The Best Hour of Your Week #awcchat on Twitter

By Sheila Scarborough

We’ve all been there – the membership renewal notice comes in for AWC (or any association) and our hand hovers over the credit card or checkbook, thinking, “Is this REALLY worth my money?”

In today’s world of free, easy-to-use networking tools with worldwide reach, associations must prove their value over and over to members.  I was acutely conscious of this when I joined the AWC National Board of Directors in fall 2011;  I asked the Board to let me see how we could use social media tools to foster a better, more valued sense of AWC community at the national level.

One of the things I really wanted to do was to start an #awcchat on Twitter.

Those of you who know me, know that I’m a big fan of Twitter, where I’ve been @SheilaS  since September 2007. It’s one of the most powerful professional development tools I’ve ever encountered, particularly because of the regularly scheduled Twitter chats on many different topics. For my own business, #tourismchat is invaluable. For farmers, ranchers and rural people, it’s #agchat. For bloggers it’s #blogchat. And so on….

I wanted a place to discuss communications issues, and I wanted it to involve not only AWC chapters and members, but anyone who wanted to participate. By making it an open chat, it could not only nurture the current AWC community, but also draw new members and make people more aware of us.

The Board agreed, so I canvassed the people I know who run chats, got some advice and set up an @AWCchat Twitter account as a first step. I chose a chat day and time that was good for me, since I was the host and have other commitments to juggle. I picked 3 different days and times that I could handle with my current schedule, then took a poll on the AWC Facebook Page for the final decision: 1130 am – 1230 pm CST on Thursdays.

We needed a “home base” for chat information and updates, but rather than a Facebook Page (which some other chats use) I preferred a blog. Hey, I’m a blogger; of course that’s what I like!

I set up a free WordPress.com blog where I write up the monthly chat schedules and weekly summaries. At some point I expect the blog to be incorporated into the main AWC website, and it will be easier to move since it’s WordPress.  To collect all the tweets from each chat, I use Chirpstory because that’s what I’m used to with #tourismchat.

Since the first #awcchat on December 8, 2011 we’ve discussed a wide variety of topics including mobile communications, office/email organization, getting gigs as a paid speaker, social media ROI, resumes/CVs and mentorship.

Topic ideas come from other board members, chat participants and my brain. I try not to overdo it with social communications (my personal area of expertise) which means that for many chats, I really don’t have deep knowledge of the topic. It’s rather scary sometimes – knowing that people are going to show up expecting answers – but the chat participants always save me. They are so smart, and full of ideas.

We’ve had one guest host already (Glenda Watson Hyatt on web accessibility) and will have more in the future.  I look for the best fit in a host, not whether they’re an AWC member, although that’s a bonus.

Twice now, I’ve had to run the chat from my phone in some parking spot off of I-35, because the chat time fell during the time that I was driving to northern Texas for something. It’s not a big deal, but the tiny phone keyboard and wildly varying data rates in different towns makes it interesting.

One thing is indispensable in running the chat: the ability to pre-post tweets so that they go out automatically at certain times. I use TweetDeck for this, so that my discussion questions (usually four of them at 11:35, 11:50, 12:05 and 12:20) and resource links go out at set times, and I can concentrate on facilitating the discussion as it happens.

I will not tell you how many times I’ve frantically thought of questions or found resources, and gotten the tweet set up 2 minutes before it needed to go out. 🙂

The @AWCchat Twitter account has about 700 followers now, and our chat’s impact as roughly measured by TweetReach is decent: between 20-30,000 people per chat.
Please join us anytime, even if you have never seen a chat or don’t have a Twitter account. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in #awcchat – you’ll see what we’re talking about. You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn in a single fast-moving hour!

Sheila Scarborough is a writer, speaker and trainer specializing in tourism, travel and social media. Along with Becky McCray, she co-founded Tourism Currents in 2009, to provide online training in social media for destination marketing. She’s on the AWC National Board of Directors, the National Tech in Communications Committee and is the incoming Chair of Freelance Austin.  She blogs at Sheila’s Guide [ http://www.sheilasguide.com ] which was a 2011 Clarion Award winner for online media.

Photo uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons.