Windows on the Web: Twittering Business Economics

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

We took advantage of another free social media tool just before the annual meeting began. That tool is Twitter.

Twitter is a real-time short messaging service (SMS) that can work over the Web or just about any Internet-enabled device.  It allows you to send and read updates from other users. The catch is that the updates, which are called “tweets,” are limited to 140 characters in length. Its first use was as a way to keep in touch with friends — used to send messages such as “Heading to bar, C U there.”  However, it wasn’t long before it found some mainstream uses.

The Basics

Like most Web 2.0 tools, a Twitter account is free.  Get an account by going to Twitter and clicking the big green “Get Started—Join” button. You’ll need to fill in a certain amount of information, but you can remain reasonably anonymous.

Once you have an account and are logged in, go to http://twitter.com/business_econ and click the “Follow” button. Then, whenever we update our Twitter feed with announcements from NABE, it will show up on your Twitter page. We began using Twitter during the annual meeting for things such as program updates or alerts when we posted new material to the website. During the meeting, we had several updates a day. With the meeting over, it will probably be more like one or two a week.

Other Uses of Twitter

Media organizations are finding ways of using Twitter. My newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, uses http://twitter.com/clevelanddotcom to send out news headlines and links to stories.  You can find a lengthy list of papers and other news organizations that use Twitter here.

Many campaigns have begun using Twitter as a way to mobilize followers, especially the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.  Many companies are also using it as a way to get information to customers. The Wikipedia article about Twitter has more information than Twitter itself has.

Web Activity at the Annual Meeting

While the intent of using Twitter was to drive visitors to the NABE website, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the regular methods. Over the course of 2008, website activity has been picking up, so that we are now averaging more than 5,000 page views a day. For October, average daily page views are more than 7,200, and were more than 9,000 a day for the period of October 5-8.

That has certainly been helped by all the press coverage of the annual meeting – nothing helps page views more than having Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke come speak to you in the middle of a crisis. In addition, Princeton economist and 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman linked to his session from his New York Times blog, and former Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Greg Mankiw linked from his blog, along with links from a lot of other less famous bloggers. For the month of October, 30 percent of our traffic came directly (either by typing in a URL or a bookmark), 26 percent came from some other site, and 44 percent came from search engines. Most of the searches were on some varient of our name, which probably means someone saw a story about our meeting, and went looking for us.

Also popular with users was our Sept. 17 podcast with Stuart Hoffman, Lyle Gramley, Laurence Meyer, and David Wyss, on “The Financial Crisis”, ]which has been downloaded over 1,300 times in less than a month. It is still popular, even though in reality so much has changed since that day.

If you haven’t yet found the annual meeting coverage on the website, going to the annual meeting session pages will lead you to links to speaker presentations, speech transcripts, and links to podcasts that Bloomberg.com made during the meeting.

And Finally....

We are not sure how many NABE members are twittering, or how many are just listeners compared to those who post their own updates. In addition to the NABE feed, my own personal feed is here. Any other NABE member who would like to post their Twitter feed for others to follow, let me know, and I'll list them here.