Nice article from Ann Handley’s Daily Fix for Marketing Professionals, in response to an apparently ill-considered, unresearched rant from history (Ad Age that is).
• Extending the reach for those individuals or companies that already have a blogging strategy in place, and want to deepen or further ties. Good examples: Carnival Cruise Lines. The ScienceNewsBlog’s weather tracking updates. Andy Carvin’s PBS blog on education and technology.
• Retailers announcing sales and deals. Good example: Deals on Dells. Blue-light specials at Amazon.
• Increasing the ability for frequent updates to blogs or web sites or news. Examples: The NY Times, CNN, BBC, Adrants, and those of us here at MarketingProfs.
• Building consensus or a community of supporters. Good examples: Presidential candidates John Edwards or Barack Obama.
• Building buzz. Example: Scott Monty and CC Chapman introduce a new blog.
• Updating breaking news at conferences or events. Example: Jeremiah at the Web 2.0 Expo. Forrester seems poised to use it to update happenings at its upcoming Consumer Forum.
• Updating your network to shape your own personal branding: Example: Oh boy… there are zillions. Pick a face on Twitter. You’ll see what I mean.
There’s lots more background and ideas in Jeremiah’s article here.
Ann’s commenters throw some more goodies into the mix:
“I see employment postings flying on twitter. It’s a fast way to connect with specialized positions.”
At RedMonk we’re finding Twitter is not just great community glue, but a solid research tool – what are the smartest developers and ops people thinking about and working on? What gotchas are they running into? And so on.
If we have a question we need to ask smart people about we twitter it (an article of faith at RedMonk is the community is far smarter than we are.) I am not defensive about using Twitter, though Ann. I am comfortable with it. Others will catch up.
It is kind of amazing to me that Ad Age still hasn’t grokked declarative living and its implications for advertising but that’s legacy thinking for you.
Open Source, Declarative Living and Making Better Platform Decisions
On Attestation, Transparency, Microsoft Internal Choices and the Future of Market Research
If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money
Technorati Tags: twitter – declarative+living – advertising – Owyang – marketing
Andy Piper says:
September 21, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Great thoughts, James. At the Corporate Blogging Summit in London yesterday, several of the speakers mentioned Twitter… the BBC, Oxfam and eon are twittering events, and using this to either draw people into their sites, or just extend their social presence.
For me, it’s an essential tool for extending my network in all kinds of directions and just for strengthening the connections that I already have. It rocks.
Connie Bensen says:
September 22, 2007 at 3:30 am
Thanks for sharing my quote. It is true to see job postings fly on Twitter & those are the personal reference type that never hit the job listings.
The other great thing is the morning Tweets as people read their blog feeds. It’s like the morning news – everyone posts links to the latest news & items of interest. And it’s a way to get to know people more personally than on blogs.
Danno says:
September 23, 2007 at 12:51 am
I don’t know so much about marketing stuff, but what I *really* want to see is what Cote envisioned Twitter becoming: A message bus for internet… things.
James Governor’s Monkchips » You can keep your “business language”: that’s not meaningful conversation says:
September 24, 2007 at 2:18 pm
[…] I was thinking over the weekend more about Twitter, and what in enables, or disables, in terms of communication, after mentioning some enterprisey use cases on Friday. […]
Ludovic says:
September 26, 2007 at 8:02 am
Hi James,
All the examples you give are B2C, do you know of B2B firms using Twitter or other Web 2.0 tools?
Informationally Overloaded » Blog Archive » real use for twitter? says:
September 26, 2007 at 9:47 am
[…] September 26, 2007 ~ If you put your mind to it, you can justify anything, even find business uses for Twitter. Who […]