You’re at a conference. There’s a giant screen showing all the Tweets from the conference hashtag. You suddenly feel like you HAVE TO BE ON THAT SCREEN. #allofthetweets

Plus, the conference organizers and the speakers themselves keep encouraging you to Tweet the crap out of everything they say. Of course they are. The organizers are incentivized to get new people to come next year. The speakers are incentivized to get their name out there so they can sell books or get clients or speak at more conferences, rinse, repeat.

But you, oh conference attendee, are someone who is beginning to believe in the power of sharing quality content on social media, so your incentive should be to NOT WANT TO SPAM YOUR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS WITH USELESS DRIVEL. Posting lots of generic quotes from speakers helps the conference, helps the speaker, but probably does nothing more for you than to annoy your followers.

Is there a place for live tweeting conferences?

ABSOLUTELY.

These ain’t it:
Heading into ReallyAwesomeSession! Looking forward to learning! #boringconference13
Learning lots of great things at the conference! #boringconference13
Jimbob Marketschmace says SEO is important. #boringconference13
Writing new blog posts every day is a good idea. #boringconference13

Here are things that would actually be valuable to Tweet on a conference hashtag:

1) Any real, actionable items or key take aways. You probably can’t fit these into 140 characters, sorry. You could try Twitlonger.
2) Any additional or complementary resources to a presentation, so that folks who aren’t at the conference can partake in the learning, and folks who are can continue the learning.
3) Attempts to get people to eat and or drink with you. Seriously. The whole “networking” aspect of a conference is the best part.

1) Your Community Manager needs to be on call 24/7

OK, maybe not 24/7. You can probably give them a few hours to sleep. But seriously, they need to be getting real-time updates every time someone mentions your brand on Twitter, or in a blog post, or writes a Yelp review, or comments on your Facebook page. By setting up these profiles, you’re sending the message “Here’s a new way to get in touch with us!” Imagine if someone called your business and left a message, and you didn’t get back to them for three days. Or even one day. Do you really think they’re going to give you money?

2) Your Community Manager needs to be empowered to act

Since you found someone who is getting real-time updates from customers about your business, they need to be able to do something about negative situations when they arise. If someone Tweets that they got the wrong order (instead of taking it up with their server), the Community Manager needs to be able to call the on-duty manager and inform them of the situation – and the manager needs to be willing to make it right. If someone writes in a Yelp review that your contractor was drinking in their house instead of installing their new carpet, then you need to listen to your CM when they tell you about it and fire your contractor and apologize to the customer. Your business (especially if you’re in hospitality) already has special circumstances offline where a manager can comp things, or issue a refund, or take other corrective action. The CM needs to be able to do these things online.

3) Your Community Manager needs to be kept up to speed with the business

They need to know what’s new, and what’s changing, as quickly as you do. Raising your prices? They better know that the lampshades that were $10 yesterday are $20 now before they talk about them. They better know that there was a popular band added to the benefit show lineup so they can talk about it. They better know that you’re closing early tomorrow. Otherwise, how are they going to tell your customers?

A version of this article was originally published on beingcheryl.com