the Greater Phoenix CVB using its dedicated Twitter handle,
@visitphoenix.