TwitNine

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.

Big name companies, such as Comcast and Dell, use Twitter as part of an overall strategy to reinvent their reputations for poor customer service and turn things around for their brands.
How did they do it? Or, more importantly, how can you do it? Both companies set up Twitter accounts (@ComcastCares and all the Dell accounts listed at http://dell.com/twitter) as hubs for public customer-service responses. They got in the trenches of social media through Twitter and
engaged their customer bases by facing criticisms and complaints head-on, and by showing a desire to help and respond quickly without making excuses or shifting blame. Better yet, Twitter users around the world can witness this transformation and watch the companies respond to others’ complaints, improving the company image for even more people.

By listening diligently for mentions of their companies and quickly extending a helping hand, Comcast and Dell have generated substantial goodwill (not to mention, press coverage). Even when the products and services sold under those brands elicit unpleasant reactions from the public, having a real person reach out to help in a public forum can do a lot to prevent or dissipate consumer anger. Used artfully, one-to-one contact via Twitter instills a sense of hope that the people behind the company walls aren’t leaving customers hanging. Presence and timely response on Twitter can make the difference between a firestorm of complaints and a quickly-managed situation.

Here’s the caveat: No one has yet figured out whether Twitter-based customer service will still be such a great shortcut once Twitter grows even bigger and more popular. If the company’s customer service system has fundamental problems, remaining in closer contact with consumers alone will not fix that. Customer service on Twitter allows businesses to catch consumers in their moments of frustration and help them right away. But Twitter alone can’t fix back-end customer-service infrastructure problems such as overloaded call centers or poorly trained representatives who have no real power to help.

You don’t need to be a huge company (and you certainly don’t need to be suffering from a        bad reputation) to create an effective business presence on Twitter. Twitter provides a great customer-service channel for small and medium-sized businesses, too. If you’re at a small company, Twitter can broaden your ability to reach out widely and listen carefully at almost    no expense (only some time and possibly tools) while saving you the cost of having an entire customer-service department.

Having a Twitter account for your business can make your business more accessible, not to mention let you help people in real time who have real problems and see instant improvement in how consumers perceive your business.

Businesses can use Twitter to talk to their customers and potential customers, and generally increase brand recognition. Given that Twitter has so many potential uses that are so diverse, how can you get started?

You can probably guess that your profile is your business’s face on Twitter. Even though many people use Twitter through a service on their phone or desktop, rather than through the Web page itself, assume that most everyone will at least look at your Profile page  if not the Web URL that you provide within that profile  before deciding whether or not to follow what you’re
doing on Twitter.

Dress nicely on Twitter: Fill out the whole Profile page when you set up your business’s Twitter account and upload an avatar (in some cases, your company logo is appropriate, but in others an individual photo is better). Link back to your main Web site, and in turn, link to your Twitter account from your Web site. You need to verify that the business account is actually yours and promote the availability of the Twitter stream to all your customers. With a widget on your site, you can even tweet to your customers (keeping freshly updated content front and center) without them having ever even heard of Twitter.

Make sure that the Twitter Bio section, short though it may be, tells Twitter users about your business. Also, the content of your business’s tweets needs to honestly, transparently show what you’re doing on Twitter. Introduce the people behind your business’s Twitter account they’re the people your Twitter readers and connections actually talk to, so let the individuals behind
the keyboard shine through.

Listen. Pay attention to what’s going on around you on Twitter. Twitter users have fascinating things to say about pretty much everything, but more importantly for you, they may already be talking about you and your business. You’re going to want to find as many ways as you can to tune in. From using Twitter Search to sophisticated social-media listening tools,  you can get useful information from Twitter in many ways. If you think of Twitter as a giant consumer sentiment engine, you can start to understand its potential. You can learn a lot by listening.

Balance. For the average business Twitter account, you need to have a good ratio of personal (or conversational) tweets to business (or promotional) ones. This ratio depends, in part, on how much you interact on Twitter and what you hope to accomplish  not to mention the nature of your business and your target audience or customer base. You may want to come up with an approximate numerical ratio that accomplishes your balance goals. You might want to decide, for example, that you can make only one or two of every ten tweets personal. Alternately, you can opt to put a particularly personal or original slant on promotional tweets, making them notably funny, valuable, or interesting to your readers. If you have a more conversational Twitter account that you still want to connect to your professional life, make about half your tweets personal, fun, or off-topic, and the other half about your business.

If you prefer to deliver business value all the time, set up your account to curate and cultivate links about events, essays, news, and ideas that are relevant to your field, in addition to promotional tweets so that you can still push your brand (without making that the only thing you do). Whatever you do, be useful. Offer value. You want to keep people engaged, which is what Twitter is all about.

November 2008 marked the second anniversary of Robert Scoble’s first tweet in 2006. At a clip of about 17 tweets a day, this A-list blogger has spent the past two years using Twitter to promote his site and share his life with a mass of readers. Amazingly,  Scoble manages to converse with many of his 37,000 followers (most of whom began following him in the past six months). In fact, most of his posts are now directed replies to other users.

Scoble  is one extreme on the user spectrum, but he  isn’t the  leader  in any category. According to TwitDir, as of November 2008 the Twitter account for Station Portal (@InternetRadio) held the record as the biggest producer of content, with over 550,000 tweets and counting. Station Portal monitors about 20,000 Internet radio stations, tracking the number of times each song is played. That account is in the top 1,000 with 1,700 followers, but many Twitter accounts that update über-frequently attract very few followers. In the summer of 2008, the twitterer who attracted the most followers
was Barack Obama, whose throng of 107,000 followers outnumbered those of Digg’s co creator Kevin Rose by 40,000—the equivalent of one Scoble. Obama posted about once every three days throughout the campaign.

A University of Maryland study published  in 2007* captured 1,348,543 tweets from 76,177 members over a two-month period between April and May. The researchers analyzed both the content and the network structure of their sample. One  of   the  outcomes was a graph showing the relationship of tweets to followers, which led them to identify three kinds of Twitter members. Members with high numbers of posts and few followers are considered spammers, and those with many followers and few posts are  information sources (e.g., @BarackObama).  The  authorities sources  such  as @Scobleizer and @InternetRadio—have high numbers in both areas.

The same study also concluded that there are four common user intentions for Twitter members:

Daily chatter

Talk about daily routines and activities Conversations Use of the @ to specifically reference another member Sharing information Inclusion of a pointer referenced in the tweet

Reporting news

Manual and automated reporting of new information, typically through mash ups  with RSS feeds.

This first attempt to officially categorize twitterers through academic analysis offers a good road map for understanding how people make use of their 140 characters to contribute to the information stream. Still, much has changed since the study was done in 2007. The ways people use Twitter today are wide-ranging.