Why You Should Get Excited About Twitter

Posted June 26th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

After months dismissing Twitter as a fad, I jumped in earlier this year and quickly discovered a whole new social media community… and a new perspective on the business impact of social media in the future. Twitter may be the purest form of social media and the change in web behavior that Twitter represents may be may become one of the most exciting opportunities for marketers on the web.

Social media is all about candid conversations and developing relationships. Blogs started it all by giving people a new voice, but that voice is still largely a one-way conversation. Most posts don’t have many comments, especially when you eliminate all the simple “great post” or “thanks for mentioning me/my company” entries. Sure you’ll see a few high profile blogs with hundreds of posts debating the issues and building on the points of the blog, but once you get beyond Technorati’s top 100 that level of interaction is rare.

Forums and discussion boards are a step up and many communities have deep and insightful conversations on very niche topics. The problem is you often have to look pretty hard to find these groups and you often see many people shouting at each other hiding behind anonymous usernames.

Twitter is different. The culture of Twitter is very open and personal. People are identified by their real names and their picture appears next to their name whenever they participate. A click on your name brings you to a profile page with a history of your tweets and links to your blog or website. Conversation occurs is real-time so whatever is on people’s minds at home and at work is represented here, as it happens. As you can imagine, that includes many discussions about brands and product experiences.

There is certainly a lot of noise here, but that is what monitoring tools like Radian6 and specialty search engines like Summize are for. As with any type of social media, the sheer volume of conversations requires that you use smart tools to organize the data and apply metrics to understand the trends.

Companies are involved now. For example, Comcast has been widely praised for the way they are using Twitter. Service reps are monitoring tweets about the brand and reaching out personally to get their service problems solved. Customers love to see that their voice matters and companies are taking them seriously.

The funny thing is that the opportunity here isn’t necessarily about Twitter. Twitter itself may not even be a big part of this trend in the future – unless they get bought. Twitter is a private, understaffed organization struggling to find a way to make money…and they have a lot of shortcomings. I see the “fail whale” more than I see my kids in a typical day. What’s important here is that Twitter is a great innovation that started a new type of consumer behavior.

Thanks to Twitter, people are now comfortable making frequent posts about what they are doing and what they are thinking throughout the day. Aggregators like Friendfeed make this even more interesting. They collect your “tweets” and then add many of your other online activities - like shared news items from your RSS reader, Facebook updates, and product reviews submitted - and make them all available in a single “lifestream” that is published online.

Not only does this lifestream change the way people present themselves online, it encourages them to share more. Google talked about this at the Supernova conference recently. They say people have been reluctant to share a lot of their lives because they don’t want to feel like they are interrupting and spamming their friends. In this new lifestreaming environment, sharing is encouraged since friends can subscribe to your news feed and view your pictures, stories, product reviews and commentary when they want to see them. People are now motivated to share more of their life as they grow their network and shape their online image.

As the information in these profiles become richer it becomes even easier to get advice and recommendations on purchase decisions from your extended online social network. This pushes the influence of corporate marketing and advertising messages even further away from the consumer.

But this is where social media marketing gets interesting. Lifestreaming facilitates the power of consumer-to-consumer influence making it even more important for companies to be actively involved in social media. These profiles are a new window into the lives of the advocates and critics surrounding your brand. You can learn a lot more about what they like or dislike and track the impact of their influence all across the web so you can engage with them on a more personal level and participate in their lifestream.

I use Twitter to communicate and share interesting interactive and social media news and issues. If you find that interesting, follow me here.

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Interview with eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf

Posted May 20th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

In today’s Market Edge show on WebmasterRadio, Larry Weber discusses eHarmony’s experience building a successful online community with their CEO Greg Waldorf.

Webmaster Radio
eHarmony History & Success eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf on the online relationship site started by Doctor Neil Clark Warren, plus we learn how the 29 levels of compatibility were comprised, plus we learn about their marketing campaigns. Show Host: Larry Weber Show: Market Edge Channel: Internet Marketing

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The Success of Blue Shirt Nation

Posted March 4th, 2008 by Adam

In a recent post, Gary Koelling of Best Buy talks about Blue Shirt Nation, an employee community he developed with counterpart Steve Bendt. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. Through the chatter, they hoped to tap into insights that would improve customer service and marketing within the stores.

With little funding behind the site (built for free with open source software), Koelling and Bendt set out upon building the community. Following the June 2006 launch, they visited Best Buys around the country and talked to employees about the site. They used employee insights to improve the community. They encouraged users to join and post about what they liked (and disliked) about the site. In facilitating the dialogue, they began to address the biggest complaint that employees had: “My opinion doesn’t matter”.

The community now includes 20,000 members and has been influential in affecting changes to the email policy, improving enrollments in the 401k program and setting up systems for employees to communicate between shifts. In his post, Koelling calls the success a “fluke”. Building a community is not easy and it takes time. Even then, not every community will succeed. But Koelling and Bendt made the most of the opportunity by listening to employees and treating them like valuable members of the Best Buy family. By empowering them to get involved with their feedback (positive or negative), it addressed their biggest concern – that their opinion did not matter. Employees now felt a sense of ownership in the community; it wasn’t just another form of “corporate-speak”.

And it paid off. Best Buy now has a community teeming with opportunities to improve the customer experience and employees engaged in helping them get there.

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GM Goes From Blog to Community

Posted February 12th, 2008 by admin

General Motors first delved into social media with the GM Fast Lanes Blog, a success by most standards of corporate blogging. GM is posting, podcasting and even Twittering regularly, and people are commenting. But apparently all this is just a warm up. Recently they’ve decided to build upon the open dialogue principles of their first blog by creating GMnext, a new online community focused around technology, innovation and collaboration.

Adding Your Story

Once you register you can participate in the GMnext community in many ways. GM invites people to help them tell a story by contributing content through guest posts on the blog, videos, photos and even the GMnext Wiki. Frank Oresnik, a Chevy truck owner, reached the million mile mark on his 1991 Chevy Silverado and posted his compelling stories on the GMnext blog. The story was recently covered in CNet, NPR, AP and several other news sources.

The community is divided by Stories, Thoughts, Videos, Photos, Events, Chat, Podcasts and Feeds. Content within these sections is labeled by categories aimed at communicating automotive innovation: Design, Technology, Green, Ideas and Reach.

Bob Lutz, Chairman, GM North America recently introduced a rather unique community feature called Our Thoughts/Your Thoughts in which a GM executive offers his thoughts along side a post by a third party source. Larry Burns VP, GM R&D and writer/director Chris Paine went face to face about GM’s approach on global energy issues in the first dual post. There are 120 comments so far.

The video section is designed similar to YouTube with a way of sorting through clips by Most Viewed, Highest Ranked and Newest. You can rate and comment on videos, bookmark them and explore links and other multimedia related to the video. You can tune in for a live talk through the Chat section with Carl Zipfel HUMMER Director of Exterior Design on February 14th at 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST.

GMnext shows a true commitment for taking the corporation-to-consumer conversation to the next level. After seeing success with Fast Lanes, they identified an opportunity to further leverage social media to involve the masses in the creation of the GM story. I learned tons about GM and their proactive position in innovative technologies while writing this post – more than I have from the years of commercials and Transformers product placements. Hopefully their commitment to innovation and their ability to communicate it will turn around this classic American company from its 2007 losses.

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