Gemma Craven (@gemsie), the New York Group Director at Social@Ogilvy, suggested that with the recent launch of Twitter’s new advertising dashboard, advertising API, the collaboration with AMEX, direct marketing tools for brands, and its prominence as a topic of many panels, Twitter might just be the belle of the ball yet again.

After the show, Craven was asked if indeed Twitter had lived up to the anticipation.

“No. But I do think that it was the communications tool we all used throughout the event that trumped all others including text and calls. It was often much faster to tweet and get a response than text.”

Twitter Dominates Super Bowl & SXSW

In Superbowl ads, Twitter was mentioned in 50% of the ads while Facebook was mentioned in only 8%. Facebook may be the leading social platform, but  there is a certain something to Twitter that has caused it to pull ahead as the leading social platform cited in advertising.

Apparently, the same thing was true at SxSW where many had adopted Twitter as the go-to communications tool. As Craven said, “every single panel had to be submitted with a hashtag, and everyone was using it to amplify and engage with their audiences.”

It seems that even non-Twitter-users understand what hashtags are all about – so it’s no surprise rumors have been flying that even Facebook is looking to integrate them into their own platform.  Given the widespread use of hashtags in advertising, it makes a lot of sense.

Twitter is no longer the enfant terrible of social platforms – instead, it’s the teenager who has gone off to college, and now, visiting back home, demands respect with its well-earned status.

Shipping Containers That Tweet

I’m often asked if I think there are some businesses that shouldn’t use Twitter. I might once have answered, “Well, a global conglomerate of shipping companies might find little value there.”

But then, at the Digital Boost event in Copenhagen, I met Jonathan Wichmann, the social media manager for Maersk.  If you’ve ever visited a major cargo port, you’ll have seen the Maersk label on shipping containers, trucks, and even ships. They’re big – a global Fortune 500 company – and distinctly business-to-business.

Maersk has over one million fans on Facebook, and a healthy 46,000+ followers on Twitter. It turns out that there is a whole world of people who like to follow container ships and see photos of deep-port off-loadings. Wichmann said that Maersk’s ROI on social media is over the top, and that they have been able to assign a value of over a million dollars to their Twitter account.

From Wichmann, I heard a similar refrain to what other brand managers and marketers profess: it’s about the brand’s underlying passions and telling stories.

Maersk has followed sound social media marketing practices: they’ve clearly defined their voice and brand persona; they have recognized various micro-segments of audiences; and they communicate accordingly to each of the major social platforms.  They are a company worth watching in this space.

Would Henry Ford Have Used Twitter?

At the ReThink Conference in Oslo, I met up with Scott Monty (@ScottMonty), global head of social media for Ford Motor Company.  Ford has long been a model user of Twitter with its many user accounts such as @Ford and @FordMustang.

Of course, the marketers at Ford don’t expect their social media work to be a direct driver of sales, but that doesn’t mean it never happens.  While this example is a few years old, it’s still a nice illustration that sometimes that magic can happen.

Drawing For Twitter

While attending the Social Media Marketing World conference session this week in San Diego, I noticed that the person sitting next to me was fervently drawing away on an iPad.  Anne McColl (@annemccoll) told me that she frequently draws her notes and then tweets the drawings.

While at the conference session, other attendees were sharing their thoughts and quotes on Twitter as text.  Anne’s drawings stand out, and deservedly garner extra attention.  If you’re a visual person, you might consider trying this kind of note taking.

Anne McColl drawing used with permission of Anne McColl.

Twitter Local

But what if yours is a local business looking to connect with more local people? It is true that you can find more people in your neighborhood on Facebook. But once you find those people, Facebook just isn’t conducive to your sending over a message to that neighbor who hasn’t been formally introduced to you yet. It’s like striking up friendships on the New York City subway – it just isn’t done.

So, back over to Twitter. You log on and search around for people in your area, and sure enough, you find a bunch. Then, you follow them and add them to a list, whereupon some of those people will take note and follow you back. And, for those that don’t follow you back, well, you’re following them. Over time, you’re bound to have the opportunity to engage.

Using Twitter Like A Good Neighbor

Once you build up a good list of local tweeters, you can start to interact with them. The approach that I have seen that is most effective is simply being a good neighbor, sharing your thoughts and information about your community. That means never being self-promotional: as soon as you start doing that, any trust you may have earned is going to go flying out the window.

It is perfectly OK for your profile page to be a bit self-promotional, and to advertise your business, but even there, I wouldn’t overplay it. Instead of a profile that says, “Acme Soap Company, your source for the finest scented soaps,” consider something that is friend-worthy like, “Acme Soap Company, helping folks stay clean and smell better.”

Better yet, include something that helps to indicate your being local like, “Acme Soap Company, helping folks stay clean and smell oh, so good, from the heart of Kingston, NY!” By including your local town or neighborhood name, others can more easily find you in local searches, and perhaps even feel a closer affinity with you for being a neighbor.

If you’re clever, you might even find a way to include some image that shows your hometown in your profile background photo.

Searching For Twitter Neighbors

Use advanced twitter search to search on city name and state or zip code. The search functionality used to include a drop-down that allowed you to narrow down the search by x amount of miles nearby – but that drop-down has disappeared. If you do want that functionality, you can manually input a search using the search operators near and within, like this:

near:”12401″ within:30mi

In all of the distance search parameters, you can use “mi” for miles, or “km” for kilometers.

If you want to get even more technical, you can use latitude and longitude along with the “geocode” search operator, like this:

geocode:41.92820589736225,-74.0047607421875,10km

You can find the specific latitude and longitude of an address using a tool like geocoder.us or Latitude Longitude Finder.

Not everyone who tweets from a general area will show up in the search results. Twitter typically pulls that information from either someone’s profile, or if they are tweeting, from a device that shares geo-location.

Following The Local Breadcrumbs

Another way to identify more locals on Twitter is to follow the accounts of local media like a newspaper or radio station. While it’s certainly conceivable that someone in Duluth is following Woodstock Times, you’re more likely going to find locals. But it’s also possible that the person in Duluth is an expat of Woodstock, and is still connected to the hometown.

You can also create regular searches for key phrases that might indicate an interest in local goings-on. This might not yield too much in a small town, but if you’re looking to create a list of people in a certain large-city neighborhood, this tactic can help to build a robust list. For instance, in New York City, a local marketer could find people that mention the popular recreation facility at Chelsea Piers.

Local Hash

Be on the lookout for hash tags being used by local tweeters. In Houston, the locals sometimes use #HTown, and then #HTownTraffic.  If you’re sensitive and aware of these local hash tags, it could bring your own tweets to the attention of a larger local audience.

Twitter Local Ads

Twitter’s promoted tweets and promoted accounts can be an inexpensive way to remain prominent in the tweet stream of locals. At this time, you can select larger cities and areas, but not smaller towns.

I’d check back with Twitter’s advertising platform often. Twitter executives have indicated that small and local businesses are important to the company, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t update this functionality in the near future.

Local Business

A Wall Street Journal study found that only a fraction of small businesses consider Twitter a viable social media platform to grow their business. I’ve certainly heard it from business owners, too, with sentiments like, “people don’t go on Twitter to make a purchase.”

That thinking exposes an age-old sensibility that marketing activities have to yield direct results, and misses the potential value of a relationship-building platform like Twitter. If you do it right, those new local friends might even become your friend on Facebook.

As a student of social media, I’m ever amazed at the complexity and richness of Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. Every week, new features are added to those systems, meaning that, as marketers, we must keep our noses to the grindstone of learning.

The Twitter Ecosystem

In contrast to those complex platforms, there is sweet, simple Twitter. Its development was inspired by cell phone text messaging, and thus, its creators innocently or knowingly became the inventors of the most uncomplicated of social media systems.

Despite this simplicity, there are a few moving parts – and it can behoove the marketer to keep these various parts in mind. To that end, I propose a view of Twitter as a system. In the most fundamental approach, the system has two major components: mechanics and behavior.

The two components work hand in hand, so I’m not really going to draw a line down the center and talk about each – instead, I’m going to use those two components as a view on the system.

Twitter’s navigation pretty much lays out most of the system for us:

• Home
• Me
• @Connect
• #Discover

We fundamentally have four major chunks of activities. In Marty Weintraub and Lauren Litwinka’s new book, The Complete Social Media Community Manager’s Guide, the authors could have just as easily been talking about Twitter when they spoke of community management as being “…all about listening, publishing valuable content that connects with your audience in a human way, engaging with the community, and managing our reputation.”

Home Sweet Home

In Twitter, “home” is comprised simply of your main feed – that is, all those tweets of all those people who you follow. There is also a mini-dashboard showing your main stats, main trends, and a few suggestions for others to follow.

It’s All About Me, Me, Me!

The idea of your own profile is a major component across all of the major social media platforms, if not the central component. Your profile is your self-expression. In it, you let the world know enough about you to perhaps initiate a conversation.

Twitter took a cue from perhaps one of the most redeeming features of MySpace, and allows its users to use a pre-designed background or add an image of their own, and most recently, a large image banner. You can write a bio for yourself using a whole 160 characters.

As there is so little you can do in Twitter, it’s fair to say that you want to take full advantage of what you can do.  Many brands and individuals have done some clever things with the background image, header image, and individual photo.

Lists also exist in the Me section. Twitter Lists are a powerful means to categorize people in ways that allow you to take in the Twitter stream in different ways. For example, I have a list of people that I consider absolutely brilliant (appropriately named the “absolutely brilliant” list). On many days, I just want to read the stream based on those individual’s tweets. It can reaffirm my hope for humanity.

It’s All About The Connections

The “connections” page in Twitter is simply a filter of the main feed that shows tweets where you’ve been mentioned, followed, favorited, or retweeted.

The process of connecting with others in Twitter is ubiquitous, and the system frequently suggests even more people to follow. Connections in Twitter are asymmetric, meaning you might follow someone while they might not follow you back, or vice versa. Some people add others to lists, where they do keep track of what they’re saying, all the while not actually following them.

Many people have come to regard their follower count as an indicator of status, and others (including some tools) even take note of the ratio of how many people are following them versus how many they are following. @SalmanRushdie has over 515,000 followers, but is only following a little over 375 people, thus it follows that he has a higher status than someone who has 500 followers and is following 750.

Another way of looking at the follow-back is that it’s a really, really small gift. There is a lot of interesting research that’s been done on how gifting in general can have a strong impact on influence; thus, I do believe it would serve the community manager well to consider their Twitter follow-back strategy.

Dr. Livingston, I Presume?

Twitter’s “Discovery” section is a veritable dashboard for creating new connections and finding information that might not otherwise make its way to your door. The tweet stream here differs from the home page, as it’s not just an unfiltered stream from all of the people you follow, but instead is filtered based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks might be interesting for you. Just about everything I see in this stream appears to have been retweeted already a fair amount – thus, the algorithm might be based on how often a tweet has been shared and by whom.

There are also modules that help you find people based on your existing email account contacts, or based on who you’re already following. Twitter also shows you trending tweets, and a section in which you can find prominent users based on categories.

One of the most interesting behaviors to emerge from Twitter has been the use of hashtags. When used, hashtags become clickable, providing the user with another filter of the larger Twitter stream, in effect, become another powerful means to discover interesting information and users.

While not built into the system mechanically, users of Twitter have used these hashtags as both a means of creating communities, as well as a whole new way of communal communications, the Twitter Chat. Just as book authors have always gone about being guests on talk radio and television, they are now wont to be active guests on various Twitter chats.

In Twitter, we have a social platform that most recommends itself to the discovery of new connections – making what the sociologist Mark Granovetter called weak links. If Granovetter was correct in his thinking, it’s in weak links that we learn new ideas, are exposed to different concepts, and our status quo is shaken up.

Other Features

There are two other features in the Twitter ecosystem worth noting: direct messages and advertisements. Brands are all over the place on direct messages. Many simply ignore the feature, while others use them for automated responses. Neither use is ideal – instead, it can be a great way to make that informal contact where appropriate.

We can guess with some feeling of certitude that the founders of Twitter embarked on their adventure with the hopes of making money. Twitter has stumbled a bit in finding its revenue model, although the bet seems to be on advertising. There have been a lot of experiments, but so far, little that has been conclusive. While some larger brands have cited successful case studies, most marketers have not been pounding a path to Twitter yet. My bet is that there will be some significant changes this year to its advertising system, and that it’s all worth watching carefully.

Keeping It Simple

Amongst the social media platforms, Twitter possesses an interface that feels the most simple — if you compare the Eco-System diagram above with one for the other major platforms, it really is simple.

It’s possible that as Twitter gains more features, it might lose some of that simplicity, particularly if each new enhancement moves away from that core strength of weak link building. In its most recent changes, for example, the acquisition of the six-second video sharing app Vine is notable. But, even there, Twitter is staying on course in maintaining its largest differentiator from the other platforms: simplicity.

Twitter Eco-System graphic created by the author using stock images from VectorStock by license.

In this case, it was invoked to provide protection to corporate entities, establishing the notion that corporations would have the rights of individuals.

During Occupy Wall Street, one of the rallying cries was that this protection must end. One notable poster stated, “I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one!”

But despite the protesters’ beliefs, people have been shown to project personality onto brands. Brand managers can cultivate that tendency and endeavor to create a brand with a personality that reinforces brand attributes.  Still, on Twitter, a brand can be somewhat limited in how it communicates, particularly when seen in contrast to an individual.

For Example: Red Bull

If you look at an exemplary Twitter profile like that of Red Bull, you can see where the brand is doing everything  it should be doing in the way of positive brand maintenance: regular postings, great lists that tell stories, and following back relevant people.

What you don’t see is very much chatter. You don’t see the Red Bull account doing high-fiving, top-of-the-morning kind of tweets.  And with a large brand like Red Bull, that makes sense.

What a large brand can do, though, is activate its employees as a tweeting army.

SAP Example

SAP is a global technology company that has over 5,300 employees in 128 countries, with 47 different product lines in 28 different industries. The SAP Twitter account has over 63,000 followers, although the account is only following under 300 individuals back.

SAP has placed special emphasis on providing training and guidelines to its employees, helping to create a vibrant community around the brand. SAP has taken this a step further, and created a program of top community influencers, most of who work for SAP customers or partners. The Twitter list of SAP mentors is shown here.  While the list is only comprised of 129 accounts, their reach is pretty significant, and highly targeted.

There are also over 39 official SAP Twitter accounts, and dozens of unofficial accounts associated with SAP. When you consider the thousands of individuals that are somehow associated on Twitter with SAP both internally and externally, it is easy to imagine that SAP on Twitter is much more than a single official account, but a real community. At this level, the organization has helped to establish the communities, and can now step back and play a supporting role.

Ritz-Carlton Example

A couple of years ago, the vice-president of global PR for Ritz-Carlton, Allison Sitch, was travelling in Shanghai, and met a remarkable and enthusiastic concierge, Apple Wang. As they chatted, Sitch formed the idea of having Wang share her vast knowledge of Shanghai with guests through social media.

Sitch wrote, “What excited me most was her passion for the destination and just how much she knew about it! Every little tip you could think of.” That was the start of a regular employee-guest Twitter program that is still going strong.

To date, the Ritz-Carlton has had over 200 employees participate in taking turns to share information and tips on Twitter.  There is a regular “guest Friday,” wherein an employee sits in as the guest tweeter. There are at least 25 employees that join in regularly, from a sommelier at Half Moon Bay to a general manager at the New York City Central Park hotel.

The marketing team provides quarterly webinars for employees on how to best handle themselves on Twitter, along with written guidelines. According to Sitch, whenever a person is a guest tweeter for the first time, a member of the marketing team sits in with the guest.

The Ritz-Carlton is one of those “love brands,” like Harley-Davidson, Disney, or the Coca-Cola Company that has real fans. One of the interesting things I heard while speaking with Sitch was that while their existing customers tend to connect with them on Facebook, it’s on Twitter that the brand is able to make connections with journalists and travel professionals.

Raven Tools Example

It would only be natural for a company that makes tools for SEO and social media marketing would be making use of Twitter. At Raven Tools, employees, particularly those that are public-facing, are encouraged to create a company-specific branded account like @RavenJon, @RavenCourtney, and @RavenArienne. In fact, new employees are pointed to an extensive blog post on the subject that explains the thinking behind the practice.

Raven has recognized that companies can be dealing with a minefield of issues when it comes to tweeting employees.  Who owns the account? Or the followers?  Is it fair to ask an employee to use their personal account on behalf of the brand? Are they representing themselves or the company when they tweet?  By having separate accounts that are company branded, a lot of those issues are obviated.

It might be argued that in having dual accounts, a person is dividing their true self.  At my own agency, we found that in trying to maintain separate accounts, one or the other account would get short shrift, and thus we encourage employees to be themselves, and to develop their own brand.

A Twitter Army

Whatever policy you adopt, the first question to ask is whether your brand could benefit by having more people tweet? The question here isn’t whether you should have a Twitter account, but whether you should actively encourage many people in the organization to do so. The answer is likely to be different depending on your industry.

There are three main groups of tweeters:

• The main corporate or brand account
• Key people, such as the CEO or head of marketing
• Everyone else in the company

Then, depending on your brand, there might also be outside people, such as those SAP Mentors mentioned above.

The main corporate or brand account can be the main source of company tweets, but can also act as a sort of Greek chorus, supporting others tweeting for or in relationship to the brand.

It’s a numbers game: a marketing department can only do so much.  If you added a dozen or more people tweeting, could there be a big effect? Each organization must examine the potential benefits and risks of actively encouraging the creation of a Twitter army. In any case, there is going to be a strong need to create policy and training – but if you really want to create that army, you have to encourage.

Feature image and accompanying images from VectorStock, used under license.

To this day, the memory of homework sends chills down my spine — I just wasn’t one of those people who dashed off their evening assignments with ease.

If only they had called it research. Research evokes pictures of Mission Impossible dossiers of secret agents, or scientists discovering a breakthrough cure for a killer pandemic.

Research is a key task in social media marketing. We have to listen to and analyze our communities, perhaps even engaging in what some people have called online ethnography, or netnography. We analyze the competition, and stalk research individuals who may be influential in our fields of interest.

There are many software tools and websites available to help with this research, some for free, others at a hefty price. Some are the cat’s pajamas for large brands, but too expensive or complex for mom-and-pops. The options are dizzying and the sheer quantity, daunting! So, when I hear of a new tool, I think, “yeah, yeah – put it on the ‘to-be-evaluated’ pile.” When I hear of one like TweetLevel, made specifically for Twitter, it moves to the top of the pile.

Introducing TweetLevel

TweetLevel is an influence and conversation analysis tool for Twitter created by Jonny Bentwood, head of influencer engagement at Edelman. Of course, to measure influence, we already have Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex, so when I tracked Jonny down, the first question I asked him is why he thought we needed yet another such tool.

In his response, he described how he doesn’t think tracking influence across multiple, very different social media platforms is effective.  He added, “…those systems judge online influence by popularity; TweetLevel judges influence by how information flows.”

This line of thinking is pretty much in line with a 2011 Study from Oxford: the spread of information doesn’t just depend on how popular a person is, but how they’re connected to others.

The first thing you’ll probably do in TweetLevel is a search on your own individual Twitter account. TweetLevel is not one of those zippy-fast applications like Google search that provides instantaneous results, but the 30 or so second delay is worth the wait.

TweetLevel returns four measurements, amalgamating them into an overall score. The four measurements are:

• Influence
• Popularity
• Engagement
• Trust

One of the beautiful things about TweetLevel is that the overall algorithm and methodology for creating the TweetLevel score is fairly transparent. The minutiae of what constitutes the particular metrics are not as clear.

Bentwood wrote that the influence score “takes the detail from over 39 metrics and significantly uses regression analysis to find out and reward people who start or curate ideas.” The system uses Topsy as a check and balance to verify that spam accounts aren’t getting through.

TweetLevel places individuals on a landscape of different influence types. If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (is there anyone who hasn’t yet?), you’ll recollect the notion that there are different types of influencers. TweetLevel puts them into the following categories:

Idea Starters – In trying to discover people who are influential on a given topic, this might be your most fertile area. These aren’t necessarily the most popular kids in the class, but they are often the people who start an idea, and those popular kids then spread it around.

Amplifiers – I’ve never shared a cup of coffee with Guy Kawasaki, but I’ve seen his tweets. Guy is the classic amplifier, as he shares a tremendous amount of various types of content with a wide audience. He seems to be connected to a lot of Idea Starters.

Curators – Once the Idea Starters and the Amplifiers have done their job, there are often people who keep collating and curating information on a certain topic. They might be analogous to Gladwell’s “mavens.” We look to these individuals for their deep expertise on a topic.

Commentators – These people are not considered very influential, although you look to them as providing a measure of trending opinions around a topic.

Viewers – These individuals are on Twitter, but they’re not participating. In the common Twitter vernacular, these may be the lurkers. If they exert any influence, it’s in their search behavior.

The idea is that there is an eco-system of influence, and that we need to understand those individuals at the different parts of the system. If your job is to help a brand play an influential role in a particular space, it isn’t enough to just target the Guy Kawasakis.

Using The Information

OK, it was fun looking up your own TweetLevel, right? And then comparing it to all of your friends? But we’re marketers, so we’ve got to get some real value from the tool.

In this example, I’ve searched on “Twitter Marketing” as a topic. Like Google searches, you’ll want to use the quotes around the phrase to avoid results that simply have both words. TweetLevel also lets you compare your search with the results for other phrases. In this screenshot, I’ve included “Facebook marketing.”

You can also see the top users by Share of Voice:

And a “Top Shared Web Links:”

Right off the bat, I can see that some of these results are people spamming Twitter with links to questionable material, which means that Topsy might not be having an effect on this part of the results. I do see some good material, too, such as a great post by @jeffbullas. So, in short, as a marketing research tool, TweetLevel is helping me to discover some good material.

Word clouds are pretty ubiquitous across a lot of Twitter tools. It does provide, at a glance, the possibility of finding some related phrases that you might have missed.

TweetLevel also provides a list of the top 100 users by relevance for your topic, extending the first report. If you input your email address, the system will send you a link to the full list that you can also connect to via an RSS feed. I queried a few community managers who agreed that a CSV file would probably be more useful here, so that the names could be dropped into other tools like Commun.it or SocialBro.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges

Or maybe we do.  If you want to add another badge to your author page, TweetLevel provides the code (iFrame) to add their badge.

A Great Tool For The Marketer’s Quiver

I’ll be including TweetLevel in my ongoing marketing work for clients, primarily as a discovery tool. Often, by working in a tool like this, thinking is stimulated.

Are there topics and keywords I wasn’t thinking of? Can I find new people discussing my topics? And, for now at least, the price is perfect for me: free.

If you call over to Zappos after ordering your newest pair of beach shoes, the person answering the phone will be able to pull up your whole history with the company and provide you with their extra awesome customer service. To do that, Zappos, like most companies, uses a CRM system.

Companies need to have something like that for social media, too. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to easily see not only who makes mention of or shouts out to your brand, but perhaps even a whole history of shared communications over a period of time. You’d like to see if you (or your social media team) followed up on a question or a mention.

I know for a fact that a lot of smart people are working day and night to fulfill these desires, and that soon, affordable CRM systems that cover social media will be available. Meanwhile, at least on Twitter, I’m covered very nicely with the browser-based tool Commun.it.

Screenshot of Commun.it dashboard

If your follow list is under a thousand, keeping up with Twitter communications isn’t too challenging. When you’re working with a brand with thousands of followers, though, keeping track of mentions and followers can be incredibly daunting.

Relationships

With Commun.it, I can see at a glance my high-value relationships and engagements. The concept of high-value, at least in the Commun.it world, consists of influencers, supporters, and engaged members.

You can also think about these in terms of people you’ve mentioned or retweeted, people who’ve mentioned or retweeted you, and people with whom you’ve had some back and forth.

Followers

The second major component of the dashboard is a follower management section. I’ve used various tools for managing my Twitter following, but find it even more convenient to have it in the same interface where I can keep track of noteworthy tweets.

Many brand social media managers don’t bother following people back, and in that omission, are missing the opportunity to give fans a very small gift. In Commun.it, you can see Consider to follow, Consider to unfollow, New followers, and New unfollowers.

Groups

Lists are also another oft-overlooked and underused feature of Twitter. Through the clever use of lists, community managers can recognize influential individuals, and help to build stronger engagements by seeing people in micro-segments. Commun.it’s interface allows you to import and manage your lists into Groups.

While Twitter’s number of lists is limited to ten, Communit allows you to create even more groups. You don’t get quite the same functionality as Twitter lists (users don’t get notified when they’re added), but you do get the benefit of seeing people in different groupings.

Monitor Engagement

In the Monitor Engagement section, you can view the history of your Twitter communications with an individual. The interface shows the times that a user has replied, mentioned, or retweeted you, and in turn, the instances where you’ve replied, mentioned, or retweeted that person. You can click in, and review those actual tweets.

You can also create a list of blogs or other webpages related to your company, or create a list of terms, such as your brand name. Once you have these lists, Commun.it will show you Tweets that make mention of those sites or terms. Typically, this is the type of task for which you’re apt to look for a more robust social media monitoring tool; but at times, I find the Twitter-centricity of monitoring these items in one place to be handy.

Discover New Leads

In the Discover New Leads part of the tool set, you can enter in keywords or particular phrases. In this way, you can find others interested in your topics and grow your base of social relationships.

For fun, I created an item around the keyword [Danah Boyd]. Commun.it created a list of people who’ve tweeted using that phrase and provided me with a nifty tweet that I could send out to those people: “Hi – happy to engage & share the Danah Boyd vibe with you.” I might be starting a Danah Body fan club tomorrow. Inquire below if you’d like to join.

The Widget

Commun.it provides the code for a simple widget that you can add to your own website. The widget shows a count of your followers, active members, and retweets this week. It also shows the top two members of your Twitter community and invites users to join.

Widgets of this type for other social platforms are great for bridging your Web or blog audience with your social media communities. Gone are the days where your own website was the principal piece of your digital real estate – now, you have more of an entire social eco-system.

Let me start out with a comparison. For Google, there are meta tags, for Facebook, there are Open Graph tags,and for Twitter, there are Twitter Cards. As in all cases, these tags are simply elements that you place in the code on a page of your website so that it causes a different type of listing. Usually, the reason for doing this is that the listing generated as a result of using the tags is better than the listing without it. In the case of Twitter Cards, this is 100% true.

What Are Twitter Cards?

According to Twitter, Twitter Cards “Make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a ‘card’ added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.”

If you take the time to create a Twitter Card for a URL on your website you will have greater control over how your content is displayed within Tweets. Twitter also boasts that you may be able to drive more traffic to your site and increase the number of people following you due to content attribution.

The most compelling reason to add Twitter Cards code to your website is the exposure and extra content it provides your Tweets. When implemented correctly, users will be able to hide or show a summary, image or video within Twitter.

How Do Twitter Card Tags Work?

Here we see an overview of all the properties and values you can specify with Twitter Cards. First, take a look at these, and then we will get into the three specific types of Twitter cards and how they work.

Now that we know all of the properties and values, we can take a look at the individual cards.

What Are The Different Types Of Twitter Cards?

There are three main types of Twitter Cards.

Summary Cards

This is the most basic Twitter Card type. By creating a Twitter Summary Card, you are telling Twitter your title, description, thumbnail and Twitter account attribution. The summary card allows a person to show or hide a Tweet summary.

Summary Card Code Example

Summary Card Preview Example

Photo Card

This card allows you to specify the photo you would like delivered with your Tweet. The Photo Card allows you to show or hide a photo within a Tweet.

Photo Card Code

Photo Card Example

Player Card

This card allows you to send a Tweet-sized video/audio/media player card. It allows you to show or hide a player in a Tweet.

Player Card Code

Twitter provides this example for mobile applications. This is sample markup for a player from foobar.com where foobar.com is also providing a URL to a raw stream to be rendered in Twitter’s mobile applications.

Player Card Example

URL Crawling And Twitter Cards

Like Google, Yahoo and Bing, Twitter respects the good old robots.txt file. “If a page with card markup is blocked, no card will be shown. If an image URL is blocked, no thumbnail or photo will be shown.”

Twitter uses the Twitterbot user-agent. For example, here is a robots.txt which disallows crawling for all robots except Twitter’s fetcher:

You can, of course, also block only certain directories and pages. If you are going to do this, please make sure to read more about robots.txt files first. If incorrectly implemented, this could really hurt your website. It would be a rare situation to want to block Twitter entirely.

Rules For Twitter Cards

Twitter has listed out a few important rules for Twitter Cards. Full disclosure: much of this section was taken from Twitter documentation to ensure it is correct.

Outside of making sure to define the player card and correct properties, you must:

• Make sure your card works well in Twitter, otherwise it will not be approved
• Test your card in all browsers
• Provide a raw stream to video and audio content when possible
• Use HTTPS for your iframe, stream, and all assets within your card
• Use wmode=opaque if utilizing Flash for the twitter.com experience, so that the player renders at the correct z-index

While you must do the items above, you must *not* do the items below.

• Generate mixed content browser warnings; all Twitter clients use HTTPS, and you must not break the lock of the browser
• Automatically play content
• Require users to sign-in to your experience
• Commingle sharing features from other networks inside your player

Using The Twitter Card Preview Tool

With all the dos and don’ts regarding Twitter cards, it’s a good thing that Twitter is offering a way to preview your code implementation. Once you have your cards ready to go, test it out with the preview tool here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/preview

What do you think of Twitter Cards? Comment below!

The rapid rate of growth of social media has led to an incredible amount of confusion of terms. Even old notions like community and engagement seem open to differences of interpretation.

It’s no wonder that when we speak of social media marketing, we’re often talking about very different things.

The Five Types Of Social Media Work

In my own agency’s work, we’ve found it useful to think of social media marketing in five different categories:

1. Brand maintenance – listening and responding
2. Community management – participating in and nurturing communities
3. Influencer outreach – targeting and engaging with relevant influencers
4. Reputation management – thought leadership and reputation work
5. Big splash – large creative social media campaigns, like the Pepsi Refresh or the Old Spice Guy campaigns

It’s only natural that we use Twitter in different ways, depending on what approach we’re taking. It’s for that reason that when I hear of people sharing “rules” of Twitter engagement, I often find myself involuntarily cringing. After all, a good rule of thumb for one type of campaign may be entirely wrong for another.

Brand Maintenance

In maintaining your brand on Twitter, you’re basically posting a few times a day – just enough to keep the people who are only following a handful of friends from getting their streams filled up with your posts.

While not terribly exciting, the @chevrolet account is an example of this approach. It would be nice to see them responding to some of their fans in the exemplary way @DavidsTea does. With the latter, it seems no mention goes by without remark or thank you.

You might quibble and say that customer care can be described as brand maintenance, or even community management. Or, it could be a whole other category. Are customers part of a customer community? Or is taking care of them simply good brand hygiene?

Influencer Outreach

Influencer outreach might also be called professional stalking. Unlike the amateur stalking of the mentally questionable camera-toting celebrity hounds we read about, professional stalkers know how to make connections without anyone even know they’re trying. They do it with respect.

In less sophisticated attempts, a person retweets every single tweet the influencer makes. It comes off like the guy who laughs at all of his boss’s jokes, with the similar result of everyone else muttering insults.

While we might joke about it being a form of stalking, it’s really about making the right connections, and paying attention to the right people for your brand in a very particular space. If we were to borrow the metaphor of a lion stalking its prey, perhaps an antelope, imagine that instead of Old Lion inching her way through the tall grass, she’s hanging out by the water waiting, knowing that Old Antelope will be along any time now, because it’s that time of day.

Reputation Management

Reputation management  has been a mainstay of the Search Engine Optimization (notice the great big capital letters!) world since day one. In both SEO and social media, it can be either offensive or defensive. Of course, if your brand’s CEO has already been caught bribing the governor’s secretary or sending text images of his boxer shorts, you’ll be in defense mode – and those do seem to be the types of stories we think of when someone mentions “reputation management.”

In the offensive approach, the garden gates open into the realm of thought leadership. In this type of Twitter campaign,  the community managers can themselves get involved in Twitter chats, or coach employees so that they can join or lead chats. The entire narrative trajectory of the Twitter account can be carefully crafted to enhance a position of respectability within your sphere.

Big Splash

Finally, we get to the type of project that most closely resembles my cousin Jimmy executing his best imitation of a meteor hitting the surface of the backyard pool: the water explodes outwards, hitting all of the hitherto dry aunts sipping their ice tea in their lounge chairs. These are the campaigns that are written about in the advertising magazines, and perhaps even spread about like this season’s flu.

Twitter isn’t normally associated with those types of campaigns. Instead, they tend to be the bailiwick of Facebook and YouTube.  Where Twitter often comes into play, though, is in a supporting role, helping to keep the stories flowing from one medium to another.

Ready, Set, Plan!

When you hear about “best practices” in Twitter marketing, consider whether the advice applies for each approach described above. It’s possible that the advice might hold for one approach, yet not another.

It always pays to go back to the basics of “what are we trying to achieve?” Or ask your boss what it is you’d have to make happen on Twitter for you to be named Employee of the Month and win that free vacation to Hawaii.

You might focus on one of the approaches above, or some mixture of several. Or perhaps you’ve discovered some other categories? Hashtag Aloha!

In an ideal situation, the journalist would have been thanked, added to a list, and engaged. Ouch!

It’s easy for community managers to get caught up in the daily and hourly flow of all the bits of information coming and going, and as a result, miss critical activities. To prevent these types of omissions, develop your own Twitter workflow for the people managing your Twitter community.

It can help to think through the four main groups of activities:

1. Reciprocation – follow people back, say “thank your” or simply answer a question
2. Nurturing of Connections – find new people to connect with, follow them, and then make a real connection to the person
3. Content Creation – create interesting content, through original authorship or curation
4. Engagement – get involved in conversations and chats

These activities can flow in a cycle that slowly builds up more and more brand equity, influence, connections, and influence. In economics, this is referred to as a virtuous cycle.

It could look like this:

Reciprocate

Did anyone include your name in a comment, or directly to you? If so, answer.

• Did anyone retweet you? If so, thank them.
• Did anyone new follow you? If so, are they real/interesting/relevant? If so, follow them back.
• Is there anything interesting in your stream to reply to? Particularly with the new people… If your daily new followers are 25 or fewer, it isn’t difficult to look over those new followers and see if there is an opportunity to engage.  If your daily new follower count is much higher, this can be difficult, but still very much worth the effort.

Nurture New Connections

Follow new people. Do you have a plan for following new people (if you’re trying to build your Twitter following, you should be, yourself, following new people every day)? You might follow new people based on:

• Use of certain key phrases in tweets or profiles
• People within a certain geographic area if your organization is local in nature
• People that are in mutual networks (following, being followed, or mutually following one another)

Creating Content

We’ve entered into a time in which “content marketing” has become a cherished buzzword and concept. Even clichés can represent an eternal vérité; however, so even if you haven’t used the phrase “Content is King” in the past six months, content is by and large the stuff that makes up the Internet. It’s the cosmic dust and ether of our online universe.

Here are some of the things you can try to capitalize on content:

• Curating content found elsewhere that is relevant
• Sharing events like trade shows and conferences
• Creating a “story,” that is, a series of tweets that have a cohesive narrative

Engage

Of course, in engaging, you’re creating content, too. But it’s content that has an extra jolt of unicorn sparkles, because it’s interaction with other people. That is, after all, where all the magic of this stuff we call social media occurs.

Some magical ways to engage include:

• Responding to what someone else has tweeted – many of the most effective users of Twitter are directly tweeting to others (a tweet beginning with @SomeonesName)
• Retweeting great and relevant content
• Joining in or even being a guest on Twitter chats
• Bringing relationships offline by meeting people

Using Lists

Using lists can help in all four areas of activity. By creating interesting lists and adding individuals to those lists, you’re giving a “micro-gift” to that person – showing that you find them interesting. The list is in itself a piece of content that you can share with others. How you name lists and group people can in itself tell a story.

And finally, by keeping Twitter lists, you can more easily engage with people. Remember, people aren’t notified when a list is deleted – only when they are added to a list.  Include list maintenance in your Twitter community management cycle to keep this important feature active.

Once you’re following over a few thousand people on Twitter, using those lists will be the easiest way to keep track of people based on subject expertise, geographical area, level of influence, or other criteria.

Tools Of The Trade

Tools can often help you do many of the tasks mentioned above more easily than the Web-based version of Twitter. Even working in one of the common 3rd party Twitter interfaces like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck can help you keep an eye on list members in a way that is just plain onerous in the web version of Twitter.

Some of the other tools I’ve found useful include:

• SocialBro
• Communit
• Tweepi
•  (feel free to add your favorites in the comments, below)

These suggestions for a Twitter Community Management Guide are by no means meant to be exhaustive.  But if you don’t already have your own guide and process, it is a good starting place. If you do find things to add or edit, I’d love to hear from you.

Feature image and accompanying images from VectorStock used under license.

“He’s makin a list, He’s checkin it twice” -Santa Claus is Coming to Town, ‪Haven Gillespie

People love lists. In the opera Don Giovanni, the licentious main character’s servant Leporello maintained a list of his boss’s conquests.

As children, we might have been encouraged to make lists of what we wanted for our birthday, while our parents made lists of groceries to be picked up on the way home.

And now that we need a book for vacation, we might even consult the best-sellers list.

If you know your HTML, you’ll know that a numbered list is an ordered list, while a list simply separated by bullets is an unordered list.

When the word first entered our language, a liste was the outer boundary of a field – the place that was used for battle. Later, people would tear of the edges (or lists) of a piece of paper, and use them for counting-off things — thus making a list of items.

Twitter And Lists

In October 2009, Twitter announced the addition of the Twitter lists feature. The idea was that lists would increase discovery and add value. They would also make it “easier to curate tweets into meaningful real-time experiences on your own sites via the Lists API.”

The list feature is quite simple: you can create lists with a name of your choosing, and add Twitter users to that list.  People receive a notification when they’re added to your list. Others can then see a list of your lists, and “subscribe” to one or more of those lists. If they subscribe to a list, the tweets of people in that list show up in their stream, even though they aren’t specifically following those people.

There are two main touch points in these actions:

1. People are notified when they’re added to a list
2. People can see (and subscribe to) your lists

Like all the posts I write for this column, the main point is using Twitter for marketing, and these two touch points are your opportunities for adding value to your Twitter marketing.

Adding Someone To A List

Many of the lists I keep on my personal Twitter profile were created to help me keep track of individuals that at one point or another blew me away with their awesomeness – or are a part of a group I’m interested in.

It’s an easy way, for instance, to see the tweets of everyone at my company. I also have a list of people that I’ve found to be “absolutely brilliant.” I have people like @zephoria and @wnd, who I have the greatest respect for. It’s just possible that when they received the notice that they’d been added to my “absolutely brilliant” list, that they then immediately wrote down my name, with a note to be sure to send me my favorite scotch at Christmas.

If, on behalf of your brand, you’re doing an influencer outreach type of social media marketing project, this can be a great way to catch the attention of individuals you are hoping to reach.

Your List Of Lists

Most of the time, we create lists as the need occurs to us. But if you back up and look at your list of lists, you’ll realize that that list tells a story. What if your lists reflected major components of your brand’s vision or values?

The Coca-Cola Company, for instance, is working hard to be all about happiness. What if they had a list of the happiest people they knew? And a list of people who made other people happy? Lists like that would reinforce the story of the brand’s relationship to happiness — much more than a list of people tweeting from different company divisions.

Maintaining our Twitter lists can easily be forgotten in all of the social media activities on the community manager’s task list. Keeping great lists alive, adding to them, sharing them every so often – these are all activities that can lend the Twitter list activity some real power.

Listorious

If you’re interested in working your lists, Listorious is a free web-based application that can make the task easier. Listorious was developed by Gregory Galant (@gregory), the entrepreneur behind Sawhorse Media and the Shorty Awards.

You can also use Listorious to find lists that you can subscribe to – a great way of discovering interesting individuals. You can add your own Twitter lists to the Listorious directory, and discover the lists that you’ve been added to.  Just like the small gifting component of following people back, following a list can send the list-maker the message that you’re paying attention.

Twitilist

Twitilist is another application to help you maintain your Twitter lists more easily. Twitilist has a nice drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to drag your followers (or at least their itty-bitty avatars) onto your pre-existing lists.

Closing List

Here’s a list of actions to take from this post:

• Use Twitter lists to connect with influencers
• Consider the story that your list of lists is telling
• Use Listorious to maintain your lists
• Subscribe to lists that list you

Is there anything you would add to this list?

photo of list: licensed under Creative Commons