The season of marketing conferences is upon us, which provides opportunities to discuss Twitter marketing with brand-side and agency marketers from near and far. It was at one such conference, the famous SxSW, that Twitter debuted back in 2007. Now that six years has gone by, was Twitter still the talk of the show in 2013? 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 pane [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

Twitter is the ham radio of social media. With it, you can sit in your basement (figuratively) and connect with like-minded individuals near and far away. Never mind that you enjoy nibbling on Manchego cheese while listening to Harry Belafonte songs, you can be sure that somewhere, someone shares those passions – and it’s on Twitter that you’ll most likely connect. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

The big news of the week was that Google has surpassed Twitter in the ranks of social networks, taking second position behind Facebook. While pundits argue about whether those G+ users are active or not, it seems that the growth of Google’s social mega-platform is simply a matter of time. But then, there was another piece of research that shows Twitter as being the fastest growing social platform in the world. 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 t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

In 1886, a case was brought before the US Supreme Court: Santa Clara County versus the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.  The case was remarkable in that the Fourteenth Amendment was invoked, an amendment that was originally written in the aftermath of the Civil War to provide protection to former slaves. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

The dog never ate my homework. Or at least, I never tried to use that as an excuse, which is odd, considering my family actually owned a dog kennel. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

As a bona fide Internet nerd, I dream about some odd things. At the top of my list is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that spans all social media. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

Although Twitter has been around for a long time, there are still many people who do not know what Twitter Cards are. Well, good news everyone: by the time you are finished reading this post, you will! 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 i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Buttons & Widgets | Twitter: Cards

Our little baby is growing so quickly! Just yesterday, well, in 2007, Twitter was debuted at SXSW. It was the same year the iPhone displaced the celebrities and politicians on the cover of Time Magazine.  By the time the vice presidential candidates debated earlier this month, over four million tweets concerning the debate were exchanged. 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, w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

What if a prominent journalist followed a brand’s Twitter account and no one noticed? No one on behalf of the brand reciprocated the follow. 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 acti [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

"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 sim [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

Fourteen years before Twitter had its debut at SxSW,  professor of educational psychology and semiotician Gary Shank wrote a paper titled Abductive Multiloguing: The Semiotics of Navigating the Net, in which he describes the concept of the multilogue: “It is as if everyone who is interested in talking can all jump in at once, but still their individual voices can be clearly heard. (…) it is as if someone had started writing a piece, but before he/she gets too far, people are there magically in print to add to, correct, challenge, or extend the piece.“ I’ve yet to see a better descri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

Just about each and every morning, business strategist Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss) goes over to her window overlooking the Lake Michigan shoreline of Chicago and takes a photograph. She then posts the photo to Instagram and Twitter, often with a message bidding her followers a good morning. She’s even got a different hash tag for different views, such as “#lizharbor3.” While Liz’s approach to saying “good morning” goes beyond a simple “good morning, Twitter,” it might still fall into a category of tweets that a recent academic paper  described as Presence Maintenance, that is [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

The very subject of this post makes me shudder:  the idea that social media in general and Twitter in particular, should be used for lead generation is horrifying. At least it is if we use old-school sales approaches to new-school social media.  At its best, social media is one of the greatest revolutions in communications technologies, enabling people from across the world to connect with one another. At its worst, it’s another channel for salesmen to send us pitches. Social media and sales don’t work together too well. All of the psychological factors that make social so po [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

Facebook may have its friends, Google Plus its circles, but Twitter has always used the ambiguous term “follower.” Odd, only because a follower could bring to mind one of those unfortunate people that drank the grape Flavor Aid with Jim Jones. But pool-side in Cancun, you might catch your significant other following an attractive person with their eyes, a meaning that seems to fit the Twitterverse. When Twitter first came on to the scene, many marketers jumped on and played what I call the Twitter Follower Game or Follower Churning, wherein you follow a fair amount of people. In a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

Thanks to John Heywood, a writer and courtier to Henry VIII, we have classic epigrams like “Haste makes waste,” “a penny for your thought,” “beggars can’t be choosers,” and “the more the merrier.”  My favorite is “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” which Heywood actually recorded as “Wolde ye both eate your cake and have your cake.” When it comes to Twitter, I most value each of my many individual interactions  (let’s call that eating my cake) -- but at the same time, I’d like to continue enjoying the benefit of that content outside of the Twittersp [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

In November 2009, author Rick Moody published the entirety of a short story tweeted out in 153 hourly posts. He didn’t simply take a story and break it up into tweet-sized chunks, but specifically wrote it on Twitter. Moody said that he saw Twitter’s character limits as “some strange, poetical limitation that would be fun to work with.” The experiment wasn’t without its detractors, and Moody himself said that he preferred to write for books -- that anything else has a sense of gimmickry about it. One interviewer asked, “What about pacing, narrative arc and voice when a story [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Marketing

On October 28, 1939, an auctioneer sold off the entire company-owned village of Chichester, located in upstate New York: each and every house; factory building; the old social hall; and even the two-roomed schoolhouse. Seventy years later, this small hamlet isn’t unlike most other small rural communities. The grocery store exists only in the distant memories of some old-timers. The church’s last remaining parishioners lost the ability to maintain the building years ago, which like so many other churches, Grange halls, and Odd Fellow lodges across the country, was repurposed as an artist [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Social Media Marketing: Hashtags | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column

What can social media marketers learn from protests in Spain? Given that Twitter was used to get out the word about these protests, there's plenty of insight to be gained. To that end, researchers at Oxford  analyzed nearly 600,000 tweets over a 30 day period to learn how people were influenced to join these protests, discovering important information on how tweets spread. We'll cover the study's findings and clarify the technical language thanks to explanations given to Marketing Land by one of the study's authors, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon. You can read the study PDF here. The Study [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Twitter | Twitter Marketing Column | Twitter: Statistics