Twittering About DAC
I wasn't able to keep up with the "#47DAC" tweets while at the recent Design Automation Conference, and read through them all this past weekend. I made a list of 120 people who tweeted about it, mostly not counting people who merely retweeted:
My main conclusion is that people used Twitter well. Compared to last year's DAC, there were few outright pitches ("read my news" or "come see my demo") and more of the helpful, conversational posts social mediaists aspire to.
Some casual observations:
- A lot of people/companies seemed to have opened their Twitter account just before DAC (or just started using it then). Some used it well, others had just one lone tweet. Maybe they had good intentions, but got caught up, like this guy:
@Jmastroianni: Too busy to tweet. Overwhelmed with number and scope of engagements. New energy in #EDA. Love this industry. #EDA is, man! <-
- Cadence dominated in company-related tweets, with their active EDA360 campaign. They seem to have a lot of PR people. Or maybe just many people in PR who are big fans.
- ARM was a close second, and interestingly, it appears that several executives took up Twitter for the show (I assume due to effective Twittering and internal evangelizing by @lorikate).
- Mentor was almost silent, and its corporate tweets were mainly pitches.
- @RichardGoering was the most prolific #47DAC tweeter, with about 100 informative, unbiased, interesting posts. You wouldn't know he now has "embedded" in front of his title as "journalist."
- Peggy Aycinena (@paycinena) took a close second, with her interesting slant on people and proceedings livening up the event.
There's debate about whether electrical and systems engineers find Twitter effective (more on that in another post) but clearly the people using it at DAC did. It wasn't as popular or helpful as at another recent tech conference I attended, DrupalCon San Francisco, but then at that geekier software- and web-oriented event, about 60% of the audience had their laptops going. All the time.
For its simplicity and understated young-company pride, this has to be my favorite #47DAC tweet:
@heysurya Exhibiting for the first time at the DAC was very productive. Here is our Booth. http://twitpic.com/1xmuaq #47DAC #semIP
Disclosure: I handle trade shows and marketing communications for client CAST, Inc., a DAC exhibitor. And yes, I'm guilty of posting a "pitch" tweet for them!
