@jack_benoff @LizatHP @joemull @DenisHurley @TheRecruiterGuy @geekychic @ckieff @Rasiej @rushkoff @carbonOutreach @jaymesgrace

It used to be that people would judge the success of a conference based on how many good contacts they made, in terms of qualified leads, business cards gathered, or other metrics. My office is littered with business cards from various conferences, people whom I’ve forgotten why they are interesting and am unlikely to ever contact again. Twitter changes things. Instead of exchanging cards, you can follow someone on Twitter. You get frequent reminders of who they are, and hopefully, why you found them interesting. With that, I let me highlight some of the interesting people that I am following in regards to Internet Week New York.

Monday at Internet Week, there was a tweet about Augmented Reality from @jack_benoff. After a few twitter messages back and forth and a little searching, I found his booth and had a great talk about his company. It was a good example of using Twitter to drive traffic to your booth.

Later in the day, I had a good chat with @LizatHP. She was, of course, at the HP Media Center and I met her face to face before I met her on Twitter. We have since retweeted various messages and she is doing a good job of getting information about HP out on Twitter.

At the Future of Location Based Marketing @joemull or @DenisHurley did a pitch for Mobile Meteor. They suggested checking a website that didn’t work properly with my Nokia N900. To make things worse the non Mobile version of the site played obnoxious music and I wrote a #fail message about it on Twitter. @DenisHurley and I exchanged messages over Twitter and soon they had modified their code to recognize the N900. It is a great example of proactive customer service using Twitter that helps build up goodwill for the company.

@TheRecruiterGuy sent out some interesting Tweets during Internet Week, and I’ve started following him, even though, to the best of my knowledge, I did not meet him face to face. In his case, the message was simple, send good content with a hash tag, you are likely to get new followers.

@geekychic extensively tweeted the Digiday:Target conference, which I also tried to do, as did @ckieff. This was as Twitter started having Fail Whales, so I suspect none of us tweeted as much as we would like. I’ve met @ckieff at other events. He’s a bright guy, well worth the follow and it was great to get to know @geekychic at Digiday, both on Twitter and during cocktails afterwards.

@Rasiej @rushkoff were two good speakers at #thepromise that are also well worth following. Also, during the long lunch line, I had a great discussion with @carbonOutreach. We ended up connecting the old fashioned way of exchanging business cards, but I later followed her with the information from her card.

Finally, I need to shout out to @jaymesgrace. I’ve know @jaymesgrace from New Haven social media activities and it was great to connect at Internet Week as well.

I still have a deck of business cards that will probably get lost or trashed before I know it, but at least I’ve found some interesting people to stay in touch with via Twitter. I hope others have as much luck with Internet Week.