Where did the Twittersphere go?

The people drawn to Twitter are people on the cutting edge, the real nerds who are resentful of the fact that the general population have found and taken over Facebook.

  -  Steve Dotto, host of Dotto Tech (Source)

Merely five years old, Twitter has had a skyrocketing rate of adoption. The statics still show that its use is on the rise, and events like Obama's town hall have made it a completely mainstream way of adding conversation and engagement to live and virtual events.

There are fantastic How-To's like this one out on the web about aggregation and management of information.

But why are so few high tech event marketers using it? There is a vibrant #eventprofs community composed of a huge variety of event managers from associations to vendors to wedding planners to event management agencies. Great content, great sharing, great conversation, and even an organized event chat on regular occasions.

Organizations like #MPI, #TSEA, #PCMA all have conversations, but tweets generally include the #eventprofs in their conversations so the messages are virtually indistiguishable except to say they are members of these industry associations.

But in following #cemaonline, the Corporate Event Marketing Association's hashtag and #hitechevents, the hashtag for marketers working in the high tech industry, I find absolutely no engagement. Why would the set of event marketers MOST likely to be on Twitter not be anywhere near it?

Just too busy? I know our group in high tech events manages more than 1,000 events a year with just 9 event managers, so busy is an understatement. Or is it that event managers in high tech are at companies that have entire groups devoted to social media (like we do at my company), so the event managers do not feel the need to engage. Or is it because high tech event managers don't understand the value of networking beyond their doors with other high tech event managers?

Personally, I find Twitter to be highly valuable when seeking out new ideas and technologies. I use it for research on competitive events. I use it to search hashtags for conversations about certain topics that will be at my event. I don't spend a ton of time idly staring at and reading random things, but when my Outlook is frozen as a 13MB file comes in, or while I'm on a conference call waiting for my moment to speak, I peruse the feeds and click on some links and bookmark great articles to go back to later.

I find the engagement of the people on Twitter exciting, and I want to know why there aren't more high tech event managers out there with me!