CheezeDMG Blog

Our Client Services Director, Mike Groves, spoke at Internet World Expo yesterday with a presentation on “What’s going to be bigger than Google in 2009″.

Some of Mike’s points were being tweeted as he made them, see the resulting Twitter stream here http://bit.ly/vDz54

To all those that weren’t fortunate enough to be there to see it, please find the first 25 slides of the presentation below and you can download it in full by clicking here:

twitter.com/MikeGroves
twitter.com/CheezeDMG

Twitter should be about customer engagement, not broadcasting

Twitter’s here. You can’t visit a website or turn a page, digital or otherwise, without reading about it. Whether it’s Jonathan Ross’ banter or breaking news stories - Sky has a Twitter correspondent and CNN has the highest following of any user; yet it’s the user who’s breaking news first - the plane dumping in the Hudson River being the most high profile recent example.

Twitter’s being used as a news channel, an information hub, but the user has more power than ever. Of course brands are keen to follow this trend and harness it to their own benefit. So how can brands make their voices heard in a world where the user, your potential customer, doesn’t have to listen? It’s a level playing field, so your brand has to operate at the consumer’s level; don’t simply broadcast offers and ‘news’ - become part of the conversation.

Some brands have been active for a while - smaller ones like eSpares are doing a great job of harnessing the channel, larger brands like Canterbury of New Zealand are just starting; and then you’ve got huge global brands like Dell that have already seen over $1m of revenue from the channel.  Charities are at it too - Dogstrust are doing a fantastic job engaging with their ‘followers’, and PDSA are starting to get involved off the back of their Facebook success. All these brands are seeing success through engagement – involve yourself, provide advice, respond to questions, ‘react’ to your customers, and the proactive nature of marketing becomes flipped.

However, the effectiveness of building brand advocates, raising awareness and ultimately promoting your products and services by ‘stealth’ is huge – subtle branding, who would have thought it?

Set to grow even further, Twitter may also spin out with the associated growth of similar ‘tools’ like www.Identi.ca, www.plurk.com and www.jaiku.com - owned by Google. Having a presence on Twitter now will help you understand the medium and benefit your brand and the consumer.  So, if you’re looking to harness Twitter, where to start?

Here are five tips to get you going:

1. Get on there! Get involved! There’s no better place to start than with yourself. Sign up for an account, follow some people - you can start with me, I talk about digital marketing, rugby and music - and get tweeting a little. Find some people or brands in your sector and watch what they’re doing. You can gain a lot from interacting and watching before you reveal a brand presence.

2. See what people are saying about your brand using http://search.twitter.com - grab the feed and watch it for a while. Is the conversation positive or negative? This will help you define what your presence on Twitter needs to be. It may also help you quickly find brand ambassadors who can amplify your presence. Don’t forget the detractors - connecting with them on Twitter and helping them may create a rapid turnaround in their opinion.

3. Work out what you’re going to say, and who’s going to manage it. In some cases an agency can help get you off the ground and hand over the running once you’re familiar with the process. You can stick to a content theme, or a reason as to why you’re on Twitter, but don’t use it as a broadcast channel. All tweeting and no listening will lose you credibility - very quickly!

4. Get your brand onto Twitter. Grab a name - ideally www.twitter.com/yourbrandname, set up your logo and a template design and start twittering. If you can reference your brand on your own corporate page that will help establish credibility for the brand on Twitter. At this time there are no regulations or checks - it’s up to you to manage your brand on Twitter. Connect it to your other channels - you can feed your Twitter stream into a Facebook Fan Page or your own website.

5. Start talking - follow people you find interesting, have a conversation. If you’re sending links to your site, think about adding tracking tags. URL etiquette in Twitter’s 140 character dialogue is to use a shortened URL via tinyurl or similar, so add your tracking in before converting the url. This can help you understand what value this channel is delivering for you, over and above interaction, enabling you to track traffic from conversation through to conversion.

www.twitter.com/TomGriffola

www.twitter.com/CheezeDMG

Thanks to David Armano for the funny pic: http://darmano.typepad.com/

This blog post was originally going to be ‘blogging and the art of inclusion’ so the thoughts and ideas replicate themselves well on blogs. Perhaps that’s not surprising as Twitter (and Jaiku) are defined in some spheres as ‘microblogging’.

I am in the process of writing ‘5 tips for brands on Twitter’ of which this will probably be one element of it, but I think it also deserves some mention of its own.

There are many articles online from ’specialists’ who talk about how to ’supersize’ your Twitter followers in the vain hope of getting loads of business from it. Well, our opinion slightly differs to that. Twitter is NOT a broadcast channel - people (famous or otherwise) and brands that use it solely to push their own message will not succeed for the long term. Successful Tweeting is about inclusion.

Inclusion can be a number of things. It can be about listening: following others is a good way to boost inclusion and credibility. Just like a blogger that checks (and reads) who links to them, so many twitters check people that follow them, and if the person has useful tweets, may be followed. From this perspective, following others is a good way of getting followers. But do treat that with caution or at least control, many experienced twitters check the ratio of followers to following as a measure of credibility. People that follow thousands of others but have 5 followers of their own are often a good example of twitter misuse.

Similarly, inclusion also means listening to others and joining the conversation. And it is a conversation, where relevance and credibility is important. Joining the conversation does not mean:

@xxx thats really intersteting. If you are ever in Hong Kong I can help with hotels.

@xxxx yeah that was a great movie, If you are ever in Hong Kong I can help with hotels.

Successful brands on Twitter probably spend 20% of their time talking about their own work, and 80% of their time being part of the channel (don’t take the as a rule, it varies). I cite good examples like @espares and @dogstrust - Two brands firmly on my radar as we converse on my Twitter Stream. Similarly a number of startups are using their Twitter channel to promote their work as part of the conversation, Viadeo is top of mind because I connect with @petercrosby ; we use Zemanta extensively on the blog because it is such a great tool, I can connect with @andraz easily on Twitter. Similalry @banannie is a great Wordpress guru - I can connect with her and ask Wordpress questions easily, but she uses Twitter to have conversations, connect with people and to be in the right place for potential business.

And inclusion also helps the amplification. It is always nice to be written about, and if people like this article there is a hope they will retweet it to their followers - if that happens a few times the potential exposure for the article becomes that much bigger. The fact that I can let the people know I have talked about them also offers a potential for further promotion.

So we get to the same end, we have a succesful twitter stream - the brand is promoted, the people are promoted and our lives are amused if not enriched by the interaction. A much more rounded result than simply broadcasting to strangers.

The final line of inclusion must be given to @ddmcd who corrected my spelling of the word twittequette.

As an agency our challenge is to maintain a succesful twitter stream (www.twitter.com/cheeze_agency) and to work on educating clients, and the wider industry about opportunities (and risks) for brands on Twitter.

If you found this article useful, please forward, link, share, retweet or comment!

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One of the ways in which Web 2.0 can be characterised is by sites which deal with “presence”, i.e. short form communication, which is constrained to bite-sized chunks of information.

Twitter is a contemporary web phenomenon which illustrates the phenomenon very well. Calling itself a “communication utility” Twitter recently announced it has raised US$20.4m of funding. Designed to allow groups of friends to interact via the web, instant messaging and mobile, it has stolen the micro-blogging limelight, and despite its very visible failings and problems scaling, it has become the market leader of a veritable plethora of similar tools, including Pownce, the Google-acquired Jaiku, Plurk, and most recently Identi.ca . All these “Twitter clones” are more noticeable for their similarities than their differences.

Twitter is the daily haunt of an estimated two million people. How has it managed to achieve that level of usage? It’s a free service. It only offers a maximum 140 characters. It doesn’t allow file sharing (like Pownce). It ’s not threaded (like Jaiku). It limits the amount of SMS updates it will send to your phone to 250 per month. And it frequently falls over… Yet, it has attracted the users, and more importantly, the coders, who with access to an easy API have constructed a host of third-party applications from the entertaining (Twittervision) to the useful (TwitterKarma) to the imaginative (TwitterFone) and for every conceivable platform and device.

The fact is that Twitter has become a crowdsourcing application for knowledge - “where can I” “how do I” and “please find me a” are requests more usefully directed to a few hundred “friends” than to a faceless operator working for a TelCo. Twitter has proved a reliable news breaking service, often beating network news by several hours. It’s good for making useful business connections. People have met, got engaged, and even married on Twitter. As a social application, it beats Facebook hands down - less shared information, so more privacy, less distractions, no zombies.

Each of these platforms tends to attract not just the same kinds of people, but the same people. These are typically early adopting, gadget-using, ready communicators, used to screening out noise and often with something to say. As if panning for gold, they sift through the conversations which they monitor, plunging in to extract the occasional valuable nugget, or - and this is most important - providing similar value to their friends and followers. They use the same applications to update them - with Ping.FM or Twhirl (recently acquired by Seesmic) you can send the same information simultaneously to more-or-less the same groups of people on several different platforms at once. If you’re using Friendfeed you don’t need to visit anyone’s website to catch up on anything they might have said anywhere, because the chances are they are feeding everything into a single portal.

Will Twitter retain its dominance? Maybe not, according to Techcrunch, who see the Google acquisition of Jaiku as a stealth “Twitter-killer“. Pownce has a small set of devotees, but it’s scratching the surface of Twitter’s user base - it just hasn’t had the take up. Plurk innovates with its user interface, but annoys by disallowing features until/unless you build sufficient “karma” which makes it too time-demanding. Identi.ca is different because it’s both open source and decentralised - the more servers running it, the better it should become, so perhaps we’ll ultimately have a reliable, flexible tool which we can all use.

Confused as to the value of all this? You should be. Everyone is talking about it.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have all reached for their chequebooks in recent months to snap up companies which are developing similar new technologies to use in very different ways.

One of Google’s most recent acquisitions is the social-networking platform Jaiku.com. The site allows its members to share their activity-streams via a wide range of technological touch-points. An activity-stream might include status messages, shopping recommendations or photographs and users can post these online or set them to feed directly from third-party sites such as Flickr, Last.fm or Facebook. Users connected via a mobile device can even post their location and track the movements of their friends.

This multi-faceted, 360° approach to keeping in touch has been gaining significant traction of late and has attracted the usual frenzy of zeitgeist-friendly monikers. Lifehack is one such term which is starting to enter popular usage. The expression was coined to describe quick-and-nasty pieces of code which computer programmers would use as shortcuts between themselves but has recently been taken up by bloggers and grown in scope to incorporate any piece of technology that ‘solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way’.

Jaiku is a good example of a life hack as it combines more traditional content feeds with another emergent technology: micro-blogging. This mode of communication is, as the name suggests, a bit like blogging-lite or, if you’d rather, instant messaging on steroids. Put simply, it allows users to post short messages, generally of fewer than 200 characters, onto the Web using a range of delivery methods. The ‘status update’ on your Facebook profile is a really basic example of this but the service which has so-far become synonymous with the technology is probably Twitter.

All of this collaborative, on-the-go functionality also has obvious enterprise applications for which the business community has coined the phrases unified messaging and unified communications. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have made recent acquisitions to a gain a presence in this emerging market with the purchase of, respectively, Zimbra and Parlano. Both of these providers have developed products which they describe as being based on next-generation messaging and collaboration suites accessible via a range of online applications and hand-held devices.

A good way to demonstrate how similar technologies can be positioned in very different ways is to compare Twitter’s mission statement with a typical definition of the benefits of unified communications.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

The largest single value of [Unified Communication] is its ability to reduce “human latency” in business processes. Although communication methods (such as voice or IM) can be used individually and separately, organizations should examine how bringing these methods together can increase synergies and efficiencies.

Some well-known brands are already attempting to incorporate elements of the new technology into their communication strategies. Dell are distributing promotions via Twitter www.twitter.com/delloutlet which are available for anyone who wishes to subscribe and, perhaps more importantly, not bothering those who don’t. Exhibitions and seminars, including the Le Web 3 conference currently underway in Paris, are also using these channels to send immediate messages and receive real-time feedback. www.twitter.com/leweb3

It is still very early days for these tools and the real benefit or potential may not yet be revealed. However, these tools are growing in importance so come and try them – you can follow Jamie by going to www.twitter.com/jamieriddell and on Jaiku - See you there!