50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
Chris Brogan is THE MAN on Twitter and this list of 50 tips on how to apply Twitter to business will demonstrate why.
A List of Social Media Marketing Examples
Peter Kim has gathered together the social media activities of nearly 160 brands. You’ll find all kinds of great ideas here, and very few of these examples are tech companies. Equally impressive is how many are big brands.
TV’s Future Looks Like Web’s Present
Forrester Research says that in the future, TV will look increasingly like the Internet. Most programs will be “delivered on-demand with targeted ad messages based on location and behavior, along with community functions.”
Is your brand at social media’s ground zero?
Sound advice on how to prepare for and execute a social networking campaign. Analyzes interesting new Facebook promotion for “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” for likely success.
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One of my clients has been experimenting with an innovative and efficient approach to content development and I want you to know about it.
The company is in a highly specialized and big-ticket b-to-b industry. Its executives are very busy and very well paid. The VP of marketing wanted to develop some thought leadership white papers, but the prospect of pinning down these executives for hours to develop the content wasn’t practical. Instead, the marketing departing is using podcasts to construct white papers from the ground up
Here’s how it works: We schedule a 30- to 45- minute phone call with these busy executives to capture background information and hot topics in their areas of expertise. I then create a list of questions that are intended to draw out the executives’ thinking (journalists are pretty good at this!).
We record an interview of approximately 30 minutes’ duration. An edited version is posted as a podcast on the company’s website, but the marketing group also has the full interview transcribed via a low-cost outside service. Marketing cleans up and reorganizes the transcript and posts the document as a position paper.
Over a series of interviews, an executive’s observations and experiences can be rolled up in interesting ways. Multiple interviews with one executive can yield an in-depth white paper. Or point interviews with several executives can be combined into a corporate backgrounder. Customers and prospects can also subscribe to the podcast series. For the small transcription fee (services can be had for as little as a dollar a minute) and some inexpensive editing, the VP has a series of byline articles from the most visible people in his company.
Rethinking Research
I’ve recommended this approach to more and more clients lately. New online tools enable us to rethink our approach to assembling complex documents. It used to be the process demanded hours or days of research. Now we can take notes in real-time and assemble them later.
Blogs are ideally structured as collections of thoughts, observations and insights expressed in short bursts. It’s fast and easy to capture these brainstorms online. Got an idea? Twitter it for prosperity. When you go back and look at information assembled in this way, you often see relationships that weren’t obvious at the time. Between search, tags and bookmarks, it’s possible to assemble these building blocks in different ways.
Some thought leaders take this to the limit. Marketing guru Seth Godin, for example, is known for writing entire books based on collections of interesting blog posts. The blog is his notepad for ideas that can be combined into coherent themes.
In some (though certainly not all) cases, this is a more efficient way to research a topic than spending hours mining the Web or library stacks. For my client, it’s also a way to repurpose content across multiple media. Maybe it will work for you. What do you think? Twitter me @paulgillin.
IPhone Software Sales Take Off: Apple’s Jobs
The new iPhone apps are moving very briskly, too, with Apple selling about $1 million a day in mobile software. Sega says its iPhone sales have been so strong that the iPhone could quickly emerge as a mainstream gaming platform.
Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience
Gregor Hochmuth explains the enduring popularity of Twitter, despite its many service hiccups. If you want to understand why Twitter resonates so much with its audience and creates such a fanatical following, read this.
Holy cow: Apple sells 3 million iPhone in debut month
Capitalizing on the popularity of digital accessories as well as the iPhone’s emerging status as a fashion statement, Apple’s new iPhone 3G had a blowout first month. It took three days to sell 1 million of the new iPhones. For comparison, it took 74 days for the original iPhone to hit the one million sold mark. The new 3G iPhone has already sold nearly half as many as the original iPhones in total.
Ben & Jerry’s Jumps Into Social Media
The ice cream maker is promoting its new “Imagine Whirled Peace” flavor with a John Lennon-themed social network at which visitors can post “messages of peace” and upload relevant images.
Citi: Yep, The Kindle’s A Huge Hit. $1 Billion For Amazon In 2010
Kindle might be the iPhone of the book world. Wall Street analysts are euphoric about reports that Amazon may be on track to sell $1 billion worth of the handheld e-book in 2009 and could sell more than 375,000 units this year. That may make e-books a legitimate marketing channel in the not-too-distant future.
Rich Newman debunks the myth that baby boomers don’t use social networks. While it may be true that they don’t use Facebook, he says, they’re just as active online as people 30 years younger than them. It’s just that they go places that researchers don’t measure.
Social Networks Surge On Growing Global Audiences
Did you know that Facebook is now larger than MySpace? A surge of international registrations is driving social network growth. That includes traffic growth of 66% in the Middle East and Africa to 30.2 million, Europe increasing 35% to 165 million and Latin America rising 33% to 53.2 million.
Excuse Me, Do You Work Here? No, I Just Need to Fold Clothes
The Gap and its retail imitators have spawned a generation of Americans who are addicted to folding. And now that obsession is beginning to have unintended consequences, especially marital strain that results from one partner constantly refolding the other’s clothing.
AOL Study Says We’re Even More Addicted to Email
AOL released the results of its annual e-mail addicition survey. Among the findings:
*62% of people check work email on the weekends;
*19% choose vacation spots with access to email;
*59% check email from the bathroom
(I just don’t get that last one)
More: 46% of email users said they’re hooked on email (up from just 15% last year) and 51% check their email 4 or more times a day (up from 45% in 2007). New York, Houston and Chicago top the list of cites “most addicted” to email; 27% are so overwhelmed by their email that they’ve either declared “email bankruptcy,” deleting all their email messages to start anew, or are seriously thinking about doing so. Twenty percent of users said they have over 300 emails in their inboxes.
Ten years of email – David Strom
Google’s Gmail service just passed the 7G-byte threshold, meaning that’s how much email storage users get for free (it’s unlimited on Yahoo Mail). David Strom, once co-authored a book about e-mail, marvels at how far we’ve come in just 10 years. It wasn’t that long ago that most e-mail packages were proprietary and the industry haggled over standards, he remembers. Today, it’s accepted that all e-mail is Internet-based and this has helped embed this tool quickly into the fabric of our everydays lives. Now if only someone would do something about security.
Influencer marketing: Effective or defective?
Neil Davey at MyCustomer.com scrutinizes influencer marketing. Does it really work? Skeptics like Duncan Watts says it’s an unproven theory that’s convenient to believe while Keller Fay Group insists that influencers move markets. I’m somewhere in the middle. Good new insight from Watts in this piece.
And to think I canceled my subscription…
Just three days left to take advantage of discount pricing to submit your entries for the Society of New Communications Research’s (SNCR) Excellence in New Communications Awards.
Details are below, but this is basically a good way to get your new-media accomplishments in front of a group of thought leaders and to get an important third-party endorsement for your great work. Jen McClure continues to cultivate an organization that is committed to guiding and advocating for adoption of social media without becoming beholden to a lot of commercial interests. SNCR gets better every year.
By the way, its annual Symposium & Awards Gala is coming up Nov. 13 & 14 in Cambridge, MA. If you want to rub elbows with some of the top journalism, marketing and PR bloggers, this is the place to do it. At $395 for the symposium, it’s a good deal.
Full disclosure: I’m a SNCR Research Fellow, which means I do volunteer work for and donate money to this fine organization.
Details from the awards page:
These awards honor corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives.
Awards are granted in six divisions:
There are seven categories:
It costs $49 to submit. More details here.
The worst SEO mistake you can make
Brandt Dainow has some interesting insight on why search engines don’t like dynamic content management systems (CMS). He says SEO consultants need to be brought in before a site is launched. Repairing the wreckage wrought by a bad CMS can be nearly impossible, he says.
Microsoft backs open source work
Microsoft continues to extend a tentative olive branch to the open-source community, investing $100,000 to become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation and promising to open some of its communications protocols to developer scrutiny.
Top 10 social media misconceptions
Noah Elkin offers some useful tips for creating and measuring social media campaigns.
Microsoft sees end of Windows era
Microsoft has launched a research project to develop a successor to Windows that isn’t tied to a single machine. But whether Microsoft can make money from an operating system that isn’t tied to a single computer is an open question. Microsoft may have no choice, though. Users of the future will increasingly be mobile and promiscuous about the hardware they use.