Results of the AACR Social Media Experiment

by Rusty Bishop

Prior to The AACR Meeting, we wrote about the use of twitter to attract scientists to your booth. We suggested using the #AACR hashtag to grab scientists at the meeting that were following along on twitter from their laptops or hand held device.

For those that don’t know the twitter hashtag (#) is a methodology to aggregate tweets about a certain topic or entity. If for example you wanted to see what other companies were tweeting about at AACR you would search in twitter for #AACR.

We saw several companies using twitter at the meeting. The most common tweet was “Come by booth XXX to learn about YYY…#AACR” or “Come by booth XXX for a free T-shirt..#AACR”. We suggest you also add a #Your Company Name in case scientists are following you directly and not the meeting.

During the meeting, Mark and I followed along and did as suggested when companies tweeted. We asked the staff running the booths whether they thought the twitter campaign was successful or not.

Positive Results

For the most part, results were positive. Staff reported that visitors were directly responding to the tweets. This suggests that using twitter is a successful method to bring traffic to the booth.

Several companies reported that tweeting about specific product lines brought scientists to the booth as well. For example – “Problems with cloning? come by booth XXX for the solution #AACR”.  A great way to pre-qualify visitors!

Negative Results

On the downside, staff in a few booths were unaware that their company was tweeting during the meeting. One fellow even asked me what ‘tweeting’ meant! In almost every case, this was caused by someone at the home office tweeting the messages and thereby not briefing the booth staff at the meeting.

Further, we saw staff of one company tweeting about how much fun their party was, but not responding to tweet replies for a location.  Social media can be damaging also.  Ask Dominoes.

Suggestions

1. Designate one or two staff at the booth to man the tweeting operation. When things are slow – Tweet!
2. Brief all staff of the plan and changes to the twitter operation.
3. Vary the message.  ”1 hr to the ipad give away” “IFA expert in booth 1-2 pm” etc.
4. RESPOND – Tweeting is after all social.

We’re not sure that Twitter is the best method to interface with scientists, but getting 100 more people by the booth can definitely increase the ROI on your investment of exhibiting at a large conference.

The jury is still out on Social Media for Scientists but we’ll keep digging for you. Find more by following us on Twitter here. Also, become a fan.