A Face-to-Face Meet for Twitterers

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"In some regions people really want to see store specials," she says. "In some markets it's considered spam."

In a panel called Tips and Tricks, panelists shared some of the many applications that Twitter users can tap into to mine Twitter data. TweetStats.com, for example, lets users track exactly what time of day other users are twittering so you're most likely to catch them if you send them a message at that time. TweepSearch.com mines the bios of users so you can search for people with similar occupations or interests. TweetBeep.com provides e-mail alerts about companies or subjects you want to follow. If all this gets confusing, Feedmyapp.com provides 34 pages of Twitter applications.

Sizing Twitterers Up Quickly

Robbins' two-hour talk was punctuated with opportunities for audience members to massage the shoulders of the person beside them, dance to techno music, and jump up and down to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Robbins has had his own learning curve with Twitter. He said his first posts were inspirational quotes from people like Nelson Mandela. "You can imagine my frustration with 140 characters," he says, referring to the limit on the length of Twitter messages. But readers said they wanted him to respond in his own words and "do something deeper."

Although Robbins has 1.36 million people who follow his tweets, he himself follows only 265 people. About 110 of those are people he thinks he can learn from. They include former IBM (IBM) chief Lou Gerstner and entrepreneur Richard Branson, who Robbins says doesn't twitter often. The others are people who have said nasty things about him online and whom he wants to have a dialogue with, including one who claims to have proof Robbins doesn't write his own tweets. (He insists he does.) The essential point, Robbins says, is that just as he tries to add value through his public speaking, he looks for people who can add value to his life through Twitter. The service allows him to quickly size people up. "Twitter allows you to understand someone's blueprint in seconds," he says. "Look at what they write, what they share. Some people it's all about the workplace, some people it's spirituality, others it's about looking cool."

Robbins says he wasn't paid for speaking at the conference. "It is a community that's been good for me," he says. "So when you're a member of a community you give back." He also sees a model in Twitter for other businesses. "The only way to build a brand is to build a brand that gives more than it gets back," he says. But isn't Twitter, which charges nothing for its service, famously big on traffic but short on revenues? "People say Twitter doesn't know how to monetize. They're creating the best possible user experience and they'll figure out how to monetize it," Robbins says.

Palmeri is a senior correspondent in BusinessWeek's Los Angeles bureau. Follow him on Twitter @chrispalmeri .

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