Twitter – the mobile-based microblogging service – has become the new darling among social media marketers and internet geeks since the SXSWi conference in 2007. Lacking any kind of monetization model, Twitter seems a trendy but not sustainable company, like PointCast in the 1990s.

Maybe Twitter wont be around to see 2010, yet many major brands have moved in to communicate with consumers and the world via Twitter: H&R Block (Finance), 10 Downing Street (The UK equivalent of US “White House”), Zappos (Online Retailer) and countless others like BBC News to Yahoo’s Marketing Team and Amazon.com to the New York LaGuardia airport. Is this wasted energy by the PR/Marketing offices of H&R Block or even US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s social media team?

The short answer is: no.

But to expand more, let’s discuss two subjects:

1. Two Quick Reasons to Consider Twittering for your Brand
2. Case Studies on the 3 different types of Twitters:
   Conversational, News Item and Reputation Monitoring Twitter Users

Two Reasons to Twitter

1. Understanding Social Media Better

Just by utilizing twitter, these brands through experimentation are learning and understanding more about social media and their customers. Twitter may not have a business model yet, but reaching out and getting to know customers is part of the business process these brands need to have to survive. Be it blogging, facebook-ing or twittering – the same core skills in understanding how to reach customers are similar. Learning how to do it on twitter is a skillset that can be applied to feature social media mediums.

2. Keeping Track of the “Linkerati” (Highly vocal and connected influencers)

Despite the buzz and activity of Twitter.com, their membership of just over 1 million users seem a paltry sum compared to MySpace, Facebook , Bebo and others.

However, Twitter is definitely on the bleeding edge of early adopters, specifically the “Linkerati” (as coined by Rand Fishkin). The Linkerati are the special type of early adopters who are very vocal on the Internet – be it twittering, blogging or doing a Yelp/Amazon review of your business or product. Current Twitter members, due to their Linkerati demographic, may have a higher than average say on influencing your brand.

The 3 Different Types of Twittering Brands

1. Conversational Twitters: H&R Block, Zappos, 10 Downing Street

H&R Block, Zappos and 10 Downing Street are incredibly innovate in that they truly embrace twitter as a conversational & microblogging platform.

H&R Block

H&R Block reaches out to Twitter members complaining about taxes and assist as customer service for those dissatisfied with their H&R Block experience. And yes, H&R Block – a financial services company – even does the occasional fart-related humor on twitter.

Zappos

Zappos‘ twitter is run by the Zappos CEO. He covers daily events and going-ons at Zappos to askings for feedback on their new beta website and throwing a free shoe prize here and there. His comments go from the serious and jovial. The Zappos CEO is twittering as someone who just happens to work for Zappos (Steve from Zappos) instead of sounding like a press release channel for Zappos.

10 Downing Street

10 Downing Street, while a highly public and political office, attempts to humanize itself with mentions of everything from how a visit from George Clooney caused “quite the stir” with the 10 Downing Street staff to answering questions from fellow twitter members.

2. News Item Twitters: Amazon.com, New York Times

Both Amazon.com and New York Times utilize Twitter as another distribution platform to send their audience updates. For Amazon.com, this means pushing out news about their news sales (Gold Box), while the New York Times publishes their latest headlines. For them twitter is based used as a one way microblogging platform.

This is definitely not very *social* media, but it allows yet another route by which to reach their audience in a relatively low cost (same mechanism as an RSS feed) method. They are embracing the idea that they benefit from being present wherever and how ever people view and digest information, specifically their information.

3. Reputation Monitoring Twitters: Radian6 & GeekSquad

Finally, there companies like Radian6 and the GeekSquad, which while not necessarily on Twitter, they do monitor, track and respond to Twitter comments. Of course, tracking and responding to Twitter messages are more important than being on Twitter itself.

GeekSquad is fairly well known American at-home computer servicing company. Recently, a fellow blogger friend, Michael Brito, twittered about a poor experience he received from Geek Squad on Twitter:

Only a few hours after twitter, Michael learns:

A few hours later, I get an email from Robert Stephens, the Founder and Chief Inspector of the Geek Squad. He asked me what my issues were and that he would look into it. Let’s see if he lives up to his promise of personally resolving the complaints of those who read the The Consumerist(lol, not really a consumerist reader though).

Nonetheless, this is a great illustration of how a company can use social media to track conversations and (hopefully) take action. We will soon find out if the Geek Squad is going to create a loyal customer, with lots and lots of friends, family and acquaintances. ; )

Radian6 is a social media monitoring company, so no surprise here. Recently, a representative from Radian6 reached out to me and mentioned he saw my twitter on social media and wanted to know if I needed a demo.

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I recently asked the “Twittersphere” on their thoughts on wikis (specifically, I was thinking for use with Emergence-Media). Should I use PBWik or try out WetPaint? I’ve used PBWiki for a long time and belong to over 10 PBwikis, but I was compelled by WetPaint’s refreshing interface. What I didn’t find so refreshing was PBWiki’s initial response to my Twitter:

Now, I’ve met PBWiki folks and they’re good people. But, their simple comment “I would go with PBWiki” completely turned me off. Why?

I had a really bad taste in my mouth for being so directly pitched to by what felt like was a one-to-one person medium. I was expecting not a “pitch” but “customer service”: “What are you looking for in a wiki? Would you like to try our free trial?”

Am I nitpicking? Maybe, and again I love the PBwiki guys so I hate to use them as an example (albeit small example). But, I fear how may other consumers out there could be so easily turned-off by something so small, yet so big.

The ability to deliver context and proper conversation right off the bat is everything and in this one small case, that didnt happen.

The lesson (as best done in humor of Hugh MacLeod):

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Along with the tidal wave of Social Media buzzwords hitting marketing and PR departments, “blogger outreach campaigns” is a big one. Blogger Outreach Campaigns are seen as the new “word of mouth” campaign, which is being looked at as a way to virally increase brand awareness and even help drive sales, all at a lower cost than other channels.

Moving Beyond a One-Time Blog Outreach Campaign

As David Wilson pointed out, Social Media Marketing is not a one-time event. David was using a Digg Article submission for an example, but the same applies for Blogger Community Outreach .

Don’t contact bloggers just when you have something to promote. Bloggers will catch to this very quickly. Just as your PR team keeps a steady relationship with reporters, keep a steady relationship with A-List, B-List and Upcoming bloggers and community beyond promotional emails: asking for feedback on your product/service, invite them for small get-togethers dinners, etc.

But companies will say: “But that takes too much resources to maintain blogger relationships, let’s do a one-time campaign”. Sure but keep in mind the following:

1. Blogs are apart of the your Brand’s Ecosystem
   For the brand Spirit Airlines, a blog post with the title “Do Not Fly Spirit Airlines” ranks 3 on Google and below it is a blog post on a very damning alleged leak from the Spirit Airlines CEO
2. Restoring a Brand is Difficulty and Lengthy
   According to BtoB, nearly 1 of 5 brands takes 2 years to recover from a crisis affect their brand image, sales or profits.
3. Customers probably Trust Bloggers more than you
   According to Nielsen, 66% of North Americans find Consumer Generated Media, like blogs, as reliable source of news. What are those blogs saying about your brand?

Conclusion: Social Media is Bigger than a Single Campaign

Social Media has opened up a whole new world for marketers and PR folks, which requires a long-term strategy beyond a one-off campaign: Community Marketing & Relation needs to be part of a companies normal PR and Marketing function.

Blogger Outreach campaigns have their place, but they must take place within a larger strategy of maintaining communications with bloggers and reaching out to those discussing your brand on forums, blogs and elsewhere.

See below for more details on those three points

1. The Community is Part of your Brand Ecosystem

When I’m asked by companies, “Why should we talk to bloggers or listen to what they say?” I make it clear that they, their brand and even their CEOs, are already being talked about by bloggers. They can join and help shape the conversation or let it shape them.

A quick search for “Paypal” on Google will show “PayPalSucks.com” as #2 on Google. I believe it was Dave McClure that mentioned that while PayPal was reluctant to promote a forum for their users to talk to Paypal, users were going to the PayPalSucks forum instead.
Stephen Spencer of CNET noted how Bloggers were increasingly present brand search results:

a. For Zappos

In the top Google Search Results, a search for “Zappos” presented “I Heart Zappos” blog post and a blog post by Start-Up Review rank top 10.

First Page Google Result for “Zappos”:
A business blog on Zappos and posting called “I Heart Zappos”

b. For Spirit Airline

Zappos received stunning reviews by the two blogs in the brand search, but not so for Spirit Airlines. A search for “Spirit Airlines” in Google led us to a blog post called “Do Not Fly Spirit Airlines” and a blog that posted an alledged leaked memo from the CEO, stating “Let them tell the world how bad we are” in response to a customer complaint.

A search for Spirit Airlines reveals some severe customer/PR relations issues.

2. Does Your Customers Trust Bloggers More Than You?

Recently, Nielsen conducted a global survey on people’s attitudes towards different advertising channels. Unsurprisingly, Word Of Mouth is king and online banner is second to the bottom.

qasd

3. Your Reputation is at Stake

Dave Wilson recently wrote on a BtoB report that reveal that 57% of marketing executives say they do not have a crisis plan in place in case of any crisis that can lead to negative coverage, declining sales, or reduced profitability. And 53% have experienced such crises.

More telling is how long it took to recover from such crises

• 23% of respondents said it took three months to a year for their brand to fully recover from a crisis
• 13.3% said it took more than two years to recover
• 17.7% said they have yet to recover after two years.

As part of crisis plan, it helps to have the ear to the ground – understanding what bloggers, reviewers on Amazon and forum members are saying – to look out for potential crises and know how to handle bloggers and others when it happens. You need to keep your ear to the community.

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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The past two weeks have been a busy week for me: Ad:Tech, Web 2.0 Expo, attending the Social Medic Club and helping a client ramp up their Blog Outreach program.

Speaking with folks from Ad:Tech and just surveying the marketing blogosphere lately, we are seeing three trends that are affecting the marketing landscape all the way from increasing importance of a CMO to the strategic changes required for SEO.

The Three Trends Affecting Marketing

• Longer Tail of Media Consumption
  Increasing variety of media (mobile, social networks, search blogs, Xbox 360) that people are consuming means more effort required for marketing/brand/PR integration and more requirements for a “grand strategy” vision.
• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Increasing Trend Towards Measurement and ROI means that marketing will take high prominence in the C-level space, helping shape product development, internal culture and budgeting
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social affecting all of Interactive Marketing Activities, diversifying the types of media being consumed and making marketers have greater engagement with the customer audience and moving from brand control to brand management.

Changes in the Evolving Marketing Landscape

• Raise of the CMOs (As Opposed to VP of Marketing)
  Elevating Marketing position as part of a revenue generating, rather than cost center; rebalancing the importance of the sales team vis-à-vis the marketing team.
• Evangelist becomes more integral to Marketing-PR
  Going beyond being a spokesperson, writing to the community (writing post, responding to comments) and generally engaging the community be it on Yelp, Amazon.com reviews or blogs or in-real-life (IRL)
• Executing the Social Media Program
  Need for Evangelists and Community Managers to execute Social Media Program to engage, manage and measure Social Media and Communities.
• SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning
  How SEM (particularly SEO) is shifting from its early days of simple keyword analysis to integrating brand, PR, word-of-mouth, content strategy, usability etc. SEM or Strategic Website Positioning needs to coordinate under the CMO and with the Social Media Program.

1. Raise of the CMO (Not VP of Marketing)

It is common knowledge that when a business is adjusting to a difficult economy, R&D slows and marketing is chopped. Marketing is seen as an expenditure, rather than vehicle for sales. The increasing emphasis on measurement and ROI is changing that somewhat.

Marketing’s evolution to a more strategic role (from VP-level to C-level) is boosted by three trends:

• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Thanks to better metrics and ROI measurement, Marketing is getting more respect as a revenue generator.
• Longer Tail of Media Consumption:
  Diversifying media consumption means more difficult in marketing integration and greater need for strategic direction in managing multi-channel marketing.
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social Media is helping fuel the long tail of media consumption. It also has been pushing companies to integrate their PR/Word-of-Mouth/Marketing campaigns and change their internal corporate cultures.

Jon Miller writes most succinctly on the definition and greater responsibility of a CMO at the Futurelab Blog:

“To be successful, the CMO must play a role broader than just leading the marketing organization. The role must include driving revenue, leading innovation, and providing strategic vision. These growth champions must lead all four Ps – not just promotion but also product strategy, place (channel and distribution), and pricing.

Like other C-level executives, these CMOs must be rigorous in their financial planning and metrics, making revenue forecasts and justifying their budgets like the investment in the future that marketing spending really is.”

See Jon Miller’s article at:

1. ”Are You a CMO or a VP of Marketing?”, April 30, 2007
   http://blog.futurelab.net/2007/04/are_you_a_cmo_or_a_vp_of_marke.html

2. Evangelist

While we can debate the number of blogs or if MySpace is here to stay, Social Media has changed the Internet landscape just as the Internet in the 90s changed the marketing and business landscape.

Evangelist have been around before Social Media took off as the latest buzzword, but the importance of their role is increasingly clear if corporations are to have plans to thoroughly engage their online audience and communities.

Jeremiah explains that: “An evangelists role is to go beyond understanding and get others to ‘believe’ in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications, building trust. “

In Matt McGee’s “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, Matt’s focuses on how even an evangelist can apply to small businesses in:

• To Write: “You need a blog to communicate directly with customers, and good writers make the best bloggers….In this day and age, you need to become a mini-publisher and that demands someone who knows how to write.”
• To Network: “finding customers and joining their communities and conversations. Good “people skills” are imperative to market successfully.”
• Do Public Relations: “This should include traditional media; press releases are still the way to reach out to those folks. But it should also include online influencers: important bloggers and important online discussion forums that cover your industry.”

Read more at:

• “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, April 26, 2007
  http://searchengineland.com/070426-082409.php
• “Understanding the role of an Evangelist at a Web 2.0 Company”, October 07, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/10/07/understanding-the-role-of-an-evangelist-at-a-web-20-company/

3. Social Media Program

Jeremiah Owyang is on *the* thought leader when it comes to understanding how corporations need to respond to social media opportunities. If you’re not reading his blog, you should.

While he has written about the need for Evangelist and Community Managers, Jeremiah recently wrote on the technical needs of the Social Media Programs the Evangelist and Community Managers would execute, listing some important tactical level thinking:

Recognize the new influencers. Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.

Prepare for all scenarios. Create an internal process or at least discuss how to deal with crises. (such as exploding products, embarrassing situations). Draw from classic PR strategies, but realize that acting quickly in a human way, and not hiding is key.

…

Employees will blog, embrace. In addition to creating the corporate blog(s), be sure to recognize the natural employee bloggers that appear. You may find them in the product groups, support, and marketing departments. Have a discussion on how to include them in your strategy, even if it means to let them continue on their own. When it comes to trust, prospects and customers may trust employee bloggers that don’t have the corporate logo on their blog.

Measurement. You’ll need to measure to prove worth in this new arena, get more budget and even get a raise. I’ve discussed this extensively, see all posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

See more under:

• “Strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program (Starting internally first)“, April 23, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/04/23/strategies-for-organizing-your-corporate-social-media-program/
• “10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations”, December 12, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/12/18/10-social-media-strategies-for-the-corporations/
• “Understanding the Community/Evangelist Role, and profiles of a few of my Favorite Folks”, March 26, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/26/understanding-the-technology-evangelist-role-a-few-of-my-favorite-folks/

4. SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning

SEO (and with it PPC) has been steadily evolving away from the traditional SEO methods, with a full embrace of Social Media to usability to content strategy, with changes occurring in:

1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

We are now at the point of needing to recast SEM (SEO and PPC) as Strategic Website Positioning:

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

See more at:
“SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? – Updated”, February 26, 2007
http://www.emergence-media.com/2007/02/seo-as-website-positioning-strategy/

Closing Thoughts: A Warning on Social Media Fatigue

I still very much remember the irrational exuberance of the Dot-Com (Web 1.0) and know that not every SharkyBuisnessIdeaHere.com will not raise up to become an Amazon.com or an Ebay.

The audience, the social media audience, will suffer from “Social Media Fatigue”. People can only support and pay attention to a limited amount of the ever increasing variety of social media websites, video networks, Pligg (digg) clones and Twitters twittering and Myspace commenting.

At the same time, the Internet was not a fad and has brought about the behemoth that is Google made websites like Wikipedia and YouTube possible.

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