After waiting a respectable period of time to see if it would survive, I
created my first account on Twitter at the beginning of October 2007.
I was going to write a long-ish post about Twitter 7-year anniversay for tomorrow.
Then I thought of all the posts I have written about the social network over the years.
The very highlights for your enjoyment, in chronological order.
Twitter for Business
Is it Time for Corporations to get a Twitter Presence (November 2007)
Twitter is an interesting tool. Imagine you have an advisory council who will give you feedback on things that are of interest to them (note the emphasis on *them*). Then wrap around that concept the thought of community. And voila', you have some sense of what the advantage could be. How you employ this force is up to you.
My advice (see if it stands the test of time):
- Speed counts
- Facilitate conversation
- Get your idea out simply
- "Relative" anonymity can be good for business to build relationships
- Nobody "makes" you share
- Get the pulse of what is going on
Your customers are becoming more and more comfortable sharing more than just their opinions online. They've been researching products and services and are now happily finding alternatives that fit their needs. Do you really want to ignore the ways in which they may express their opinions about what you offer?
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Business Uses for Twitter (August 2008)
1. Have a presence in a channel where your customers could be
2. Try new ideas in a space where you will likely receive feedback
3. Give the community of other users a way to see your business personality
Still very much applicable.
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You're on Twitter, Now What? (February 2009)
This post got a lot of play as it was tweeted by Mashable at the time. It's still one of the top searches at Conversation Agent.
Companies and organizations generally join for slightly different reasons. Some of which are:
- competitors are there
- agency said it was a good idea
- everyone is talking about it
- opened an account to reserve company name
- and more...
However, once people sign up as representatives of an organization, especially if that company does not have a clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish, people tend not to participate actively. One of the reasons might be that Twitter does not scale well in commercial terms before your stream becomes a string of commerce.
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A couple of posts where I track content on Twitter, complete with charts.
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Twitter: Macro Insights from Micro Interactions (April 2009)
The Twitter @ConversationAge Effect (February 2010)
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Twitter as Customer Service Channel
The Other Story on Twitter Tuesday: Best Buy and Laughing Squid (December 2007)
Another storm was brewing on Twitter Tuesday, and it was courtesy of
Best Buy. Although the company later apologized in writing, their legal
department took the initiative to send Scott Beale of Laughing Squid a cease and desist letter for running a picture of a t-shirt which parodied their brand. Scott had been Tweeting the whole affair...
I concluded the post peppered with screen shots with a parting question:
If those tools are available to customers, why wouldn't companies use them as well? Conversation is always preferable to taking positions.
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Comcast Cares on Twitter (May 2008)
What I have seen so far is pretty bold:
- specific troubleshooting
- email resources - helping people with some changes they've made in the way their servers handle mail
- live modem diagnostics
- information on new features
- a human voice, apologizing for snafus, even admitting "I do not know" and hopefully going to find out
Last August I wrote a post at Fast Company expert blogs about Comcast that got a lot of comments. The post was voicing how a huge organization has tremendous difficulty dealing with customers, even through the channels they designated - namely a simple address and name change request and inquiries about pricing.
The company's recent (looks like April 6, 2008) move on Twitter is a step in the right direction - that of customer conversations.
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And that it was... soon to be followed by many more.
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Top Customer Service Accounts on Twitter (August 2010)
Based on execution, not (self)promotion, I took a closer look at how many of the customer service accounts on Twitter are doing to share the top examples with you. The criteria for vetting were:
- answering customer questions in real time -- in other words, they have the support of the organization to be problem solvers, and not just to point to policies and disclaimers
- thinking about customers first -- which means, navigating the line between company rules and customer needs with skill. It will come as a shocker to many of you, putting a "customers first" tagline is a tiny step if you don't walk the talk
- orienting customers on what the account is about -- often you can tell the level of thoughtfulness from the bio alone
What customers want is a reliable and responsive contact for when things are not going so well. However, to work as part of an integrated marketing program, customer service in social should be fair.
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Twitter, the Social Network
Twitter is a Social Network (November 2008)
Twitter encourages and engages certain features of our nature that are essential to our social lives. It also helps visualize social patterns and regularities, which humans are very good at picking up.
- the adaptive
- the imitative
- the cooperative
People cannot be understood in isolation, and then summed together. Social reality emerges inherently from the collective patterns born of their interactions. Twitter is a map of several social networks that intersect and overlap long enough to give us a glimpse of threads appearing in other quasi conversations.
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Twitter Brings Interactions to Events (March 2009)
Or the famous live tweeting.
Benefits to having a back channel:
(1) listeners tend to focus more if they want to share it;
(2) they will share more content with attendees and non attendees;
(3) so that many more can participate not just with questions, but by bringing new information to the conversation.
Perhaps the sweet spot for me would be to share information with those who could not attend.
As a keynote speaker and conference attendee, Twitter has been part of the experience for years.
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Twitter and Google Aren't at War (November 2009)
To me, it's not a choice between one and the other - it's about integration.
- Twitter is great for discovering what people are talking about.
- Google Reader is great for discovering what they think.
Using Google Reader and Twitter together frees you from using Twitter's clunky search tools or having to watch your stream in real time.
Look at the date -- same discussion, different year.
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Twitter and Community
Kaizen and Blogging (July 2009)
The Twitter chat I founded, among the first ones. Still going strong as #kaizenbiz.
The principles that guided me:
- Micro productivity can lead to macro results when applied persistently and patiently.
- Focus on the people - readers are your customers, be in service to them.
- Focus on the process and not the results.
- Doing the right thing.
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Also see My Twitter Interview on Conversation and Community (July 2009).
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Twittertales, the eBook (November 2009)
This would have been a terrific opportunity for Twitter to embrace the community, instead of trying to launch an initiative with the very same name I had already done.
Instead, Twitter never acknpowledged the crowdsourced connection stories.
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Twitter and TV
Twitter is the Modern TV (April 2010)
What's a valuable tweet? In the client they built, PARC and MIT address topic-based browsing:
- Topic relevance: Users particularly appreciated tweets
relevant to their interests. They empowered this approach in the Eddi
prototype, described in the paper.
- Tie strength: Users made sure to read tweets by strong ties and individuals of particular interest. This approach lends credence to the tie-strength design taken by Eric Gilbert in WeMeddle (wemeddle.com).
- Serendipity: Some users followed accounts that were far from their usual social circles or interests, simply because the person’s tweets were interesting. These users deliberately increased the amount of “noise” in their feed for the reciprocal opportunity to find a needle in the haystack.
I concluded that integration was the best approach.
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Twitter and Media
Twitter Lists Reveal Interests of Followers (July 2010)
Where I talked about how mainstream media was starting to use lists to break news, aggregate content, etc.
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The Stream Comes First (March 2011)
Where I provided an example of citizens as media during the Japan Earthquakes and Tsunami as well as the community fundraising initiative at #SxSWcares.
It is about both/and -- watching and doing. That is the future of news -- and of business.
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There were at least 7 things that could have killed Twitter and didn't. Infrastructure was one of them -- remember the Twitter Fail whale?
Many of us laughed together about it.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.