Edudemic

Topics: boston, bostontweet, featured, Tom O'Keefe, twitter

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If you’ve ever used Twitter and either live in Boston or follow anyone from Boston, you’ve likely seen a tweet from Tom O’Keefe. Who is Tom, you ask? He’s not the guy that everyone was forced to be friends with from MySpace. Instead, he’s a Boston resident who everyone wants to be friends with. (Want to see the inside scoop about Tom? Here’s his blog) Tom’s business is the basis for TweetBlogr, a system I am planning on trying out in the near future.

So what exactly does Tom do to earn such respect from the Boston Twitter community?

• Frequent popular locations (restaurants, bars, landmarks, events)
• Have a system (TweetBlogr) that turns every tweet into a threaded conversation on bostontweet.com
• Allow people to simply comment by including @bostontweet in their tweets (It’s like a hashtag but focuses awareness on one single Twitter handle, genius!)
• Encourage and foster conversation (Tom poses many questions, thoughts, etc. on an hourly basis and actually replies to most tweets!)
• Eat, drink, be merry, and tweet!

Example.

Not hip to Twitter? Here’s an example tweet from @bostontweet that was sent out while I was writing this very post!

Stalkers?!

So what is the average fan of BostonTweet like? I have had a few conversations with friends who have actually said they’ve gone out with the sole intention of tracking down Tom just to see if he actually exists. After eating at Anna’s Tacqueria (Tom’s biggest vice according to his tweets and FourSquare check-ins) for four days in a row, there was no luck in finding Tom. He was like the Loch Ness Monster of Twitter. Finding him via Twitter and Foursquare has reminded me of a recent viral video going around about phantom check-ins from people not actually at businesses. (The FourSquare Cops by HubSpot)

Tom has been a big force in proving that Twitter is about a lot more than just ‘sh*t people don’t understand, after all. What do people currently think about Twitter? Take a look at this chart:

How It All Started

(from BostonTweet.com)

BostonTweet was created by Tom O’Keefe, and developed by Steve Callan, as a way to create awareness for local business in a down economy. Tom developed BostonTweet in November 2008 when the financial markets were at a precipitous decline and his two former startups had become worthless after the crash. Fearing that Boston would become a 1929 ghost town, O’Keefe created BostonTweet to make sure everyone knew that our favorite restaurants and bars were still open and needed our business for survival. Needing a very economical platform to promote local business, Twitter was hands down the best application to talk about everything Boston.

Boston Loves Food & Beer

After a few weeks of being online the number of informative tweets about local restaurants was so valuable that Tom called on Steve Callan to develop the current BostonTweet.com. BostonTweet.com indexes BostonTweet’s tweets with the replies of followers to create a valuable resource for everything Boston. Perform a search for any food, restaurant or bar in Boston and you’ll likely find honest & succinct feedback on the place. In addition to discovering great new bars and restaurants in this great city, BostonTweet also discovered that Boston really loves pizza, burgers, brunch, ice cream, and burritos!!

Every Bostonian is a Citizen Reporter

What makes BostonTweet.com truly powerful is the ability for any Bostonian to publish news, events and reviews directly to the website via their mobile device or computer. By simply creating a new tweet with @BostonTweet in it anyone can publish news to the site for the world to see – citizen journalism at its best!. In many cases breaking news is broadcast on Twitter before other media outlets. With the increasing growth of Twitter and social media, citizen reporting is going to be the main source for breaking news – BostonTweet.com gives Bostonians the platform to broadcast that news.

Advertising & Marketing

With the integration of advertising, tweeting, appearances and promotions BostonTweet offers a very effective and influential medium to promote your business.

What’s Next?

BostonTweet started as a pretty simple website but has evolved into a real-time discussion forum, focused on live events. The cornerstone of the site is obviously the Twitter handle…but that’s also the site’s biggest weakness. What happens when Tom goes on vacation like the @ComcastCares guy? What about starting NYCTweet, SanFranTweet, BoiseTweet? I think the business idea is fantastic and the implementation has been revolutionary, but it needs to focus more on scalability. In other words, BostonTweet needs to build up the number of people the website is based on, like an Elite Membership or something, where people can pay BostonTweet to have their tweets featured / start conversations on the website. This would allow the website to not rely solely on advertising (which is not jarring or obnoxious so kudos!) while simultaneously building a profitable community of users.

What will actually happen? Follow Tom’s every move and find out!