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!

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!

One of the most confusing things for new Twitterers is the hashtag. Basically, it is a topic with the hash symbol (“#”) in front of it. Twitter hashtags like #FollowFriday help spread and share information on Twitter and more importantly, help to organize it.

Hashtags are loved by conference and event organizers and are also a great way for Twitter users to organize themselves. When thousands of people agree to include a certain hashtag in their tweets on a certain topic, then it becomes easier to search for that topic and it is more likely that the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.

So how does one efficiently identify, track, use and organize hashtags? Here are some steps to help you understand and make sense of hashtags.

1. Hashtag Identification. So anyone can log onto Twitter and see what is currently trending. But trying to decipher what the hashtags mean can be near impossible sometimes. But fear not, there is a great website that lists all current trends and (more importantly) why they are trending: WhatTheTrend.com. You can see the top 10 trends and search for trends. This is a great way to find people who are interested in the same topic as you.
2. Hashtag Tracking. There are a lot of great tools that can help us find out what is hot on Twitter. My favourite is Hashtags.org. It allows you to search for a hashtag and it shows you a trend graph and the most recent tweets containing the hashtag in question. It is a great tool for any tech journalists, marketing professionals and those of you who are just interested in trends.
3. Hashtag Usage. The key thing to remember is to not over do it! You don’t want your tweets to seem spammy. A good tip is to put it in context. Give an explanation so that your followers will know what your hashtag means.
4. Hashtag Organization. This is mainly useful for events, and helps attendees, coordinators, speakers, etc. track conversations via the hashtags. If you want to create a hashtag for an event, there are a few tips to remember.

• Choose a simple hashtag. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s important to get it right. Instead of spelling out the whole event name for the hashtag, use a shortened version.
• Remember to plug your hashtag. Put it on your website, on your twitter feed, add it everywhere! This way you can easily track any conversations that include your hashtag!

Do you have any unique uses for hashtags or any tips to share? Be sure to share it with everyone by posting it in the comments!

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.

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.

You can use Twitter as a fantastic public-relations channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitterers from individuals to large corporations   report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitterers and sharing on the Twitter platform.

Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool  albeit a powerful and efficient one  to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a
way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.

You may have heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter  such as the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009. Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t
always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.

Journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both sides of the field gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media, all by simply tagging their tweets with the word #journchat. Because #journchat is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or http://search.twitter.com) at that word and watch the conversation scroll by.

It was Twitter innovator @PRSarahEvans who came up with the idea for #journchat, and the community she built catapulted her from obscure community college PR practitioner to an extremely well-known social-media innovator. John A. Byrne (@JohnAByrne) of BusinessWeek implemented a similar standing event (Wednesday nights, for those of you playing along at home) when he went onto Twitter one night to answer questions and encouraged the use of the #editorchat hashtag.

Keep it real! The be-genuine Twitter rule applies at all times, even when you’re embarking on a publicity campaign (often especially when you’re attempting to drive sales or awareness to your product, service, or site). Twitter’s users can be very turned off by empty marketing banter.

Remember your balance. Just because you want to see fast results doesn’t mean that you should bombard your Twitter followers with link spam (numerous tweets that contain links to your business) or constant  about whatever you’re trying to promote. Remember to space
it out. On Twitter, overly aggressive promotions can slow your progress and reduce your audience. Tread with respect.

Give your idea wings. Come up with a pithy or witty statement about your promotion that inspires people in your network to share and pass it along (to retweet the statement, or RT) to their own networks. Getting your message retweeted is much more effective than hammering your point home on your own.