You stage a special session on a hot topic at your show, promote it heavily on Twitter and hundreds of attendees end up tweeting about it during the live event, getting others engaged and building buzz about your show. But then what? No matter how hot it may be at the time, once the event’s over, people quickly start to forget about the Twitter conversation.

To keep the discussion top of mind, try creating a TweetBook, `a la the Open Government and Innovations (OGI) Conference, held July 21-22 in Washington, DC. Hosted by 1105 Government Information Group, the OGI Conference focuses on how government can use emerging technologies for collaboration and innovation, so organizers used Twitter and other social media tools to produce the event and emphasize their benefits. At one hot-topic panel discussion at the event, Tweet boards tied into the show’s Twitter account were placed behind the podium to display Twitter streams in real time and illustrate the sense of community that the technology generates.

“We knew we’d have thousands of tweets with valuable info from speakers and attendees, and wanted to find a way to preserve that information,” says Andrew Krzmarzick, Program Advisory Board Member and Senior Project Coordinator for the Graduate School.

After the event, he posted an idea for printed compilation of the tweets (dubbed a TweetBook) on GovLoop, a social networking site for the government that attendees frequent, and received positive feedback on the concept as well as interest from volunteers to help compile thousands of tweets for the project. A group of eight volunteers and staff spent 60 hours producing the TweetBook. First, they gathered the tweets using the event’s hashtag, put them in chronological order (Twitter feeds appear in reverse chronological order) and then organized them by session to create a comprehensive text to work from. Others then edited the tweets, deleting inappropriate or repetitive tweets and re-tweets. To add visual appeal to the text, the most interesting tweets throughout the book were highlighted in bold text along with a Twitter screenshot of the tweet. Graphic designers also created cover and sponsor pages for the book.

The final TweetBook, which featured highlights from more than 600 contributors, was tweeted out and posted on the conference Web site, relevant blogs and GovLoop. The result was a success. “We’ve received very positive feedback on it,” Krzmarzick says. “Through social media tools like Twitter, we’re now able to capture event proceedings from the perspective of participants.”

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