In This Chapter
Putting your business on Twitter
Using Twitter to make your business look good
Creating a network on Twitter and communicating with it
Getting and giving useful information on Twitter
So, you want to find out more about what Twitter can do for your business. In this chapter, we cover some of the essentials, explain what some other businesses have tried, and point you in the right direction to get started yourself.
People often ask Laura, "What's the business use of Twitter?" Laura frequently answers with a different question, "What's the business use of e-mail?" It's not that the technologies are similar or play the same role; it's that Twitter has the potential to filter into every possible aspect of business as a versatile communications platform and problem-solving tool. Both technologies are extremely open communication platforms that have uses way beyond the marketing and customer-engagement layer. Twitter can impact pretty much everything, from the way enterprise software works to how project status is shared. It can fundamentally change communication and problem-solving, as well as match resources, accommodate HR challenges, and lower expenses. Most of the potential business applications of Twitter are just starting to become understood.
Twitter can have powerful effects on personal and professional networks. Sales professionals can use it to generate leads, journalists to locate sources, publishers to discover new content, or any business to create better relationships with customers. You can listen to and harness the massive flow of ideas and information passing through Twitter so that you can advance your business objectives.
You can use Twitter to create ad-hoc communities, organize and publicize live events, or extend an experience to a remote audience. You can sell directly — if you do it right — or you can just develop an inexpensive listening and conversation post among the very people whose problems your business solves. You can use Twitter to generate traffic to your business's Web site. You can use it to solicit feedback. It can even make your company and brands easier for users to find on search engines such as Google.
First, it helps to take a look at some ways Twitter might fit with your brand.
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.
Tip
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. (For more on polishing your profile, turn to Chapter 2.)
After you create a great Profile page, what do you do? Here are a few simple ways to get out of the Twitter background and into public awareness:
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, (see Chapter 9) 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.
Engage. While you listen and talk on Twitter, be sure to also interact with other twitterers. Twitter is a communications tool, and although it's based on a one-to-many concept, it works best when you make friends and have real conversations right in the Twitter stream. Sometimes when you find people talking about subjects relevant to your business you can offer helpful contributions to their conversations! When it comes to business, public relations, and customer service (which we talk about in the following sections), you absolutely need to engage other people on Twitter.
Connect. Use the ability to take conversations offline and into the real world via tweetups, events, and meetings to your business's advantage. Twitter makes finding ways to meet and engage with customers in real life easy, and therein lies its largest business value. Bring your business's conversations and connections beyond the 140-character limit.
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.
Because Twitter usernames are short and frequently easy to remember, they can be a powerful way to introduce people and pass along contact information. In an interview, a reporter was surprised how easily Laura could rattle off half a dozen sources whom the reporter might like to talk to. Armed with these Twitter handles, the journalist used the profiles behind those usernames to get a quick snapshot of those users' interests, abilities, and points of view, plus links to further detailed information about them and an easy way to make contact.
Here are some tips to make your Twitter-based public relations more user-friendly and successful:
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 nagging 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.
Be genuinely helpful. Watch for conversations about topics relevant to your company or product, and provide unselfish solutions, ideas, and help to those conversations.
Listen to feedback. If someone asks you a question, answer it in your own public feed so that you can continue to generate organic interest in your promotion. Answer others who happen to tweet related questions, but make sure that your answers aren't selfish or too pushy. How can you tell? Watch for effectiveness. Do people click your links? Do they retweet your messages without you having to ask? Do they complain that you're being promotional, or worse, do they just not say much at all? Use trackable link shorteners so that you can see which of your tweets people are bothering to click or, even better, retweeting themselves (and passing your messages along for you). Sometimes, you may need to tweet a little less frequently to avoid letting spamminess make you less effective.
Offer incentives. We don't mean free giveaways or money, but value. Give people an unselfish reason to pay attention to you. It takes more than just promotions. Followers listen to you for the value you add, and if you consistently add insightful and worthwhile thoughts to their Twitter streams, they'll be there for you when the roles reverse and you need them.
Twitter provides all users access to influential journalists, bloggers, writers, and people from all walks of life. If you use it consistently and well, you can find powerful, inexpensive ways to share messages that help solve people's problems and gain visibility for your work.
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.
Warning
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.
Zappos (www.zappos.com), a sweetheart of the Twitter-for-business world, models an almost perfect implementation of the ideas laid out in The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, by Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Doc Searls (@dsearls), and David Weinberger (@dweinberger) (Basic Books). At Zappos, employees literally have a mandate to create delightful experiences for customers. The catchphrase? "Deliver happiness." Each employee who may come in contact with customers is encouraged and empowered to do whatever it takes to help. This policy holds true throughout the company's interactions, but the Zapponian culture of helpfulness absolutely shines through Twitter. Over 430 Zappos employees use Twitter, whether they're involved in customer service or not, and they all take a share in the "Deliver Happiness" mission.
When you first dive into Twitter for customer service, you may see negativity about your company, particularly at first. Keep going. The best part about Twitter as a customer-service channel is how you get feedback when a customer leaves satisfied. Many satisfied customers send out thank-you tweets that all their contacts see, which gives you instant good public-relations buzz — and that kind of buzz is priceless. Letting go of control (you don't necessarily have control anymore anyhow) of your brand and engaging publicly with dissatisfied customers can really get that goodwill going.
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, and introduce yourself — all in real time. Twitter also efficiently harnesses networks of loose ties — 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.
If you represent a company that has something to sell, you can find a unique home on Twitter. You may need to adjust your messages a bit so that you can shift from a hard-sell philosophy to an attitude of interaction and engagement that doesn't necessarily follow a direct path to a sale. But after you find and flip that switch from "talking at" to "talking with" potential customers, people on Twitter can interact with and respond to your company's information ideas and products in ways that often lead to benefits for both sides.
You can sell-without-selling just about anything on Twitter. Whether you want to sell something large (such as used cars) or something small (such as shoes), you can probably find people on Twitter who need and want them. These potential customers have questions for you about your item, your company, your staff, and you — and you can let them talk to you on Twitter about their concerns. You're in business because you solve problems and fulfill needs for people. Spend your time on Twitter being useful and informative about the types of problems you solve, and the rest really does follow.
One of the most popular examples of products and how Twitter can help sell them is @Zappos. Zappos has been a pioneer in business microblogging because a large number of its employees all use Twitter and all, in their own way, promote the brand and its products. Having more than 400 employees active on Twitter has improved communication and connection between Zappos' employees, increased its visibility and reach, banked large amounts of social capital (potentially valuable connections with people who know you and care about your work), and led to extensive press coverage and speaking opportunities.
Zappos is fronted by CEO Tony Hsieh, who tweets about his life, including his schedule, his company, and his personal thoughts — he even operates a separate Twitter account for his cat. The Twitter community embraced Tony and Zappos early on, and in return, Zappos periodically offers Twitter-only bonuses to its followers, such as free shoe giveaways.
But Zappos isn't the only company finding sales success on Twitter. @DellOutlet is another Twitter success story. We talk about Dell as a company that used Twitter to start reversing its reputation as a struggling brand with a poor customer image in the section "Customer service," earlier in this chapter. But Dell, like Zappos, has also started offering Twitter-only promotions, tweeting links to deep discounts that have generated over $1 million in revenues. Most notably, you can attribute more than $500,000 in revenues to less than 1,000 followers — demonstrating that the coupons not only got passed along on Twitter, but that they probably also got passed along via e-mail to people not even on Twitter. The airline JetBlue (@jetblue) has also had great success advertising deals on Twitter: A special $14 cross-country flight offer was snapped up by Twitter users almost instantly, and retweets helped spread the word. This past winter, it was estimated that more than 1,500 coupons and offers appear on Twitter every day. Dozens of coupon-aggregating accounts (like @dealtaker) and even Web sites (http://www.coupontweet.com and http://www.cheaptweet.com) are emerging to organize these coupons and find the best ones.
Two women making exceptional use of Twitter for discovering gift-givers in need are Melanie Notkin (@SavvyAuntie) and GiftGirl (@GiftGirl). Those who sell any kind of gift resource can use Twitter to reach their audiences and magnify their impact. Notkin and GiftGirl have found unshakable niches with their custom gift-finding service. How to find the right gift for loved ones for birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries is actually a pretty commonly tweeted question. The advice these women provide on their Twitter accounts and the commerce they offer through their Web sites (http://savvyauntie.com and www.giftgirl.com), place them squarely in Twitter's elite when it comes to product sales and knowledge contribution.
You can replicate their success be keeping these tips in mind:
If you're in any way in the business of creating, whether it's art, music, film, photography, or what-have-you, Twitter can become a home away from home. Twitter users are incredibly receptive to creative people who tweet — just ask MC Hammer (@MCHammer). The former rapper turned preacher turned producer had a terrible image: bankruptcy, bad decisions, and excess. But he joined Twitter around the same time that he co-founded a new Web startup, DanceJam (http://dancejam.com), and conversing with followers on Twitter let the world see another side of him.
MC Hammer is a pretty cool example of how you can use Twitter for rebranding, marketing, and self-promotion as an artist, but Twitter can also help relatively unknown people make it to the top for the first time.
Twitter also helps artists such as Natasha Wescoat (@natashawescoat) increase their prominence in the art world. Westcoat's work is finding a home in art galleries, movies, and more, and she can attribute some of that increasing reach to contacts that she made on Twitter.
So, how can you (as an aspiring musician, artist, photographer, or other person who makes a living in the creative industries) find success on Twitter if you aren't already on the level of Dave Matthews (@DaveJMatthews), MC Hammer, Ryan Adams (@ryanada_ms), John Mayer (@johncmayer), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), or Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah)? Here are some simple tips that you can follow:
Surround yourself with successful people. We don't mean just others in your profession or field who are more successful than you! We also mean people in other fields or areas of creativity that inspire you. You can start to find them by finding out which of your real-world contacts in the industry are on Twitter or by doing a few Twitter searches to find like-minded people while you build your network.
Take it offline. Take the connections that you make on Twitter and organize events and get-togethers that bring the experience offline. You can also find out about other members' tweetups that are relevant to your business. In creative industries, the talent is what counts, and so real-world connections can really lead to new opportunities, fan segments, and opportunities to build your loyal fan base.
Share your content. You don't have to give away all your hard work, but put your music, art, videos, or other work out there for people to sample and play with. Start a Blip.fm (
http://blip.fm) channel, upload a short video to YouTube, offer free mp3s on your Web site, or set up a page that features a few Creative Commons–licensed photos. Whatever you do, give people a way to take a look or have a listen so that they can get to know you and what you make.Note
Creative Commons (
http://creativecommons.org) is an organization that makes it easy for people to license their work so that they retain their copyright but allow it to be shared. For more information on how Creative Commons works, go tohttp://creativecommons.org/about.Tweet on the go. Give your fans and potential fans a look backstage, in the van, behind the canvas, on tour, or behind the lens. Take them with you by tweeting while you travel with your music, art, film, or other creative medium. Also, let them know where you are! Many fellow Twitter users would love to hang out with you if you happen to be in town.
Engage your fan base. Don't just post static links to content or schedule changes! Talk to your fans and respond to them through Twitter. They probably want to ask you about the thoughts behind your work, your experiences, and you. Let them. Answer them. Engage them in good conversation, and watch as they spread the word about your work to their friends and followers.
Be yourself. Put a good face forward, yes, but don't try too hard to project a persona that really isn't authentically you. Twitter is a medium that rewards authenticity, candor, and transparency. Try too hard to put your best face forward, and you may lose yourself and stop being genuine. Twitter people notice if you aren't being real. Don't worry about impressing people — just do what you do and be yourself, and the fans will follow.
For the most up-to-date examples of how musicians (http://wefollow.com/tag/music), TV personalities (http://wefollow.com/tag/tv), actors (http://wefollow.com/tag/actor), comedians (http://wefollow.com/tag/comedy), and other celebrities (http://wefollow.com/tag/celebrity) are using Twitter, check out some of the top most-followed individuals in each category on user-generated Twitter directory We Follow. For more in-depth reading on how musicians can use Twitter, see (http://pistachioconsulting.com/musicians-guide-to-rocking-twitter).
If you have a new or growing company that you want to introduce to the world through Twitter, start a separate account for the company, just as Laura did with @oneforty. You may find balancing traditional corporate professionalism with the level of transparency that Twitter users have come to expect to be a little tricky sometimes, so keep these guidelines in mind when you start your new account:
Provide value to the Twitter community. Your company account can become a source of news, solutions, ideas, entertainment, or information that's more than just a series of links to products and services. Educate your Twitter followers. Reach out to people whom you can genuinely and unselfishly help. You can even offer sales incentives for products, in the way that
@DellOutletdoes, as long as what you offer has genuine value. Establish your company's leadership in providing ideas, solutions, and innovation.Attach a real-world face to the account. If you need to use a company logo as the avatar because of internal regulations or because multiple people are maintaining the account, make sure to list the names of the actual people who are tweeting in the Bio section of your business's Twitter profile, and consider signing each tweet with the author's initials. This approach lets your followers become familiar with who's behind the company voice and it makes them feel more engaged. People like to talk to other people, not brands.
Don't spam. Don't flood the Twitter feed with self-promotional links or product information that don't deliver genuine value to readers. Whether self-promotional or not, you never want to clog up peoples' Twitter streams with irrelevant information. You might not talk about your cat or your marriage on a company account, but you can still make it personal. Profile an employee, talk about milestones for employees, or talk about what's going on in your office. You can even hold tweetups at your office and invite your followers to stop by, like Boston's NPR news station WBUR (
@WBUR)does. This approach gives people a peek at what makes your company run.
Note
Before tweeting in earnest for your company, it's a good idea to openly discuss your plans to demonstrate that you're taking a productive, innovative approach and to prevent any misguided fears that twittering means you will somehow suddenly start to leak sensitive company information or otherwise break reasonable corporate policies. As with any public communications platform, you do need to consider just how much you can say about what goes on inside your business. Transparency is key, but you don't want to disclose industry secrets in a public forum. Every company has a different style. It helps to have a good plan in place and make sure that the employees assigned to the company Twitter account are trustworthy and have solid judgment.
Community-building sometimes suffers from a kum-ba-ya perception that devalues the importance of using tools such as Twitter to connect with people. But building a truly engaged community is extremely valuable.
Apple is an example of a company that benefits tremendously from its engaged community in terms of promotion, sales, and even customer support administered from one Apple fan directly to others. Apple built its community by building great products people get passionate about, not by worrying about any particular tools. So as you approach the Twitter opportunity, remember how powerful and engaged community can be and remember what people actually engage around — the things they really and truly care about.
At its best, the community concept of sharing and connecting can help you spread a positive image and good comments about your company; done wrong, it can veer into feel-good, self-help banter that's ultimately empty. Again, don't fuss too much about Twitter as a tool. Think more strategically about the community and what they care about and engage them with substance and real contributions.
Building a community is not necessarily the same as building a network:
Network: Your network is there for you and your business, a kind of foundation for concrete professional growth.
Community: Building a community means inspiring the people who follow you on Twitter to embrace your brand and create a feeling of solidarity around your business, service, staff, or product.
With a community, you can build a loyal corps of evangelists: people who are passionate about your brand, even though they have no professional or financial stake in the company. If you can engender the community feeling through your use of Twitter and how you interact with your customers, your customers begin to feel emotionally invested in your success online.
You can see this community feeling with Zappos. The Twitter users who follow the shoe retailer are so dedicated that they act like they're legitimately invested in the brand's success. Zappos fosters this effect by staying on top of what people on Twitter are saying about them, or about shoes in general, through the use of monitoring tools. Then they jump in with help, as needed. If you tweet about having trouble finding any kind of shoe, for example, you can expect a Zappos employee to send you a direct message (DM) or @reply in less than a day that includes links to the proper pages on the Zappos site. Plus, Zappos has spent so much time building a strong community that Twitter members who don't even work for Zappos will routinely pass along information they see or hear and will even reach out on behalf of the company and connect potential customers with Zappos.com.
You can also see the community around less popular products, such as Comcast's cable offerings. Even while people express frustration about their cable service, members of their Twitter network still point them to @Comcastcares to find help.
Community is also a huge aspect of many musicians' and artists' Twitter experiences, such as Imogen Heap (@ImogenHeap) and John Mayer (@johncmayer). Heap uses Twitter to interact more directly with her fan base, which increases the loyalty of her listeners, who have come to see a more human side of her and feel like they've even come to know her. If someone tweets something about Heap that her Twitter followers don't like, you can watch the community leap to her defense. At the same time, tweets from her Twitter community usually reflect the tone of her own calm tweets, remaining mellow and not shrill.
Musicians, actors and other celebrities are really personality-based businesses, and bringing forth those personalities on Twitter by asking questions and sharing parts of their lives cements a valuable engagement between the artist and fans.
You can build community through
Genuine interaction
Asking questions
Honesty
Transparency
Following people back who follow you
Not over-automating
Being more than a link list
Providing value
Twitter is an excellent tool for crowd-sourcing and focus-group research. You can easily get the answers you seek after you establish a relationship with your followers that encourages participation, conversation, and sharing. The real challenge is finding reliable methods to extract and analyze the data: Twitter is still a very new medium, and analytics tools associated with it aren't yet that advanced. Larger corporations are diving in to conduct their own research and build their own tools that can make sense of the tremendous amount of data being generated on Twitter all the time.
If you're willing to experiment with different ways to watch the Twitter stream, you can collect passive data (what people happen to be mentioning), do active research (asking questions and conduction polls), and even engage actual focus groups and ad-hoc communities in live events.
As you build your network and start gaining more followers on Twitter, it becomes a very useful tool for informal conversational research. If you ask a really good question and send it into the world with a #hashtag to make the answers easier to find, you can even do research with a very small following, because the tag attracts curious bystanders who may later become new followers. As you ask questions, you can use any number of polling tools or even a simple manually generated tracking system (such as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) to collect the answers and data that you receive.
Twitter can be thought of as a global, human-powered, mobile phone-enabled sensing and signaling network. What Twitter knows about the world is pretty incredible, and once businesses understand how to work with that information, it can contribute toward closing some pretty important gaps in our economy between supply and demand.
Transparency is a crucial marketing buzzword for some businesses and a scary reality for others. Lest you think we're asking you to live out that unpleasant dream where you forget to wear your pants to school, relax. Transparency doesn't require exposing company data to corporate spies or baring your soul for the Internet. More than anything else, it simply means being honest, disclosing your biases, admitting to mistakes, and not trying to force your message and spin on everyone all the time.
Although many Twitter users find themselves becoming more casual in their use of the service over time, you need to find your own personal comfort level between acting like a real person and over-sharing. After you find that line for yourself, your business, and your employees, being genuine and transparent on Twitter becomes second nature. Transparency fosters trust and relationships. It's no secret — people like to work with people they like.
Here's how to achieve transparency:
Release control. Stop worrying about what might happen to your brand. Instead, listen to what your customers are trying to tell you and respond to that feedback. The truth is, you haven't been able to control your message for a while now: You might just not have known it. For example, look at the hashtags
#motrinmomsand#amazonfail.In the former example, painkiller brand Motrin put out an online ad campaign that targeted mothers; it failed spectacularly when real moms took offense at its content. They used Twitter to express their anger and ultimately get the campaign suspended. The Amazon Fail incident happened when books pertaining to gay and lesbian themes were suddenly pulled from the online retailer's bestseller lists. Again, Twitter users smelled something fishy and instantly started spreading the word. Both companies learned from going through this process that a better Twitter listening practice would have helped them address concerns early and prevent a conflagration.Admit to problems. When you acknowledge that your business and you occasionally have rough patches, you can form stronger, more genuine connections with your community. That kind of open disclosure has limits when it comes to some professions. Obviously, people in the legal and medical professions, as well as government agencies, have to restrict and curtail their Twitter use because of privacy issues. But for most businesses, honesty is the best policy.
Reach out continually. Don't stop seeking out the customers who are talking about you (you can find them by conducting regular Twitter searches; see Chapter 9) and reaching out to them. That personal touch goes very far in establishing and maintaining a positive perception of your business or brand.
Be proactive. If you're engaged with the community in a genuine way, people forgive most mistakes. Twitter's community is pretty cooperative, and if you embrace it, you can be rewarded with unexpected benefits like loyalty, advocacy, and even organic, voluntary promotion of you and your work.
Like with any new tool, business owners often feel some uncertainty and concern about how to manage employees so that they don't waste time or make costly mistakes when using Twitter. Remember to apply common sense and manage based on behavior and results, not just specific tools. Your existing guidelines about e-mail, blogs, commenting on Web message boards and forums, and even conversations with outside individuals cover any concerns that you have about your employees' use of Twitter.
That said, it is important to take heed that information spreads fast on Twitter, and that Twitter is a very open and searchable public forum. Errors can — and will — go farther, faster, so the exercise of common sense is in order.
Before you start using Twitter for your business, provide staff with guidance on how to use it and what to be cautious about. Twitter is extremely new to many people, and they may not yet be familiar with just how public and open it is. Definitely set a few ground rules to help avoid common mistakes. You can simply write up a one-or two-page set of reminders or direct employees' attention to the parts of your existing HR policy that cover public communications.
Make the guidelines basic, clear, and easy to follow. Here are some thoughts to get you started:
Remember that if you wouldn't say it in front of your parents, kids, or boss, perhaps you shouldn't say it on Twitter.
If you do something confidential at a company, keep private information under wraps. Respect clients' privacy, as well as your company's.
Respect the company brand when you're out at tweetups (Twitter-based meet-ups) and events. Anyone can get quoted at any time.
Perception is reality. Even if the complaint you tweet right after a client phone call wasn't about the client, it can be misconstrued that way.
Manage your time on Twitter well so that it doesn't interfere with your workload.
Unless your business has other issues that come into play (for example, if you work for a law firm or government agency), these basic rules should be enough to keep people from abusing their time on Twitter. Customize them however you want.
Tip
Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool when it comes to building your professional team and bringing them together. You can set up meetings, tweet notes, meet customers, and more — and your staff can connect more easily by using Twitter, as well. The more of a team you can build, the better you can weather any economic buffering.
You can also use Twitter to share knowledge, collaborate both inside the company and out, and gather business information and research. After you start to build a healthy network, you need to send out only a few tweets about your project, problem, or issue before people come out of the woodwork to try to help your business and you. If you haven't been building your Twitter network, you may have to wait a while for this aspect of Twitter to become useful for you.
Say that you come up with a major presentation about what your company does or sells, but you need something to complete it, such as a chart or a link to a relevant study. Twitter can probably help you find that missing piece. People on Twitter usually offer a helping hand when it comes to knowledge sharing, collaboration, and information gathering, especially if you spend time interacting on Twitter and building your network. Avid Twitter users are all aware of the same thing: By helping out others, they can get a hand when they need it.
The very existence of this book is an example of Twitter bringing people together for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Laura got to know two Wiley employees on Twitter and in person at conferences, which led to a conversation about Laura writing Twitter For Dummies. Laura in turn had met Michael and Leslie via Twitter-related conversations and events, and they had all come to trust one another over time. We also reached out via our personal Twitter accounts and @dummies on Twitter to ask the broader Twitter community what they thought belonged in a book about Twitter. Moving forward, we'll continue to listen and interact via the @dummies account, our Web site, and, of course, via the community at Laura's Twitter-powered community startup www.oneforty.com.