This week's Bella Buzz podcast is focused on the topic of participating in regularly scheduled Twitter chats. Desiree Scales and Joe Magennis explore the finer points of locating chats, how to participate in a chat, and what the takeaway expectations might be.
The conversation kicks off with the exciting discovery that Desiree was hightlighted in an article at the Small Business Trends blog titled TweetChats - The Cool New Way to Network and Learn on Twitter. Desiree is prominently presented as participating in the SBBuzz conversation on March 24th.
Twitter Chats are a relatively new phenomenon where a group of individuals conduct a conversation on Twitter around a particular topic using a hashtag (#). For example, Desiree was exposed to the weekly #JournChat conversation by Rebekah Lovell from Renown Promotions. Each Monday evening the conversation revolves around journalism, blogging and public relations practices and strategies. There is an official web site that recaps the night's events and archives prior conversations at JournChat.info.
The chat for small and medium sized business owners is called SBBuzz or small business buzz, conducted every Tuesday evening from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm Eastern time. The archival web site is located at http://sbbuzz.biz.
It is recommended that the best way to follow these conversations is to use web applications developed to filter out all of the other twitter noise and let you focus on the hashtag. For example you can enter the hashtag phrase at the web site TwitterFall.com, or you can use Search.Twitter.com. What The Hashtag.org is a Wiki that is developing a resource about all of these developing chats. .. or simply use a desktop application like Tweetdeck that will allow for search columns isolating the topic.
For a business owner, there is actually an opportunity here to start your own Twitter Chat around a topic that you are interested in. It would be interesting to develop a niche conversation where your expertise could be demonstrated and a community grown. These conversations start out with small numbers of participants but with some consistency and diligence could grow out to something very meaningful.
While our conversation was wrapping up, the SBBuzz site sent out a tweet with a list of "power contributors" to the chat and Desiree was prominently posted on the list.
NOTES: It appears that the integration of the Bella Buzz podcast into the RSS feed may have knocked some people off of the subscription list, so if it doesn't appear you are getting new updates please re-subscribe through your favorite RSS reader. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Also .. The iTunes store has accepted the podcast feed!! So you can subscribe via iTunes at The Bella Buzz
FINAL NOTE: School vacation is upon us next week, so we will be taking a one-week hiatus and return for the next edition of The Bella Buzz on April 13th.
