Earlier this month I had the pleasure of Twittering The Responsible Business Summit Live from London, here is Part 1 of “The Journey of Hastag #RBS09″
First few tweets (Tuesday 5th May) were about how excited everyone was at the tweeting that was going to happen at the Responsible Business Summit and the introduction of the #rbs09 hashtag, from @Ethical_Corp, @davidcoethica, @mrochte and myself.
A bit of real information then started coming through with a link to @Ethical_Corp founder Toby Webb’s post ranking the sessions at the conference by number of registered attendees (in case you were wondering, Embedding CR in your Company and Supply Chain Management came out tops).
Then came questions from both me and @davidcoethica to our followers, wondering if anyone else was going to be at the summit. I don’t know about David but I didn’t get any responses.
At the same time @Ethical_Corp used the attendance of CEOs of Timberland, IKEA and the Chairman of Shell to gain further interest. Which proved to be successful as it was retweeted by Chris Jarvis @RealizedWorth and @SteelyGreen.
Word also seemed to getting out of the hashtag-o-sphere with @robarj (Ryan Jones, Global Brand Manager at P&G) tweeting about the conference and Mario Vellandi @mvellandi retweeting it adding #rbs09.
A day before the conference @davidcoethica sent out a list of sessions happening during the conference and asked the community if anyone had any questions, immediately retweeted and replied to by @RealizedWorth who was interested in employee engagement (I am guessing because Chris’s profession is creating great employee volunteering programs).
In the same day, the first exhibitor came online, Charles Bosher @cbosher, Corporate Membership Manager at the NCVO, tweeted being ‘weirdly looking forward’ to the conference.
The claim to 1st Tweet on conference day went to neither me nor David with Martin Smith @Martin_CSR, CEO of JustMeans, claiming the prize.
But what definitely kicked off the questions was @davidcoethica tweeting that he had just arrived at the conference and was taking questions. Retweeted by Ginee @loopyginee.
@SSRIMikeTyrrel How do co’s plan to communicate sust. Perf. To investors now that banks thar organised meets for them are closed?
@RODIEN When will a treaty be signed by the worlds (business) leaders that CSR in EVERY company is mandatory?!
@MsNotMr I’m curious about Green & Blacks and what they are doing to promote responsibility in their industry
@Martin_CSR You should ask the opening panel how they plan to use social media to better engage stakeholders
@Martin_CSR also took the opportunity to tweet about a new podcast about Timberland’s Sustainability strategy just before their CEO’s keynote, fantastic timing. This was immediately followed by the JustMeans crew jumping on with a few retweets of @Martin_CSR from co-founder @KevinEdwardLong and the official @justmeans_CSR account.
Words of encouragement came through too
@fair_ruth Hope #rbs09 goes well, would be interested to hear more
Then the summit kicked off.
(Look out for Part 2 later this week)
