Have you “tweeted” lately? Do you like knowing what people think and aren’t afraid to ask? Both of these questions have to do with Twitter www.twitter.com, the social media phenomenon. Here’s a whirlwind tour of Twitter, for those who’ve been wondering.

Twitter, in a few words, is a “microblogging” community that tracks the frequent (sometimes constant) updates its members around the globe are posting. These members are able to “follow” each other and know instantly when someone they’re following writes a “tweet”. It’s much more immediate than other Web 2.0 sites like FaceBook, with small, 140-character snapshots updating someone’s status.

What does that have to do with business? Think of Twitter, and other social networking sites, as vast pools of members who share information, ask questions and otherwise communicate quickly.  The idea of sharing who you are and what your business does should be enough to have you signing up.

Twitter’s also a great way to survey thousands of people at once, by posting a question and watching for replies. Here’s a survey example wrapped in a status update, “Attending VA marketing forum 2pm CST. What svcs RU using VAs for?” Anyone who is following your tweets, or who searches for “VA”, will see your post and can reply. That brings up another great use for Twitter.

The search functions built into Twitter let you look for what others are saying about topics related to your business. There are actually three separate ways to look. TweetVolume www.tweetvolume.com lets you search for up to five words or phrases at once and ranks them by volume. Summize www.search.twitter.com lets you find all postings with related keywords and TweetScan www.tweetscan.com searches Twitter and similar sites for specified content and will even send updates by email.

There may be questions posted that you can answer, or conversations you can lend your expertise to. That’s the best way to build your reputation on Twitter. Nobody likes a hard sell-build relationships and watch for ways to meet people’s needs.

In his blog on community and social media, Chris Brogan gives 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/. Follow his instructions for getting started, then experiment with several of his ideas this week. A word of warning: Twitter can quickly become addictive, if you let it. Set a schedule for posting, searching and following Twitter activity, just as you would any other market research tool.

We don’t have to chase every new phenomenon to be successful on the Internet. We should, however, learn what’s good and put those to work for our companies. Twitter, used in the right context, could turn out to be one of the best for you.

Monitoring keywords across different social media platforms including Twitter and the blogosphere, is one of the best ways to gauge how your brand is perceived. You have those who we’d call ‘key influencers‘, and of course other ordinary consumers. Key influencers are, in PR land, perceived as the most important group to get your brand in front of. These are the people in the eye of any particular social storm, be it a group of friends or a group on a social network, who pass on their knowledge of a particular topic to those around them, whether they offer it, or it is asked for.

‘Why is it important to get a brand in front of key influencers?’, I hear you shout. They will be knowledgeable about a certain subject and will give your brand credibility if they think it is worthwhile. This of course will translate into sales for your client. But how do you know if these guys are liking your product? You can go and ask them, get thier opinion and engage in a dialogue that will be beneficial for both you and them. BUT, how do you find key influencers to talk with in the first place? it can be tricky, and you don’t want to spend your time looking for five people when really you want to know what the other 50,000 people think.

This is where the likes of Twitter can come in handy for your brand. You can follow specific key words, such as your brand name using a variety of different tools, of which Twitter has many. You are then able to see what people are saying about your brand in their tweets.

Here are some of the better free tools to have a look at, some are for Twitter, others are not:

Twitter Search
Spy
Tweet Scan
Backtype
Board Reader
Trendrr
Social Mention

Now the wonderful thing is that although these don’t distinguish who your key influencers are – they tell you what consumers are actually using your client’s product think of it or them. Why is this important? It allows you to engage in conversation with the people providing the revenue that your client craves, and crucially, the people that aren’t.

The next step on from this is to monitor what is being said about your competitors and the compare these conversations, to give you an opportunity to position your client in a way that will make them stand out from their potentially crowded market place.

You can actually promote your ad agency using social media. Agencies such as Off Madison Ave are generating inbound new business leads on a daily basis. Social media is affordable and allows you to test your messages and positioning with your key target audiences. You need to learn how to use these tools and allow your marketing mind to “kick-in” so that you can use them for your clients but also to understand how they can be used to market and promote your agency.

Twitter is a social media tool that I wouldn’t have thought had much application for marketing but I’m now a believer. It is a great marketing tool. I’ve put together a few resources that I thought would be helpful as you explore this tool and learn how it can be used to promote your agency.

This is a great list of Twitter Tools that can enhance your Twitter experience:
140+ Twitter Tools

One of my favorite tools is Tweeter Later. You can keep your Twitter supplied with new tweets even when your not in front of your computer. You have the potential to connect with over 2,000 persons instantly making your blog post, survey, industry or agency news viral. Just keep providing rich content and you will build your following and a great network.

Another tool that has been helpful is Tweet Scan. This tool also provides nice features such as Auto Follow and Auto Reply. Use Twitter Search to find others to connect with. Try typing in “CEO” to see how you can use this tool to build a network of potential clients. 

Get others telling your story and recommending your agency.

These are actual Twitters: 

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgass

Additional ways to promote your ad agency:

• Surveys
• Videos
• Social Media
• Online Presentations
• Blog
• Viral Program

For the latest agency new business updates subscribe to FUEL LINES by Email

Tweet Scan is a great search engine for Twitter where you can search by word, phrase or Twitter user

link

The following is a longer version of the article that appeared in Journalism.co.uk last week, with some extra tools and quotes.

It’s almost impossible to sum up Twitter in one line. To some, it is a way of delivering content to mobiles as headline text alerts. To others, it’s a social networking tool for getting contacts and leads. Some use it as a research tool for developing stories; and still others as a project management tool to gather a number of contributors together – for example, drivers posting updates on traffic.

In other words, it is what you make it and the only way to figure it out is to start using it. The following is a guide to getting started on Twitter as a journalist, and some of the things that can be done with it.

Twitter for newsgathering

Contacts are central to a journalist’s work. Twitter makes it easier to find them. But whereas, for instance, Facebook requires someone to accept you as their ‘friend’ before you get updates; you can follow people on Twitter regardless. It’s where blogging meets social networking.

The more people you follow on Twitter, the more likely you are to come across a lead or a useful contact. News of the recent UK earthquake, for example, broke first on Twitter, while last year news of a fire in East London broke there too. And even as I type this, someone I know at St Pancras station has twittered that it is being evacuated. You might also use Twitterverse or PicoBuzz to spot important phrases (e.g. events).

Here’s a simple ticklist to fill your Twitter contacts book:

1. Obviously you should begin by searching Twitter for people you know, or know of, in your field. The Labour Party, Lib Dems and Conservatives all have their own Twitter accounts, for example, as do some politicians. But beware of hoaxers. This isn’t really Chuck Norris, for example. Is it?
2. Then, look at who they’re following (I find entering someone’s username on Gridjit is the best way of seeing someone’s contacts and what they’re saying, or you can use Quotably to follow their conversations).
3. Then try Twits Like Me to find people with similar interests (based on what you’ve twittered)
4. and Twubble (based on your friends) or Who Should I Follow? (which allows you to adjust according to whether you want people nearer your location or more or less popular)
5. and Tweetscan for key words (e.g. “health”, “NHS”).
6. Finally Twitterlocal will help you find twitterers in your local area.
7. You can also find a list of significant Twitter users in various fields at the Twitter Pack Project. However, as this is a wiki there is a risk that people have added themselves. It’s also US-focused.

The Birmingham Post, and particularly reporter Jo Geary, are leading Twitter-users among regional newspapers. She sees it as a great way of building a relationship with your contacts and target audience.

“It’s not just popping in, getting something, and popping out, but building something more. And because of that it’s also become a support network of people who help me, and vice versa. It moves into the crowdsourcing thing – if you want to do something you can put out questions and get answers.”

It’s all part of the wider move of journalism to becoming a conversation with readers. Abbie Lundberg, for instance, wrote one article by soliciting tweets on the topic from her followers. Nico Luchsinger even conducted his interview with me via Twitter (which gave me the unique experience of being interviewed while shopping in Tesco.)

Managing your Twitter feeds

Once you’ve set up all those contacts, it’s useful to create some filters to help manage the incoming information. Gridjit, again, has a clearer interface for viewing tweets. Desktop applications like Twhirl will give you an audio alert; Snitter allows you to filter your tweets – for key words or tweets containing links for instance. You can also set up pages to organise tweets from ‘crowds’ of twitterers (for example, friends, colleagues, contacts) using Crowdstatus.com.

You can – and should – set up Twitter to send updates to your mobile phone (click on ‘add device’ or look in settings). It’s free, and is particularly useful for following what’s happening while you’re on the move. But pick your sources carefully – Twitter will only send 250 updates per week, and it’s easy to hit that.

The first thing you should do once you’ve set up Twitter to send text alerts is to text Twitter the word “track” followed by your username. This means Twitter will text you whenever anyone mentions your username on Twitter – very useful for picking up messages aimed at you. You can use the same trick to track mentions of key words in your area, such as a key employer or your own organisation (More tips on mobile commands can be found here). If you prefer email alerts, MobiFeedLive.com and Tweet Scan (not to be confused with Tweetscan) provide them.

You can also follow links that are getting passed about a lot on Twitter though Twitterbuzz and Twitt(url)y. While Twist is a pretty impressive equivalent of Google Trends (from comments).

Twitter for news publishing, distribution and creation

If you want an idea of what Twitter can do for news publishing check out BreakingNewsOn. Headline alerts of breaking news that people can receive on their mobiles are the most obvious application, and used by dozens of organisations including the BBC, the Guardian and CNN (This post has a list of news organisations using Twitter). It’s a good way of alerting people to your content, as well as inviting participation, as Emap’s David Cushman recently tweeted: “Comments on my blog are going mad. Nothing has changed except I now use twitter regularly.”

Many newspapers have separate Twitter accounts for different sections, such as business, traffic and sports. Sky even have one for news about Madeleine McCann.

Twitterfeed will save you typing updates by pushing RSS feeds from your newspaper to a Twitter account, but this means you have to write the article first and risk missing the scoop. Instead it’s better to ‘tweet’ (post to Twitter) before you write the article – ensuring you get to the top of Google quickly, as Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves did with the arrest of Karren Brady:

“I’m only followed by 30 people or so … But these people are all … in the business of sharing information and knowledge. Consequently, a number of them followed my link to the story on the Post website, and started to talk about it on their own blogs and again through Twitter, with the effect that the Post site received an incredible number of hits as word spread.”

If you really want to track how many people are clicking on any of your links you can also use Tweetburner (or Twitt(url)y to see what they’re saying if they pass it on). Or you can use Intwition to see who’s linking to a particular domain.

Twitter is particularly useful for journalists reporting live via text message themselves. Sky reporter Julia Reid recently used it to post her “minute-by-minute” experiences at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Robert LaHue used it “to semi-liveblog a board meeting via texting” and it’s often used at conferences and events. You can also download applications that allow you to update Twitter from your mobile – this article compares 20 of them.

Going beyond 140 characters

And if you’re frustrated by the 140 character limit try some of these tools:

• Twitzer is a Firefox extension that allows you to write tweets over 140 characters. MessageDance does much the same via email, and also allows comments on tweets.
• twi8r translates text speak into ‘English’ and vice versa, allowing you to truncate your messages
• Twittermail.com and Tweetahead allow you to pre-schedule tweets to be posted (for when you are not at a computer); the latter also lets you send and receive tweets via email
• Tweetr is a Twitter reader that allows you to send files up to 10MB through Twitter.
• TwitPic allows you to send images from your phone and not only posts links straight to your Twitter account but allows people to post comments that are then posted on their own Twitter page (with a link to the photo). Mobypicture does something similar. TwitterSoap is a mashup of Mobypicture and Twitter.
• SnapTweet posts your latest Flickr picture to Twitter; Autopostr.com does much the same.
• Twiddeo allows you to do the same with video.
• Twixxer does both photo and video sharing
• And American and Canadian users can phone in their tweets using Jott.
• Or you can use the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, which does most of the above and much, much more.

But Twitter becomes really impressive when you tap into its social, conversational nature – or combine the RSS feeds from a number of twitterers. Shawn Smith used it to create the Michigan Twitter Network, which “follows more than 1,300 Michigan twitterers. We’ve gained about 200+ followers and use this account @mlive to send breaking news alerts and also poll users.” (I’ve created something similar for Birmingham twitterers). In Spain, ADN.es used it to follow voter reactions during a televised presidential candidate debate on TV.

My recent experiment with, of all things, a live book review on Twitter demonstrated that the boundary between publishing and conversation becomes blurred when you use the technology – confusing if you’re bothered about semantics, but encouraging if you’re interested in positive relationships between the journalist and reader.

At the end of the day, Twitter is just a platform. What I’ve outlined here is just the start, and there are plenty of experiments being done – the really interesting stuff starts when you try something completely new…

Feel free to follow me, by the way, at twitter.com/paulbradshaw

For more information see my Twitter-related links, or read my other blog posts about Twitter.

Within about ten minutes, unbeknownst to either of us because wonky Lotus Notes delays e-mails anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours, my colleague Todd and I sent around to the office two very similar comparison/measurement tools we found online (I was first, Todd, remember that): Twist and and the Facebook Lexicon.

It seems like with every social media conference or gathering, the topic of discussion is how to measure the impact of social media. Nobody can seem to agree how to do this (or even if we should), but I think Twist and the Lexicon give us a little bit of a starting point to work off of.

With both tools, you can search for one or more keywords to spot buzz trends in the application. Going a step further, Twist incorporates a Tweet Scan-like function that produces a real-time feed of all Tweets using that keyword.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to be effective is searching for low-volume terms. For example, if you search for “mseasons” on Twist, you can see a minuscule number, but no real graphic evidence. Apparently I’m not kind of a big deal. You need to be very broad with your terms to have any visual value. One of the examples they give on the homepage is the comparison of “hillary, obama,” which as you can imagine has been talked about a lot (note the spike during the Pennsylvania primaries).

I’ve not had a whole lot of time to play around with them and have yet to incorporate them in a practical sense, but I dig the concept. Being able to compare trends over the long term could be an incredibly valuable correlation tool between word-of-mouth and conversion – especially if they could be broadened.

Chances are you’re bored of Facebook. It was too easy. You just studied the hip cats and robbed their essence of cool.

But the fraud was too successful. It rained spam. Everyone wanted a piece of you. People you barely knew were firing sawn-off Super Pokes from all angles.

Marketers caught up and brands wanted their own weapons. The best marketers started making useful applications for Facebook and MySpace (Paul Isakson is worth a read on this). But people were already migrating to Twitter to get out of the cross-fire.

Now you can search Twitter posts with Tweet Scan. That could be exciting for you. You might want to find other friends who are “bored”, “happy” or “bored”. Maybe?

But Paul Chaney has identified a sinister angle to this story. By using Tweet Scan, ad men can target the flock according to their mood. And that’s their mood as they’ve stated it. Live.

There’s only one solution: escape on a Segway.

That’s right. The Segway. You can speed to social victory on a Segway.

There was a lot of flapping about the Segway. There’s a lot flapping about social networking. Segway made their own social site for Segway users. Wow. You can almost hear the tumbleweeds rolling in cyberspace.

But we can hijack these empty brand spaces. Why the hell not? Flip it around. Take it to the advertisers. Let’s get social with a Segway. At least we’ll only be harassed by Segway in the process.

That’s not too bad, if you think about it.

Segway was, and is, after all, the future.

Arme Unternehmen, arme Berater. An dieses neue, unkontrollierbare und schwer durchschaubare, vor allem aber verdammt schnelle Ding namens Blog hat man sich so gerade gewöhnt, und nun kommt dieses Twitter daher wie Blogs auf Extasy. Die institutionalisierte Abwesenheitsmitteilung, die Nebensächlichkeiten der ganzen Welt, wildes Gezwitscher. Was machen wir damit? Am besten erst mal ignorieren: “Irrelevant, was soll auf 140 Zeichen schon passieren?”

Zwei Beispiele belehren uns eines besseren: Die Nachricht vom Konflikt zwischen erstiVZ und studiVZ wegen angeblicher Markenrechtsverletzungen machte zunächst bei Twitter die Runde, bevor sie nach und nach Einzug in die Blogs hielt. Erst als Spiegel Online anrief, zog studiVZ die Bremse. Twitter war über die ganze Dauer Motor und Seismograph der Diskussion.

Manch ein amerikanisches Unternehmen ist da schon weiter, wie Michael Arrington von Techcrunch schreibt: Der DSL-Provider Comcast beobachtet Twitter offenbar sehr genau. Bei einem Netzausfall und nach fruchtloser Zeit an der Hotline des Anbieters machte Arrington seinem Ärger bei Twitter Luft. Daraufhin rief ihn ein Comcast-Mitarbeiter an, die Störung wurde umgehend behoben.

Was kann die Unternehmenskommunikation unternehmen? Die Antwort kann nicht in jedem Fall lauten, sich in den Brandherd zu setzen. Selbst twittern ist die Kür, dieses Instrument muss zur Marke und ihrem Kommunikationsstil passen, braucht ein wenig Fingerspitzengefühl und Zeit. Finger weg, wenn das nicht gegeben ist. Ein wenig Beobachtung kann aber nicht schaden. Von der Public Timeline, in der ungefiltert sämtliche weltweiten Nachrichten dargestellt werden, sollte man sich dabei nicht abschrecken lassen. Eine Reihe von Monitoring-Instrumenten erleichtert die Beobachtung, auch ohne selbst bei Twitter angemeldet zu sein.

Wer sich einen Überblick darüber verschaffen will, welche Themen, Firmen und Produkte bei Twitter gerade heiß diskutiert werden, kann das bei Twitterverse tun. In einer Tagcloud werden dort die meistgenannten Worte gelistet. Den Vergleich der Nennungshäufigkeit mehrerer Schlagworten ermöglicht Tweetvolume, zum Beispiel zwischen “Clinton” und “Obama”. Dass Obama weit vorne liegt, überrascht nicht. Er bedient die internetaffinere Klientel und betreibt auch bei Twitter die bessere Kommunikation. Zum Beispiel indem er seine Fans nach den Regeln der Attention Economy belohnt: Jede “follow”-Anfrage wird ebenso beantwortet.

Über die reine Quantität hinaus gehen Schlagwort- und Suchdienste: Hashtags sammelt alle Tweets (Twitter-Nachrichten), die mit “#Schlagwort” zugeordnet wurden. Allerdings müssen die erfassten User zuvor einen bestimmten Twitter-Account zu ihren Freunden hinzugefügt haben. Diese Einschränkung gilt für Twemes zwar nicht, beide vereint aber ein Haken: Was nicht explizit verschlagwortet wurde, wird nicht erfasst. Das macht diese Dienste zu guten Tools zur Gruppen-Kommunikation z.B. für Veranstaltungen, aber fürs Monitoring kaum brauchbar.

Simpel und gut für diese Zwecke ist Tweet Scan. Komfortable Details: Man kann sich Permalinks und RSS-Feeds für spezifische Suchen, etwa nach Kaffee, anlegen. So kann man sich per Feed Reader oder Feed Aggregator über Tweets zur eigenen Firma, Mitbewerbern und wichtigen Schlagworten übersichtlich auf dem Laufenden halten.

Auf ein neues Tool bin ich gestern bei Klaus Eck gestoßen: Über Quotably lassen sich Konversationen bequem mitverfolgen, zum Beispiel meine oder die von sonntagmorgen.

Eine Warnung zum Schluss: Arrington rät nun jedem Kunden, der ein Problem mit Comcast hat, sich die Zeit in der Warteschleife zu sparen und gleich auf Twitter zum öffentlichen Angriff zu blasen. Die Kunden bemerken, dass dieser Rückkanal effektiver ist. Spricht das also gegen eine Reaktion auf Twitter-Nachrichten, Blogs & Co.? In meinen Augen spricht es eher dafür, es nicht so weit kommen zu lassen, sondern den Kunden einen bequemen und direkten Rückkanal zu bieten.

Nahezu alles, was man über Twitter wissen sollte, steht im “Big Juicy Twitter Guide“.Eine
umfassende Liste der verfügbaren Microblog-Monitoring-Services einschließlich der Twitter-Konkurrenten Pownce und Jaiku bietet Internetszene.

Fimoculous introduces six apps that will probably help enhance your Twitter usage. My favourite of the lot is by far TweetScan.

Jac, Amelia and myself were thinking about how Twitter can be used for us, and a quick TweetScan search on “photography” quickly turned up some results that would probably of use to Jac, and I’m sure searches for food would yield similar results.

I think I’ve read quite a bit on Twitter, and I’m ready to progress to Twitter 201 which will talk about how us regular bloggers (ie the non-famous people of the world), may actually have practical uses for Twitter. This’ll probably occur after Chinese New Year, so stay tuned!

Tweet scan allows you to search any subject or by user across Twitter land. This is a simple and useful application built by David Sterry.

Here is a sample search on super bowl. For more Super Bowl coverage, click here.

Related:

David Sterry’s Blog

There seems to be quite the little network security community growing on Twitter, which truthfully has made for some fascinating discussion over the last few weeks. However there are a few challenges:

• It’s really hard to find each other. Searches via Tweet Scan on the “security” keyword result in everything from complaining about physical security to debating homeland security to emo song lyrics.
• Not a whole lot of of security folks are yet on Twitter, and if they are, see bullet No. 1.
• Even if you find a security person and add them, unless they use Twitter Karma, they may not even know you’re following them due to Twitter’s unreliable and sporadic notification system.

What’s the solution? Twitter Packs, while a great tool, can be a bit daunting if you’re really trying to dig into one niche area, and really at this point only Twitter power users know about the packs. Ryan Naraine suggested to me yesterday that a separate list of “Security Twits” (really, guys, it’s not an insult — Twitter users = Twits) that the security community could manage itself would be a great tool. I agreed:

SECURITY TWITS LIST MOVED HERE

So, what now? Click on the names above to view the Security Twits’ (I swear this is what it’s called…) Twitter pages, and if you’re on Twitter, add them to your follower list. If you’re not on Twitter, sign up. Whether it be Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku, micro-blogging is on fire right now, and based on research thus far the security network hasn’t spread as widely to the other two services — yet. If you’re new to Twitter, read this blog post on the must-haves for newbies.Send this list to your own security networks and recruit more Security Twits. Comment below if you have any corrections or additions. This blog post will serve as a living document. When a suggestion is made in the comment section, I will update the blog post as appropriate.

Oh, and if you want to add me to your Twitter feed, I am over here. I’ll post an update whenever this list is improved and enhanced. Feedback is always welcome.

He visto vía David Sterry un motor de búsqueda para twitter que parece bastante rápido. Habrá que probarlo y ver si realmente es un mini-Google para twitter, por ahora por lo que he visto parece bueno

Foto de Oboes

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