TSIA Service Revolutions

Since TweetRoost can be used beautifully as a Twitter Customer Relationship Management system for Support, Marketing and Sales at larger organizations, I spent this past week at the TSIA Conference in Santa Clara, CA, attending the meetings as well as presenting in the TSIA Service Revolutions Vision Awards, where TweetRoost was a finalist.

It was a great week. First, I spent time with my old friend, John Ragsdale, the TSIA Vice President for Technology Research. John is a great guy, he reminded me that we go back more than a decade — yikes — and that I had arranged for John to be the keynote speaker at our last company’s User Conference in Las Vegas about 5 years ago. John did a great job then, and of course he did a great job at this conference. He knows so much about Services and Best Practices and he has such a good sense of humor. I always find it a pleasure to talk to him.

Each talk at the Visions awards, since there were eight of us, had only 6 minutes. It was very difficult to present in 6 minutes; 60 minutes would have been easier, each word counts! And not only is the preparation difficult, but the backstage technical work needed to coordinate eight 6 minute talks is quite complex. Each computer which has a Powerpoint or Prezi or a video needs to be ready to go, there are marks on the floor, there are monitors on the floor (unseen by the audience), the lights are blinding, there is a 6 minute countdown clock which helps keep you aware — but it is quite a tough job. I know why I went into tech work, coding and managing, and not Broadway.

I wanted to mention one more interesting point: Both J. B. Wood, the executive running TSIA, and David Pogue, NY Times reporter, gave really cool keynote speeches. David’s speech touched on Twitter’s simplicity, and also on how organizations should pay attention to their customers on social media. It was a great leadin to what I had to say.

Mark