Using Twitter & Community to get the most of your SXSW, GDC, Web2Expo

With conference season upon us the Montreal technology community is preparing to descend on a number of very large industry events.

Our community has a number of speakers, attendees & company presentations occurring at:

SXSW Interactive in Austin (March 13-17)
Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 23-27)
Web 2.0 Expo (March 31-April 3)

Conferences give us a great chance to network with many of our industry counterparts from around the world. They also provide us a chance to meet members of our local community that we may not have connected with while in Montreal. Meeting your local counterparts at these events allow us to help support each other in many ways while we are stateside. Whether you are looking for a job, trying to recruit for a position, inviting people to listen to your session talk or need help trying to meet that critical investor/partner/speaker or guru your local community might be able to help you get more out of your conference experience.

If you are planning on attending any of these conferences this year please send a tweet using the conference hash tag & #MTL to introduce yourselves including who you are, which company you are with (if any) and any information about meetups, promotions, presentations or help you need to get the most out of your trips.

#SXSW #MTL Example: @georgefavvas CEO of @smarthippo is at #SXSW #MTL this week where SmartHippo is going to be doing a fun promotion.
#GDC #MTL Example: @austinhill from @akoha #MTL is doing a keynote at #GDC Serious Game Summit
#Web2Expo #MTL Example: @acroll @seanpower Authors of new O’Reilly book on Watching Websites are speaking at #Web2Expo #mtl

This will allow other Canadian & Montreal tech community members to reach out, introduce themselves and hopefully lend a helping hand to each other for any specific things you are trying to get done. It also allows those of us not attending events to keep an eye on your tweets from Montreal.

If this picks with with other cities such as #Tdot (Toronto), #Van (Vancouver), #Cal (Calgary), #Ott (Ottawa) or #CAN (Canada) you can use these links to track the Canadian tech community at these conferences. Expat Canadians are also welcome to grab the #CAN tag to join in on the fun.

Update: As Boris Mann suggests in the comment below, there are more often used Twitter hash tags for other cities. The tags he suggests are YVR (Vancouver), YYZ (Toronto). The round up links haven’t been updated for this, but if you are using Tweetdeck you should find it easy to create a search that includes a number of the variants on city hash tags.

At the very least we can co-ordinate meeting up for drinks to showcase our drinking prowess to our industry counterparts around the world