Twitter for Business

Facilitator - Ron Casalotti, BusinessWeek --> @roncasalotti; @bwbx
(Notes from Matthew Lees --> @mlees)
(Edited by Devin Brown --> @devintrix; Ron Casalotti -->@roncasalotti)

• Twitter IDs are becoming prevalent in main stream media nd advertising, the way that URLs were 10 years ago.
• Even Twitter doesn’t know its business use. They’re working on it. They have good funding.
• Twitter is like instant messaging. People call it micro-blogging.
• It has been restricted to 140 characters, to be compatible with SMS.
• Richard Skaare, communications consultant: “Forced brevity sharpens the mind and quickens the soul.”

How many people in this session have Twitter accounts? Around 20 people (80-plus% of the group).

BusinessWeek Business Exchange Twitter Experience

• We have 1,237 followers. We acquired them through consistent, non-aggressive methods in 4 months.
• We’re following 540 other people. You shouldn’t just expect them to follow you. You need to reply to and Re-tweet what others say.
• We provide a personal touch with our Twitter followers. No auto-reply Direct Messages, although we do use Direct Messaging to thank users for following us whenever possible.
• We also personalize our tweets

At BusinessWeek, we’re an old media company, owned by McGraw-Hill, being morphed into a 21st century Web site to complement its published magazine. We still have a rather Web 1.0 Web site that is being improved on an ongoing basis and a new Web 2.0 site, Business Exchange, comprised of niche communities centered around business topics, like Cisco, pre-fab housing, micro-finance in India. Each of those has its set of active, passive users, etc.

We’re still adding social features. How can we make it more relevant? We now have 38 Business Week editors and writers who tweet about their work, to get ideas for articles, etc. We have a Business Exchange User Participation that administers the Businesses Exchange Twitter account (@bwbx), as well as our own personal ones. @bwbx /@roncasalotti /@michellelockett

We’re transparent. We tweet about different things personally vs. through @bwbx. For more personal stuff, like who you’re rooting for
in the Super Bowl, we use our personal accounts.

So now we’re in the Twitterverse. We’re saying “Hey, check out our Web site.” We’ve already determined that people who tweet are the people we want to be a part of our community… influencers. These are people who like to be engaged – we want them to be engaged on our site.

Want to incorporate tweets on our site, in our topics pages. Have it another avenue for network distribution. We've are experimenting with a Twitter stream on one topic page right now, appropriately enough, the Twitter topic page.

We’re importing tweets into an aggregation Twitter page. And not just from our users. (We use the Twitter API.) For the people that, unbeknown to them, are being featured here, they’re getting click-throughs based on this. It’s another audience for them. Are you tracking this and letting them know? Not yet.

What other companies are using Twitter for…

• Susan Tenby –- I have 4 Twitter accounts for our different projects, and my own.
• Dave Weinberg (@weinberg81) – Amplify. Collaborative community for developers. I have mine, and about 8 other accounts for different purposes.
• Sarah Wulfeck -- CBS Local news stations – We’ve been pushing in the last 6 months to get all those local sites on T. Decide on their voice. Trying them not to just go the RSS route, where they pull headlines from stories, but commenting on it. That’s a real key. Marketing departments want everything to be a marketing message. It’s a struggle.
• Devin Brown -- McKinsey, runs the McKinsey T account for the publishing arm, @McKQuarterly

Forum One

Jim Cashel: We have a lot of things we want to publicize. Events, reports, advocacy campaigns. We use different channels. Our recent tests show that T has been the most effective, followed by FB, followed by Google Ads and shared media partnerships. These data shift from week to week. We’ve spent a lot of money on Google Adwords, and it’s been effective. Admittedly, we do have a very tech savvy organization/audience.

Other thoughts:

• For business, you have a business message and purpose. But in the Twitterverse, people can get turned off if everything is a constant marketing message.
• For my personal account, I’m very measured about not doing too much self-promotion.
• People talk about the percentages of your Tweets should be business and personal. Some say 50% of your tweets should be non-"business". You also need to be a good Twitizen and reply to and re-tweet (or, pass along) interesting tweets originated by others.
• What’s the value of the tool? What can it do for my ROI or business/organization mission? What can it do that other tools can do, or will it just add work to service and maintain it? The good news is that it’s cheap and easy. it can take time, but you determine how much time it takes. There's major upside potential and very little downside risk.
• Bank of America fraud example… One participant noticed a fraudulent transaction on her Bank of America online activity report. She tweeted asking if anyone knew if bank of America was on Twitter. That same night she was contacted by BofA via Twitter and had the problem handled.
• There are some interesting uses. The Israeli Embassy just did the world’s first Twitter press conference. It was pretty interesting. I don’t know if it was a total success, but it was an interesting attempt. They had their NY consulate office run it centrally create a mashup on the Web, so you could see all the questions and answers in one place. There was a specific. They had some problems, as they weren’t experienced Twitter users.
• The Fix on Twitter. He’s a reporter in the White House press corps.
• Tweeting has taken over live blogging as being the as-it-happens way to cover an event.
• Nancy with Waterfront Media, Senior Editor with What to Expect. I don’t really understand Twitter. I just made the account for the business. I don’t understand what people’s expectations would be.
• Tools were discussed, most of which can be found via +Twitter +tools Google search
• Tagging tweets, e.g. from conferences.
• The best way to learn it is to do it. Reading best practices doesn’t make sense. Jump in and mimic the behavior.
• Using Twitter for pull, and not just push.
• Bringing Tweets into Second Life.
• What technology allows people to respond to areas of a Web site in Twitter?
• It can be confusing for people.
• Passive users want nothing to do with Twitter. (Not everyone in the room agrees with this statement...)
• Dell attributes to Twitter $1million in sales this past holiday shopping season. (Squishy number.)
• Searching Twitter in Google. Relevant results depends on the user, and the number of followers.
• Tweets are throwaway data. They’re ephemeral. There’s no context. Search engines don’t work that way.
• Opportunities for networking. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of junk. And, the occasional pearl.
• How will print media survive? You can try stop-gap measures, but you have to adapt to the new technologies. How can media companies be part of the online community? Be where your audience is: we’re on LinkedIn, we’re starting with Facebook.