There were a lot of people at ERE Expo that are huge on twitter @TheRecruiterGuy is the only one to wear the shirt that said it!

I am not someone that is huge on Twitter.  A lot of the twitter superstar’s are also bloggers.  Not like I’m a blogger – but like real bloggers that people read and care about.  They have really cool things to say and make you want to learn more.   In fact, I was a bit of a late adopter and didn’t even start using Twitter until May when I got home from Kennedy this year.  So…what is that like 4 month?  Lame, I know.

My first national conference in 2007 was terrifying.  Not only was I attending – but I was called in as a last minute speaker for a general session.  To top it off, I knew NO ONE.  Honestly, not a soul.  Over the years, I have met a lot of amazing people in this industry – people that I have maintained relationships via a variety of channels.  Each one of them has helped me learn and grow both personally and professionally and they likely don’t even know it.   Twitter helped me develop, expand and strengthen a number of these relationships and build new ones with people that I had never known before.

My favorite Punk Rocker, Laurie Ruettimann, had a great blog today about the women of twitter that were there.   Jason Buss had a great blog yesterday on the best tweets of the event.  I taught Mike Greenier from Walmart how to tweet and use Tweetdeck this week (and created a monster).   Overall, Twitter at ERE was HUGE – used to help share some of the highlights of the various sessions, tweet complaints about sessions, locate people for lunch or pool time and share some after hours pictures (ummm…@marenhogan).

If Networking is King, then Twitter is Queen – playing an amazing role in my experience ths time around – giving me the chance to meet and connect with in person people that I have been learning from all summer. I didn’t feel like the awkward geeky girl trying to meet the cool kids (like normal) rather like the awkward geeky girl the cool kids already know is geeky and they accept her anyway.