TwitNine

“Have you seen the Old Spice videos on YouTube?”

I think everyone with a computer and an internet connection has seen the manly Old Spice guy strutting his stuff and posting hilarious video responses to people’s Twitter questions.

According to reports around the web, Old Spice experienced a 30% increase in revenue. They are largely thanking their online marketing campaign for this increase.

It started with ads at the Superbowl, and then the ads hit YouTube and suddenly became viral in the blogosphere and on Twitter. One of @OldSpice’s Twitter followers even asked him to propose to his girlfriend for him, and sure enough, a few hours later, a video appeared on Old Spice’s YouTube channel.

So what actually happened here between Old Spice, YouTube and Twitter? Well, firstly, putting these videos on YouTube was an excellent move. They could easily have put them onto an Old Spice site, but going with YouTube helped make the videos more viral, as a lot of people visit YouTube and watch videos on a daily basis.

And the Q & A between Mr. Old Spice and Twitter, Facebook and Reddit allowed members of the public to as questions, which if are deemed worthy by the folks over at Old Spice, will be answered in the form of a video response.

This campaign was a great way to bring together all of the different social networking sites. And the video responses were addressed to celebrities, other corporations as well as members of the public.

In terms of sales, I can’t imagine that it did anything other than boost the sales of Old Spice products.

From the graph above from TwitterCounter.com, I think it’s pretty easy to guess when the Old Spice videos went viral. It’s incredible to see how the numbers have grown in just a few weeks. This Old Spice campaign is a great example of how social media works, and the possibilities that are there for companies that have a unique idea. I hope the guy that came up with this campaign gets a huge bonus!

Old Spice even made a video response to @Twitter which you can watch: here

Let us know what you thought of Old Spice’s online marketing campaign!

Normally when we think of customer service, we think of being on hold for 30 minutes listening to awful music or impersonal emails. More often than not, the term “customer service” does not evoke pleasant feelings; people have come to be turned off by the term and subsequently, companies have started to use different words to describe their efforts (i.e. Help desk, helpline, after-sales care).

In recent years, with the huge growth in connectivity made possible by social media, both big and small companies have found a new way to interact with their customers, address their problems and build up their brands: Twitter.

Over the last few years, Twitter has come to be a great customer service platform. It offers:

• Quicker problem resolution. Instead of waiting in a call-line for 30 minutes, Twitter is a lightning fast platform which allows issues to be addressed very quickly. If it’s a small problem, one tweet may be enough. If the problem is more complex, the company may initiate a more in-depth conversation with the customer.
• Building a positive image. Good customer service will get talked and Tweeted about. Since Twitter is one of the most viral platforms, one happy customer has the ability to reach an international audience.
• Lower costs. We all know that time is money. Customer service via Twitter will often take less time and significantly less money than a call center. Twitter’s need for short and direct information means that problem solving time is reduced. Also, your staff will find Twitter more engaging than a phone and head-set!

In order for Twitter to be an effective tool for your company, there are a few steps that you will need to take.

1. Add a Twitter button to your website and add your Twitter information to your email signature. Your customers need to know where to find you, otherwise, customer service on Twitter won’t work!
2. Respond quickly! The key to good customer service is a quality and speedy response. Use @replies and always remember to keep a professional tone. If it is a sensitive problem, try using direct messaging or give them a fast way to contact you, such as a special email address or direct phone number. Let your customers know that you are there to help.
3. Take the time to chat with customers. Talking to your customers helps to build up your brand’s image. Supplementing your customer service with conversation is a great way to do this. During the Icelandic volcanic eruption, all major airlines used Twitter very effectively to pass information and updates onto their customers.
4. Be authentic! The last thing any company needs is for their customers to feel that they are not forthcoming with the information they are providing. Building a positive brand image will do wonders to your sales figures.

Many big companies have been very successful in building up a positive brand image on Twitter: Starbucks, Comcast, Southwest Airlines and KLM. Give the steps above a try and let Twitter help to redefine how customer service is done for your company.

At the beginning of 2010, the registered number of users on Twitter had surpassed 75 million. With the ability to reach out to that many people, it is no wonder that businesses and individuals are using Twitter as a platform to build and promote their own brand.

Here are some great steps to help you reach this rapidly growing online audience.

1. Claim your name: Just like your website’s domain name, Twitter account names need to be secured! Exxon Mobil faced a lot of problems when an impostor started posting tweets using @ExxonMobilCorp, similarly, SitePoint, the web developer and publisher, was unable to secure @sitepoint and had to settle with @sitepointdotcom. There is even an aftermarket for Twitter handles at Tweexchange where names can be purchased and sold – just like domain names. Before you read any further, go and claim the Twitter handle for your name and for the names of any products or companies that you own or plan to create. In today’s Twitter day and age, a brand isn’t a real brand without an authentic Twitter handle!
2. The Branding Begins: Now that you have your Twitter name, the first thing to do is to fill out your profile – properly! People want to follow someone who has a legit looking page (i.e. one with all the info filled out). Fill out your bio with care – be sure to be honest! Don’t label yourself as an expert unless you really are one! Once this is done, you should spend some time on choosing your Twitter background. Some good sites are Twitpaper and Twitterbackgrounds. Try to create a background that has the same colors, format and even logo (on custom backgrounds) as your website.
3. Become Reputable: Twitter is essentially a shorter form of blogging. So, like a blog, tweet often about your expertise on a certain topic. Gradually, you will become known and people will be drawn to follow you. If you have a blog, Twitterfeed is a great tool which auto-updates your Twitter status whenever you create a new blog post. As well as pushing your own information, you can subscribe to Google.com/alerts and tweet the best content that you come across. A lot of experts will have Q&A sessions with their followers. This is a great opportunity to showcase your knowledge. Also, people may contact you if they need your expertise!

4. Marketing Your Twitter Brand: Include your Twitter handle on everything. Add it to your email signature, add a follow button on your website, plug your Twitter handle in your blog posts, leave links in any email newsletters or publications, you can even add it to your business card! You can add re-tweet buttons to your blog posts to make it easier for people to share your posts.

The most important thing to remember is to produce content and tweet often. New content is what keeps people from coming back! Happy tweeting!

Many twitterers use the service almost exclusively on their mobile phones. You can use Twitter on your mobile device in three ways:

• SMS (text messages) to and from 40404 (or your country’s short code)
• Twitter’s mobile Web site (http://m.twitter.com) if you have a Web browser on your cellphone.
• Downloadable applications for smartphones such as the BlackBerry or iPhone.

Literally dozens of applications come out for Twitter every couple of months. For more information, and to find the latest Twitter tools, check out Laura’s startup Twitter directory and marketplace oneforty (www.oneforty.com).

Via text messaging

Although text messaging (or SMS) is the most basic way to access Twitter via your cellphone, you need to first make sure that your cellphone plan encompasses unlimited texting. Otherwise, your monthly bill may end up skyrocketing. Check before you enable SMS updates!

After you make sure that you can afford your mobile texting plan, you can easily use SMS to update Twitter on the go.One caveat: The maximum length for a standard text message is 160 characters, but Twitter’s maximum is 140 characters. You have to manually verify that you aren’t going over the Twitter limit because otherwise, Twitter cuts off your SMS tweet at 140 characters.

In addition to sending tweets as SMS messages from your phone, you can receive your contacts’ tweets on your phone via SMS. Setting this up takes a little more work. First, think long and hard about how noisy you want your phone to be each day. Most Twitter users find that they can handle between 10 and 20 peoples’ tweets being sent to their phone before the constant incoming text stream becomes overwhelming. Luckily, even power users like iJustine (@iJustine) have discovered that they can take advantage of SMS tweets to their phone by being really selective about whose actual tweets they get via SMS. It’s not all-or-nothing.

To receive tweets from your contacts on your cellphone:

1. Open your own Home screen and, under Device Updates on the right sidebar, click phone to activate your phone notifications. Now you can subscribe to receive SMS tweets from any or all of the people that you already follow on Twitter. Don’t confuse notifications with following, though. Following means you follow their updates generally via Twitter. Notifications are a more intimate connection where you get their every tweet as an SMS text on your phone. With notifications ON, you also get all your DMs via SMS.

2. Make a list of people whose tweets you really want to receive directly as SMS messages on your phone. These people can be anyone — friends, family, influencers, clients whatever works for you.

3. Go to each of those Twitter users’ profiles and select (toggle) the updates on or updates off radio buttons to turn their notifications on or off.

Like any other social-media company, Twitter has a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement that all members must adhere to or risk having their accounts suspended or deleted. You can access Twitter’s terms at http://twitter.com/terms. You won’t find anything particularly surprising in them: You must be at least 13 years old to create an account and use the service, you can’t engage in abuse or harassment, you can’t spam other members or participate in activities that break any laws, and so on. The terms are actually more liberal than most Web services’ regulations; pornography and explicit language, for example, aren’t banned.

Beyond the terms of service, Twitter etiquette is simple: Be genuine and non deceptive and provide value. Other than that, just use Twitter how it suits you. This is primarily an unofficial protocol, but do keep in mind that Twitter keeps tabs on “deceptive” activity, too: Twitter can ban accounts that impersonate celebrities or companies if those accounts don’t make it clear that they’re unofficial or parodies. This policy is a contentious point in the Twitter community: Many members were upset when the @cwalken account, belonging to an aspiring comedian pretending to be actor Christopher Walken, was deleted from the system.

Beyond the simple regulations, you can’t really use Twitter in a right or wrong way because no two people use it for exactly the same reasons. But some members certainly have their opinions:

• Some users complain when others tweet too often, whereas others complain that their contacts don’t tweet enough. (This complaint is a little silly. Don’t like the contents? Turn the dial. Unsubscribe.)
• Some users take issue with strings of @replies and wonder why those conversations weren’t conducted in a private forum.
• You may encounter confusing, even conflicting, advice and back-seat tweeting from the handful of people on Twitter who aren’t comfortable without rules. Don’t take them too seriously; Twitter just isn’t that rigid.

Although users love Twitter’s largely rule-free nature, some generally accepted behaviors have evolved over time. You can ease your transition into the culture of Twitter by getting familiar with these behaviors before you first start out. Establish dedication and credibility early on, in part, by knowing your way around the following Twitter customs.

Twitter is a very receptive environment for forging connections with new friends and contacts, so amassing a list of followers is relatively simple. Typically, you gain followers in the natural course of using Twitter, but here are a few guidelines to follow:

Be real: Being genuine goes a long way, and you’re likely to gain followers
without even trying.

Be interesting: You don’t have to fascinate with every tweet you type, but do try to tweet about things more relevant to the world at large than what you just ate for lunch or the heinous traffic on your morning commute. Talk about your interests, instead. Talk about what’s in the news. Or talk about what you think should be in the news.

Be involved: The more “into” a topic you are, the more people will respond to your enthusiasm. Say that you’re really into classic cars —don’t talk just about your own fascination with them, but try to help other people on Twitter who might have questions on the subject. Get
into heated conversations and debates, too. Without being too authoritative, position yourself as someone who has some valuable information on your chosen issue to see an increase in your number of followers.

If you’re lucky enough that @Oprah posts a tweet with your @username in it — usually after you @Oprah her, and she notices and responds — you’re going to be barraged by new followers who’ve seen your username in connection with that famous person’s. But the most popular Twitter users have hundreds of thousands of followers and hundreds of people @replying to them, so don’t count on a response from a famous twitterer as a way to get your foot in the door when it comes to Twitter influence.

Some Twitter users try to lure followers by offering contests, giveaways, or other incentives to reach certain pseudo-milestones, such as number of tweets or number of followers. This approach is a little bit cheesy and can look like you’re desperate for new followers. In our opinion, you can have a better time on Twitter if you just allow your network to grow organically.

Regardless of how you get people to follow you, make sure to keep your Twitter interactions genuine. What you post on Twitter and contribute to the conversation, along with your ability to listen, determines your authority more than any follower count ever could.

While your Twitter universe grows and grows, you probably want to find the  best way possible to keep up with your followers and who you’re following. Twitter itself falls short in this area. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search your follower or following lists . It also doesn’t offer a way to sort your followers alphabetically or navigate in any way more efficient than the slow page-by-page scan.

You can quickly find out whether someone is following you back by trying to send that user a direct message. If you’re on the Twitter Web interface’s DM update screen, that twitterer’s username appears in the drop-down list only if he follows you back. If you’re on a desktop client, you can try to direct message that user  if he doesn’t follow you, you get a message telling you so.

Networking is by far one of the most powerful uses that anyone can make of Twitter. But, finding interesting people, maintaining your network, and digging in to really understand who you are connected to are not always straightforward. Here are some tools that will improve your networking experience on Twitter:

Find your followers. You can use sites such as Twitter Karma and FriendorFollow to check and compare who follows you and whom you follow, and to keep up with those people you want to add to your follow list. You can use these kinds of services to check out your followers and to
double-check that you’re following the people who are important to you:

• Friend or  Follow (http://friendorfollow.com): Came onto the Twitter scene more recently than Twitter Karma, and its interface is a little bit easier to understand. The FriendorFollow interface tells you who your mutual follows are, whom you follow without  being followed back, and who follows you without you following them back. You can then pick and choose whom to follow and whom to stop following. FriendorFollow connections don’t automatically opt you into individuals’ device updates, so it’s okay to
  use the tool to connect to many people, even if you have device updates turned on for your account.
• Twitter Karma (www.dossy.org/twitter/karma): Offers you a way to see whom you follow, who follows you, and which users both follow you and are followed by you. You can also use Twitter Karma to add followers, as well as remove users whom you no longer want to follow. But Twitter Karma tends to select Notifications On as the default setting when you add a new follower from Twitter Karma’s interface, so be sure to double- check
  that user’s profile if you don’t want to receive her notifications by text message

Find new people to follow.

• We Follow (www.wefollow.com): User-generated Twitter directory launched by Digg Founder Kevin Rose at SXSW in April 2009. Associates up to three hashtags with each twitterer who lists themselves in the directory and then presents the most followed individuals and accounts for each category. Because the results are searched by follower numbers, it’s a particularly good way to find the top celebrities, musicians, journalists, politicians, and so on who are using Twitter at any given time.
• Twellow (www.twellow.com): Structured like a Yellow Pages for Twitter, allows you to find new followers based on category, name, location, or trending topics. If a Twitter user has been active long enough to have a few tweets on the record, as well as a bio, you can find him on Twellow. If you search for yourself on Twellow, you can claim your profile, meaning that you contact Twellow and prove that you are you in order to get editing privileges for it, and then tweak it to categorize yourself so that others can find you based on your interests, services, or professional categories.

Inspired by the 1924 Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” Min nesota resident Aric McKeown (@aric) created a community game of hide-and-seek for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area using a Twitter account. Twice a month, Aric spent a Saturday afternoon in a local coffee shop or business tweeting clues about his location for followers to use to find him and earn a little sponsored prize. Unlike Connell’s story,set on a remote island, Aric’s version of the sport of human hunting was nonlethal he called it the Least Dangerous Game (http://www.leastdangerousgame.com). Cor-
rectly guessing his location wasn’t the goal; rather, the LDG was a multimodal activity where Twitter facilitated a face-to-face meeting. The first follower to find him won a prize and some bandwidth on a weekly podcast.

Following SXSW in 2008, humorist Ze Frank (@zefrank) organized a Twitter Color War. Members were asked to choose a team color and had to work to get the most followers. Icons were changed to flaunt color affiliations, and a leaderboard was set up until the war ended two months later. The idea was based on a game played at summer camps, where campers split up into color teams and compete in events like tug-of-war and egg tossing. Frank adapted the concept for Twitter, urging players to form teams and compete for medals in various contests. The activities included:

• Reverse caption, where contestants provide a picture to illustrate a caption

• Mixing a nerd rap with the word “bacon” in the lyrics, to be judged

• Creating a merit badge with Photoshop

• Battle of roshambo (rock-paper-scissors) throw-down photos

• A bingo game, with numbers called through tweets

• The Broom Game, where contestants spin in circles while holding a broom above their heads.

• “Young me, Now me,” i.e., recreating childhood pictures

• A scavenger hunt using Google Street View to find 31 things

Fifty-four teams earned medals or badges during the color war, which was eventually won by @teampuce.

Twitter games can be a double-edged sword. For all of the community goodwill they generate, they can also create a lot of noise for followers. In effect, each participant becomes two identities: the one you want to follow, and the one playing the game.

Tweeting isn’t just an opportunity to share experiences and advertise products and services; it is also a means to express political opinions and persuade others to adopt causes. Among the early adopters of Twitter were several politicians, most notably Barack Obama and John Edwards.

In two presidential bids, Edwards proved to be a  leader  in Web 2.0 politicking. His staff arguably made the best use of Twitter on the campaign trail, with regular updates  about his whistle stops and speeches. Although Obama was more successful both on-line and offline, Edwards created his account four months earlier, posting 87 times and picking up almost 9,000 followers before his concession and the subsequent scandal dropped his count to 6,000. At the time of his election, Obama was managing a mutual network of over 120,000 followers, the largest following in Twitter.

At the start of the election season in 2008, 7 sitting U.S. senators and 32 congressional representatives had active Twitter accounts.# By  the  time President Barack Obama addressed the joint Congress for the first time in February 2009, members of Congress were tweeting during his speech. The presidential debates sparked a lot of involvement by Twitter members as the Twitter website added a special Election stream, filtered to include tweets mentioning the candidates, the campaign, or debates. Current.TV included some of those tweets as part of its live video feed, and Twitter Vote Report
(http://blog.twittervotereport.com/) used SMS and Twitter to keep track of voter expe-riences on Election Day. Government participation isn’t limited to the U.S., either: the British Prime Minister and several Canadian politicians also make use of this medium to communicate with constituent.

There are other examples of social activism. Live Earth, a 24-hour, 7-continent concert in 2007 to benefit the SOS environmental project, used Twitter to promote its music event across several sites. Each venue showcased the latest energy-efficiency practices and was designed to minimize the environmental impact of the concert. The Sunlight Foundation, whose goal is to create a more transparent Congress, organized a Twitter petition to oppose restrictions preventing elected officials from tweeting in session. They now have their own suite of APIs (http://sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/) and are encouraging developers to help make government more transparent.

In February 2009, Guardian writer Paul Smith (@twitchhiker) announced that he planned to “travel by Twitter” in a stunt intending to raise money for charity: water (http://www.charitywater.org), a project to improve worldwide access to safe, clean drinking water. (This charity was also a main beneficiary of Twestival [http://twestival.com], a global tweetup on February 12, 2009 when twitterers from 202 cities met to raise money more than $250,000 and awareness for the cause.) Smith’s plan was to start in his hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K. and attempt to travel halfway around the world in one month, to an island off the coast of New Zealand. His self imposed rules included relying only on people who followed his @twitchhiker account and offered travel and lodging through public replies. Smith documented the experience   on his blog (http://twitchhiker.wordpress.com) as well as through Twitter.

Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned Rolodex, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network.

Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people that are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses who share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians.

One of the most interesting phenomena on Twitter is the communication and collaboration that can occur while businesses network with one another in public. Twitter offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries. Take, for example, the CEOs of competing companies IntenseDebate (http://intensedebate.com; @IntenseDebate) and DISQUS (http://disqus.com; @disqus), two companies that build comment management software for blogs. Through a debate in Twitter, they collaborated on some cross-functional features in their otherwise rival products to make both companies’ customers happy and solve a problem.

Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector  it’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This movement towards a “Hire 2.0” culture (applying so-called Web 2.0 technologies to the job market), creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.

Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. We really can’t overstate how versatile a networking tool Twitter can be. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone whom you don’t want to.