Stats from the 2018 CollabTalk TweetJams

by Christian Buckley · January 11, 2019

Looking back over this past year at some of the Twitter threads that are all still out there and searchable, it dawned on me that we have had some epic discussions because of the #CollabTalk TweetJams. This month kicks off our 8th year of running these monthly one-hour events, and I’m looking forward to doing it all over again! The concept came together in late 2011 while working as chief evangelist at Axceler. I wanted to break out of the echo chamber of my organization and get closer to the voice of the community on a number of topics — and I wanted these discussions to be open to anyone, whether friends or anonymous online participant, competitor or partner, Microsoft product team member or internet troll (thankfully, there hasn’t been much of the latter). My original goal for these events was to build an idea-generator of sorts that would provide differing opinions and ideas, or validate what I already thought. The name CollabTalk seemed to fit: it was a collaboration of experts and practitioners talking about collaboration. After the first few tries, the model was refined to what it remains today: an action-packed hour, 7 questions, a panel of experts to seed the discussion, and an open-door for anyone to participate via Twitter.

In the late 1990’s while going to business school at night and running my own startup on weeknights and weekends, I came up with a phrase that anyone who has seen me present at conference has probably heard: the more constraints you put on a system, the less likely people will use that system. In those early years of working with intranets and then project management and collaboration technology, it was certainly true. And I find that even with community discussion where companies or individuals may be looking for feedback, people tend to put up artificial barriers that make it difficult for ideas and perspectives to permeate. We create silos of information within the enterprise, we limit our information consumption to sources that we likely already agree with, and we rarely have conversations outside of our circle of friends. From a business and technology standpoint, the CollabTalk tweetjams were a way to cut through these barriers and allow people to be honest and open with their opinions. Granted, using Twitter (or any technology) could be a barrier to those who don’t use the social platform, but we’re not solving world peace….we’re talking business and tech. The more relevant barrier was the timezone issue, which is why I have been experimenting with the start time to try and get more participation in EMEA and APAC on certain topics. I’m glad to see more people recognizing that they can still participate in a staggered manner, answering questions hours after the event wrapped, but adding their voices to the discussions after-the-fact. And I hope that we’ll see more of this in 2019.

Impact in 2018

As the image up top shows, we held 10 one-hour events last year (due to the timing of a couple conferences, it just wasn’t feasible every month), generated 5,352 tweets, reached 2.92 million social profiles, and garnered more than 36.33 million impressions, which is (using my advanced math skills) over 3.633 million impressions per event. To put that into perspective, there are 3 to 5 day conferences that don’t reach 3.6 million impressions, much less do that in an hour.

Here are the events that we held:

This year’s sponsors included KanBo (Jan) and Microsoft (Feb), and of course tyGraph (every event). I’m always happy to talk with companies about the benefits of sponsoring a tweetjam, so if this is of interest please contact me! But the sponsorship by the tyGraph team (@tyGraphTweets) has been more of a partnership than a sponsorship, providing each other with feedback and discussing ideas for topics that would benefit the community. Thanks again to John, Dean and Ed for your support over the last few years! And if you’d like to see the latest iteration of the Power BI-based tyGraph stats for CollabTalk, check them out at https://link.tygraph.com/CollabTalk.

Community Trends

Something I try to do each month…as I have time…is to share out some of the stats from each event. People love lists, and it’s always interesting to watch the trends over time of what is mentioned, and who is participating. You’ve probably seen those tweets pushed out through my @CollabTalk profile, but here are the all-up 2018 data points….which I’ll try to remember to tweet out tomorrow morning. And yes, I’m on the lists because I host the events, but removing myself would skew the results…so just deal with it, people.

Top Mentions in 2018

@buckleyplanet (Christian Buckley)
@diverdown1964 (John White)
@tyGraphTweets (I think this is run by the team)
@SharePoint (Microsoft)
@MKashman (Mark Kashman)
@Percusn (Liz Sundet)
@ShrPntKnight (Ryan Schouten)
@EricaToelle (Erica Toelle)
@SPConf (Microsoft)
@thatMattWade (you guessed it, Matt Wade)

Top Tweeters in 2018

@buckleyplanet
@diverdown1964
@ShrPntKnight
@Percusn
@MKashman
@KoprowskiT (Tobiasz Koprowski)
@EricaToelle
@HeddaNewman (Heather Newman)
@thatMattWade
@ladygwenavear (Nikkia Carter)

Most Retweeted in 2018

@buckleyplanet
@diverdown1964
@ladygwenavear
@CollabTalk
@MKashman
@johnnliu (John Liu)
@Hoorge (Harjit Dhaliwal)
@EricaToelle
@Noopman (Magnus Mårtensson)
@Percusn

And the next TweetJam will be…

The next tweetjam will be held on Tuesday, January 29th at 9am Pacific on the topic “The Keys to Employee Adoption and Engagement” with another stellar panel of MVPs, partners, practitioners, and end-users. You do not need to be on the panel to participate, but if you ARE an expert and would like to be included on the official panel, please contact me via email, a DM on Twitter, or through my LinkedIn page. I’m building the panel now.

The tweetjam can be found via Twitter and the #CollabTalk hashtag, but you can also follow along in real-time on our dedicated page at http://tweetjam.collabtalk.com