Food, drink, location and Twitter

I haven't blogged much about Twitter recently. Rather than (over) thinking, I have just been tweeting and enjoying myself.

An unlikely trigger started me thinking about it again over the weekend - a trip to the Wirral Food and Drink Festival.

I knew there would be some local businesses there who use Twitter (like @cancookstudio and @theliverpoolmal), but I was surprised to see how many other names popped up when I did a Twitter search for the festival after it closed on Monday.

There were some businesses I had actually bought things from (@starlysspice for instance) and others which I recognised from the festival like @corkshoutheswall and @kokonoir.

It struck me that this could be really useful if you were trying to build relationships on Twitter with local businesses (or businesses in a particular sector). Simply search using the hash tag for an event you are at or search for references to its Twitter account (if it has one) or just search for its name.

If businesses are serious about using Twitter then the chances are they will tweet about being at the trade show, festival or whatever and they will show up in your search. This is hardly new advice, but it struck me that there are three things which make this kind of search very useful:-

• it shows you businesses who are active on Twitter and take the time to tweet from day to day (after all these are the ones you can build a relationship with using social media);
• it shows up some businesses who might be hard to track down with a Twitter search for local businesses (maybe they don't tweet about being in your area, or they are from outside the area or see themselves as being national);
• you are at the event so you can go have a chat with them and mention that you saw them on Twitter (which is a lot more memorable than simply popping up as another Twitter follower and also gives some reassurance that their tweets are finding an audience).

Obviously it also gives you the chance to see how many of your existing Twitter followers are there and go and have a chat with them - after all, the objective of all of this is to build real life relationships - not just to interact online.

I think that this is one of the areas where locational services will go from strength to strength (indeed I just saw a reference on Twitter today to Lanyrd which is a locational service specifically tailored to conferences and events and shows you which of your Twitter followers are speaking / attending).

Could this be the answer to one of my previous posts about how law firms could use Foursquare and similar services? If you are running seminars or events then publishing a hash tag, using a specific Twitter account or even promoting Foursquare check-ins could add value for those who are attending, help them to network and help you to track who attended and follow up with them after the event.