Event promotion with Twitter and Google Calendar "Quick Add"

Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.

1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".

What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.

6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.

Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.

Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.

When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.

To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.

UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter

Comments

[yoz]

All great tips, but I'm wondering how to cram all that into 140 chars. Got any good examples?

[Brian]

description of "quick add" format:

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36604

twitter search for a2events:

http://terraminds.com/twitter/query?query=a2events&submit=search+in+updates