How to
JetBlue Marketer to Agencies: Find Me on Twitter
One basic way agencies can demonstrate digital chops to a potential client? Find him or her on Twitter. That’s the lesson to be learned from JetBlue’s senior VP-marketing and commercial, Marty St. George (who will be speaking on June 14 at TWTRCON NY), who decided to test agencies currently vying for the airline’s marketing account with this tweet: “We’re pitching our advertising AOR. Curious on digital savvy … first test is how many of the agencies will find me on Twitter.” …more…
Reaching Millions With Twitter: The Whole Foods Story
Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market, was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year, Wholefoods gained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people with its 150 different Twitter accounts (some are devoted to products, such as cheese or wine, for example).
Whole Foods uses Twitter primarily as a customer service tool. Erwin says Whole Foods does promote its blog content and may …more…
Dyn Inc. to its Followers: "Tweet Nerdy to Me"
The business of managed DNS (Internet Infrastructure as a Service) is anything but sexy, but the Dyn Inc. team has a group of 2,000+ passionate users following them on Twitter. The Dyn Inc. story began the same way a number of tech start-ups did — as a big idea out of a college dorm room. Since then, Dyn has thrived, in great part by leveraging social media as a springboard. …more…
How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation
IBM doesn’t have a corporate Twitter ID because “we want the IBMers in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”
Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense. …more…
Lessons Learned From My Year With Twitter
PR and marketing professional Jenn Riggle shares eight lessons she’s learned in her yearlong experience with Twitter. They include Three is a Magic Number; The Power of Hashtags; and Why …more…
12 Practical Ways to Use Twitter in Business
Twitter has been receiving an enormous amount of coverage in the mainstream press. My 82-year old mother-in-law recently asked me why all of the news anchors on her favorite morning show kept talking about this Twitter thing, and what is it anyway? Yet most business professionals, marketers and media people still don’t have a lot of personal exposure to Twitter, so many of them are scratching their heads and wondering what all the commotion is about. Unlike …more…
Marketing through Facebook Apps: What's (Not) Working
Adweek has a great article on advertisers’ continuing struggle to connect with Facebook users. The full article by Brian Morrissey is worth reading, since he provides some in-depth examples of marketing-driven applications that have failed to catch on with the audience.
Some of the pitfalls? …more…
Sunday In the Sandbox with Facebook Connect
Having been told by Tonia that I would have to provide useful content for this site, rather than just pronouncing from on high, I spent the Sabbath playing around with Facebook Connect (website | Tonia’s post,) to see whether I could extract something useful from it. …more…
How to Start a Conversation
There are many great how-to posts out there for marketers trying to figure out what steps to take in order to engage their customers using social media, and we’ll probably add one of our own at some point. A couple of good ones we’ve seen include Jason Baer’s The 7 Must-Haves In Your Social Media Strategy, or Tony Uphoff’s Social Media Gets Down to Business.
In addition to figuring out the what and the how of social media, companies need to wrestle with some deep cultural shifts in the rules of engagement. One is to shift the focus from “messaging” your customers to listening to your customer as the first step in engaging in a conversation.
I first started to …more…
