Last week I attended the San Diego session of The Cool Twitter Conference World Tour. The event was a part of a series that is bringing together local twitter experts to share best practices, talk about new resources and keep the Twitter conversation going offline. Each speaker talked about Twitter from a different perspective (Twitter for non-profits, Twitter for a local association, Twitter for a retail business, Green Twitter, etc…) which was a great way to get variety into the presentations. And the event even attracted a few of our local twitterati: Mashable’s Jen Van Grove (@jbruin) and Customers Rock’s Becky Carroll (@bcarroll7) were both speakers, and @downtownrob was in attendance. All in all I found it to be an extremely interesting day and I enjoyed being in a room with people who are as twitter-obsessed as I am.

Here are some of the things I liked, things I learned and a few key takeaways from some of the conference.

A couple of Twitter Basics:

• Twitter is a not new fad – It’s actually been around since 2006. It is only recently that it has taken off in such an exponential way.

• Must have’s for every profile: a bio, link to your site, and a profile image.

• Basic things every company user must do: Follow back the people that follow them (within reason), reply to @ replies and DM’s, RT links/tweets that would be of interest to your customers, ask for feedback, be conversational, genuine and consistent.

• 20 character rule: If you are hoping to be re-tweeted, aim to save at least 20 characters so that your followers will have room to RT you.

If you are looking for more twitter basics check out our post on Twitter 101.

Twitter/Social Media Numbers:

• In the last year, Twitter grew 1,000 percent. (That’s a lot).

• 51 percent of US adults now participate in social media.

• 63 percent of companies have increased their social media budget in 2009.

New Twitter Trends:

• Real-time search engines (aka, the ability to search for something the second it is typed) – Twitter, Tweetmeme and the recently launched Bing Tweets are all real time search engines. Facebook and Google are both scrambling to get their real-time search capabilities functioning and are expected to release these sometime soon.

• Monetizing Twitter – Twitter recently launched verified accounts for celebrities however not for businesses. It is expected that this will be something businesses have to pay for in the near future.

There is also a growing trend of Twitter Ads. Companies use services such as Magpie to send their tweets out through peoples Twitter stream as “sponsored tweets.” There seems to be a bit of controversy over this, and I’d have to agree that I, personally, wouldn’t want to subject my followers to a bunch of Ad’s in my stream. (I just love you all too much!)

• Twitter Giveaways – If you haven’t heard of the Square Space Iphone giveaway/drama or the successful Moonfruit Macbook giveaway, I’d suggest googling them. Both can teach you a lot about running your own Twitter contest.

• Microgiving – The average online donation is only $57 dollars. To run a successful Twitter fundraiser, it is recommended to ask for small donations ($5-$10 range). Such small donations can have a big impact, much like they did during 2008’s Tweetsgiving.

Twitter Resources:

• TweetLater/Futuretweets – Allow you to schedule out your tweets.
• Twitbacks – Twitter profile background
• Polldaddy/Tweetpoll – Ways to create polls via Twitter
• Trottr/Audioboo - Audio Twitter
• Tweetphoto – A new competitor to Twitpic.
• Trenderr - Tracking for mulitple search words.
• Hootsuite/Bit.ly/Cli.gs – creates shortened URLS and tracks click-throughs.
• Paratweet – streams tweets at conferences/events of Tweet screen

Most interesting case study of the day:

Twelpforce – Just launced, @twelpforce is BestBuy’s twitter handle run by hundreds of its employees. The company isn’t giving its employees specific guidelines on tweeting. Instead, they are empowering their employees with the tools and letting them use their own voice to talk with customers. I will be fascinated to see how this new approach works out and I must give Best Buy a major Kudos for being able to relinquish so much control.

Biggest controversy of the day: 

Should businesses allow their employees to tweet during work hours? I am obviously a proponent of this. A few people there, were not. It got heated…I won’t go into detail.

Suggested companies to follow via the CTC presenters:

@Birch_Aquarium
@TreeHugger – Green Blog
@Delight_com – E-commerce
@WholeFoods – Retail /Food
@zappos – Shoes/famous twitter case study
@comcastcares – Twitter as customer service portal/famous twitter case study
@cottageantiques – Retail
@OBMA – Ocean Beach Mainstream Association

Suggested people to follow/CTC presenters:

@momcentral – mom expert
@ecoglamourista - Green clothing
@bcarroll7 – Customers Rock blog
@jbruin - Mashable editor
@Mike_Stelzner - wrote Social media marketing Industry report
@bobfine – Cool twitter Conference organizer
@mcmilker – eco marketing and twitter presenter
@rumford – tweetphoto founder
@seantiner – non profits and twitter presenter
@aaswartz – Twitter talk radio host

What do you think fellow attendees? Anything important I missed here?