Twitter For Business

What About Using it for Business?

Using Twitter for business is a great idea. No wait, a mandatory idea. What, your not using Twitter! Well, let me bring you up to speed of what you are missing out on: Everything! You see, social media platforms like Twitter will give your business an opportunity to give your business some real-time market intelligence and customer feedback that can catapult your brand, reaching hundreds of thousands of people with the least amount of resistances and resources on your part.

Back Up, What is Twitter?

Twitter is a powerful social media tool that is based on status updates consisting of 140 characters or less. According to the official Twitter website, they explain it like this:

Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now. Twitter asks “what’s happening” and makes the answer spread across the globe to millions, immediately….lets you build relationships with customers, partners and other people important to your business.

Use Twitter for Relationship Marketing

Twitter gives you an opportunity to connect with your clients and to build authentic relationships. These types of relationships can help your business as you transform from product based marketing into the relationship marketing that helps to build brand loyalty.

You see, we all buy products and services. Think about the last movie you saw. A couple of days before you went and saw it, you saw a great promo of it on tv or a YouTube clip that caught your interest. But, it wasn’t until your friend went and saw it the night before and claimed it was the greatest thing next to sliced bread that you made the decision to purchase! Sure the commercial was cool, but it was your friends recommendation and the relationship that you have with them that sold the ticket.

Twitter can help you build those types of relationship with your clients and business partners because you will be able to connect with them, learn more about them, and likewise they will learn more about you and your company. And this can be done on their terms in a more relaxed and casual environment.

Twitter Can Get Your Name Out There

Twitter is a powerful marketing tool and the messages that are created can reach millions of people. Wow, that’s a big number. With your current marketing campaigns of newsletters, direct mail pieces and maybe a radio spot, how many clients are you reaching? Now, don’t get me wrong, email marketing and traditional marketing are also important so don’t shelf your traditional marketing. What I am saying is that Twitter can potentially reach a far greater audience and can be marketing tool to help you manage your online image. The power of Twitter is in duplication. Twitter has a built in function that if one of its users gets and update of information they like, they are able to “retweet” it and send it out again to all the people that follow them. This becomes viral and your original tweet may be seen, well, by the entire known world…or at least those that use Twitter (and haven’t been in some cave for the last couple of years).

Get Started with Social Media Relationship Marketing

Over the next several days, we are going to look at how we can use this powerful social media relationship marketing tool can be used to market and build your brand. We will also be looking at several Twitter tools to help you communicate and manage your updates. For those that haven’t done it yet, head over to Twitter and get your own account and get ready to start building your social marketing campaign.

Comment Strategies

Comment Strategies

A recent article on Contentini.com titled “When Bad Comments Happen to Good Websites: Strategies for Managing Comments Online” talks about the different strategies that you can take to not only promote great discussions on your site, but to also make sure the noise (and spam) stays to a minimum.

Comments can be handled in one of two ways: either pre-publish or post-publish. The difference is whether you let the commenter publish their comment right away or that you moderate the comment first and then publish it. Both strategies work, it just depends on how much work you expect to do and what type of community of comments you would like to build. For example, with pre-publish comment strategies you will need to filter through all the comments for relevance and spam and hand select the comments that work for that post. On the other hand, you could let everything through and then go back and reduce the noise. The later, even though it requires less time, can really fill up a blog post with useless information and even reduce the number of good comments that you could get.

How can WordPress Help?

There are some great commenting plugin systems that WordPress uses to help reduce the noise and spam. The comment systems will capture most spam and spammy looking comments or can have people register, or use social network services such as Twitter and Facebook to comment. Let’s take alot at three popular 3rd Party Commenting systems with plugins for Wordpress.

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IntenseDebate

Automatic, the ones behind WordPress, acquired IntenseDebate, making it a real winner with WordPress. IntenseDebate allows for:

• Moderation: Auto-filter comments by keyword, email and IP addresses
• Blacklisting: Auto-delete comments by keyword, email and IP addresses, or ban users from posting
• Spam Filters: Akismet keeps the spam at bay
• Multiple Admins:Multiple Admins illustration Assign additional admins to manage the same blog/website

Commenting can also be done with services like Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID. Commentators can also sign up for an IntenseDebate profile or simply comment without one as a Guest.

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Disqus Comments

Disqus Comments lets your readers choose their identity, with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in, when they leave a comment. They also:

• Allow your commenters to easily spread the discussion all across the social web, driving new traffic back to your site in the process. Every time someone leaves a comment, they can easily share the discussion happening on your site to friends and followers.
• Disqus has their own proprietary anti-spam that was built and trained to handle the junk some people try to pass off as comments.

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Echo

Echo is the next generation commenting system. It’s the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. It is a newer player on the commenting block, but is back with features that they other two don’t have. We have not yet used Echo, but it does look promising.

• Echo has Real-time commenting: Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
• Hyper-Distributed: Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
• Multimedia: Echo items can include safe HTML, photos and video for a richer conversation.
• Strong Moderation: Echo supports countless modes and methods of moderation including ‘Pre Moderation’, ‘Post Moderation’, ‘New User Moderation’, blocking users, blocking IP addresses, bad word filtering, spam detection and more.

Each of these commenting systems have robust spam control to help weed out most of the noise that you would see on a blog. Plus, by having users register with an account, are allowing to use social networks such as Twitter or Facebook (or OpenID), the amount of unecessary and useless comments are weeded out automatically, letting you as the blog owner focus on helping to stimulate the conversation and building your community.

Twitter has made tweeting a common way to communicate for a lot of people. If you’re a Twitter addict or just starting to become one you’re not alone. Being stuck looking into you computer screen to be able to communicate with your new twitter friends on the other hand may put your life on halt so why not tweet, make new friends etc. on the move? Tripwire Magazine has put together a list of 5+ twitter applications for your iPhone to keep you up to date with Twitter while on the go.

Twitter iPhone Application

Last Wednesday, Microsoft announced that the company would officially launch Facebook (and other social networks) into their Outlook 2010 Beta product with Outlook Social Connector. Following the previous week’s announcement about Google Buzz, and rumors that Facebook would be launching their own email product, we found out details about Outlook’s new integration. The service will let you “view friends’ activities, photos, and status updates within Outlook—as well as grow your network by adding friends from the same view”.

Outlook Social Connector

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name, and title of the sender. A rich, aggregated collection of information about the sender is included.

Both Facebook for Outlook and MySpace for Outlook will be available later this year as our official release of Office 2010 approaches.

Outlook Social Connector Video