Agencies and agency executives who were smart enough to find the JetBlue marketer on Twitter will likely earn some points in the pitch process. The airline is currently in the midst of a search for a new agency after splitting with WPP shop JWT late last year.As of now, agencies following Mr. St. George, who uses the handle @martysg, include Mullen and New York-based Ludvik & Partners.

JetBlue’s marketing strategy has relied heavily on the web and social media in the past few years. The airline has been known as a progressive marketer and made Ad Age’s America’s Hottest Brands list in 2009. The airline has 1.6 million followers on Twitter and also supports a separate handle for deals. Advertising Age has the full story here.

Whole Foods uses Twitter primarily as a customer service tool. Erwin says Whole Foods does promote its blog content and may mention, “We’re having specials for the holidays,” and that sort of thing. But its number-one focus on Twitter is customer service.

Whole Foods Market, the leading natural and organic food store in the world with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom, is the most popular retailer on Twitter and is a leading example of Twitter’s power to build millions of relationships a single customer at a time. Michael Stelzner, executive editor of Social Media Examiner, recently conducted a long interview with Marla Erwin and posted excerpts on the Social Media Examiner website.  

While the company is proud to say it has served over 12 million users since its creation in 1998, it is more excited about the much smaller number of social media followers continuing to grow both on its corporate account (@DynInc) and its newly launched support account, the DynDNS Ninja Squad (@DynDNS). “Many companies get on social media sites such as Twitter and wonder why they don’t see a return. What we have learned is that if you give value you will get value. We talk a lot about transparency with everything we do and social media has been the best way to show our users that we really mean it,” said Kyle York, VP of Sales and Marketing at Dyn. “We have also differentiated ourselves by making contact with companies we follow and find valuable ourselves.”

For example, Dyn actually boasts @Twitter as one of their clients, reaching out to them along with @Zappos, @Hubspot and @SimpleGeoInc, simply because they share an appreciation for what they do.

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.

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information. But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values. Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

I recently replied to this tweet from @dpazour:

looking for three practical things that can be achieved personally or professionally through twitter–so far no luck. HELP!!!!

It was tough to answer in 140 characters, so I decided to expand on my answer.  Without much effort, the three practical things became 12, but I’m sure there are many more that could be added.  Let us know what you’d add to this list!

1. Find out what people are saying about you

Because Twitter is open – most people don’t protect their streams – smart brands are monitoring Twitter to see who is talking about them and what they are saying.  It’s a great way to monitor your reputation, and offers many opportunities to engage with customers and prospects

2. Build an audience

Facebook and LinkedIn are for staying in touch with people you already know.  Twitter lets you meet new people.  You can follow anyone, unless they have protected their profile.  You can engage in conversations, re-tweets, replies and direct message with people based on shared interests.  It’s a great way to build a community that you can tap in many ways for personal and professional reasons.

3. Get answers

The tweet I quoted above is a great example of how to use twitters to get answers to questions.  Build a group of followers that have expertise in a specific area, and you have an instant team of experts ready to give you advice.

4. Provide customer service

Got a gripe with a product you just bought?  Tweet it, and see how your complaint gets a response. If brands are listening, they can wow their customers, and create a great PR case study to showcase their dedication to delighting their customers.  This blog post documents 7 of them.  Or use your feed to answer questions, like JetBlue does @JetBlue.

5. Instant, cheap focus group feedback.

Twittering customers, by definition, are among the most vocal, passionate customers you can have.  They also tend to share their opinions and influence others, both online and offline.  Tropicana found this out, and ended up rolling back their redesign.  Why not get their feedback on new initiatives – before you spend the money to go to market?

6.    Build traffic to your site

Add new content. Tweet. Repeat.  Of course, you’ll get more followers and more credibility if your tweets do more than just promote your content – make sure you take the time to engage with the audience you’re building on Twitter so they know that you’re not just a robot that automatically posts your latest link.

7.    Create content for your site

Ask a question on Twitter. Talk about the results on your site.  Find out what people are talking about on Twitter.  Write content to address those issues.  (Then Tweet, Repeat – see #6.)  This blog post is a great example of that practical use of Twitter.

8.    Get breaking news

Every smart news organization now has an intern monitoring Twitter for reports of news items.  One of the reasons Twitter has been getting so much attention lately is because of its role as an early news warning system for major events over the last year.  The Mumbai terrorist attacks.  The Hudson River jet landing.  The Academy Awards.  People were tweeting all of them, and consumers, news organizations and sponsors are figuring out how to leverage that.  Heck, there’s even a tool that lets you rank your news stories based on Twitter search results.

9.    Live cover an event

Set up a twitter feed around an event. Tweet the event to include people who are not able to be there in person and expand your audience.

10.    Offer coupons

Use Twitter to distribute time-sensitive promotions, either using a coupon tool or by tweeting the offer directly.  Many people use Twitter on their mobile phones, so you’ll reach them while they’re out and about, where you may be able to get them into your store.  Here’s a good post on using Twitter for mobile coupons.

11.    Include your audience

You’re about to interview an important source.  Use Twitter to find out what questions your audience wants answered.   You provide coverage of a big event such as the Superbowl or the election. Add a Twitter feed for instant audience response.

12. Organize

Whether you’re trying to win an election, win a PR battle, or get people to support an event, Twitter has proven to be a highly effective way to mobilize and organize like-minded groups of people.

Your turn.  What are some other practical professional ways to use Twitter?

Some of the pitfalls?  Applications that are too slick or brand-driven (vs. user-driven), and campaigns that use pay-per-install networks to generate huge initial returns but then see a dramatic fall-off.  What’s working?  Taking it one step at a time, partnering with existing apps such as RockYou’s Pieces of Flair or Slide’s FunSpace.

The net net is that there is no magic bullet.  Social media marketing initiatives are still at an experimental stage.  Brands are better off experimenting with a number of smaller initiatives and learning how their brand can thrive in this new environment in a way that’s engaging and feels authentic to the audience.  Start small, get lots of feedback from your audience — maybe even find ways to get the audience to help you figure out what to do — learn, and then build from there.

Most importantly, don’t let some of the negative coverage throw you off.  Social media is here to stay, and will continue to influence and change how you connect with customers.

• We put a widget on our site that invites people to “connect” with the site using their Facebook profile.
• Once someone has connected with our site…
  • We can message him via Facebook.
  • We can post one-liners to his wall.
  • He can invite his friends to join him on the site.

This sounds like a great way for sites like ours to get social quickly.  I say “sounds like” because it soon became apparent that Facebook Connect is not quite ready for prime time. Caveat about what follows: my experience with Facebook application development is next to nil, though I am familiar with the technologies (PHP, Javascript, Ajax) involved.

Here’s what I found out:

• You’ll probably have to hire a Facebook developer to implement this on your site.  As far as I’m aware, Facebook provides no plug and play widget — you’ve got to have some bespoke code.  Lucky for you, there are 670,000 great developers out there.  Take your pick.
• The technical documentation is lacking.
• Most importantly, I don’t think Facebook has quite figured out the underlying business logic of what a user “connecting” to a site enables the site to do with the user.  The “policies” page is full of coming soons.  This means that they’re pushing the product out before it’s baked.

For now I’m going with Google.  More later…

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 seriously think about this after I interviewed Michael Pranikoff, the Director of Emerging Media for PR Newswire, for the Edge, a newsletter that Modern Media writes for United Business Media.  In the interview, Michael gave examples of how companies are learning to listen to what customers are saying on Twitter feeds and answer sites such as LinkedIn, and then engage appropriately to respond or amplify a conversation.

Here’s the point:  you no longer control the message.  Your customers all have cameras, blogs and networks of friends.  They will say what they think, post reviews and make recommendations.  And if what they are saying is different from what your ad campaign says, who will their friends believe?

In a world where social networks have more influence than the messaging that you create, here are some steps that the connected marketer is taking to move beyond one-way messaging to harness the network effect of engaging customers in conversations with and about your brand:

1. Invest in Active Listening: First, listen to what customers are saying about you.  How do you do this?  Take a small portion of your traditional research budget, and hire an intern or dedicate some staffers to spending time on social networks, listening to what they’re saying about your brand and products.  Post your commercials on YouTube, and then read the comments.  Monitor twitter feeds and blog posts.  You’ll learn a lot, and you’ll soon find ways to engage in those conversations. Let your customers know that you hear them–their concerns, their questions, their enthusiasm–and then find ways to get them the answers, solve their problems or amplify the positive energy.

2. Help Your Customers Talk About You: Once you’re good at listening, you can encourage your customers to do some of the talking for you.  Make it easy for them to tag, bookmark and share content that you create.  Give them ways in which they can help you create more content.  If you sell to consumers, nurture the fans, and then put some of the photos or videos they send in on your web site. If you sell to business users, create a peer advisory board and connect them with each other on Ning, or find some other way to make your customers feel they have a seat at the table.

Some Examples:  Get Famous with ThinkGeek’s Action Shots, the Obama-Biden Transition Team’s “Seat at the Table” page.

3. Cover the Basics:  Are you making it really easy for customers to talk to you?  How hard is it to find a phone number, email address or even a message board on your site?  In the rush to create the next award-winning user generated content campaign, don’t overlook the basics.  As customers feel more and more empowered to create and share their own content, they will expect you to give them a voice on your site.  The potential damage you can do to your brand by not having great customer service or an easy-to-find help desk or place to leave comments increases every month.

Example: Nesquik’s Shake It Contest on YouTube

4. Give up Control, but Share More:  In a social media-powered environment, you won’t be able to control your message.  But you can encourage conversations by sharing more content, and making sure that it’s in a format that customers can share with others.  Most importantly, you need to learn to be incredibly open.  As with the recent Pepsi Suicide ad campaign, the bloggers and tweeters will out you, so you might as well be the one to share bad news first, take responsibility and make sure you’re keeping everyone informed about the situation.  Marketers are learning to share more of their strategy earlier in the process to give customers a chance to buy in.

Example:  Google’s App Engine Product Roadmap page

5. It’s Not a Message, It’s a Conversation Starter: Instead of creating a traditional messaging document, can you give your brand or product a series of talking points that it can use to engage potential customers in a conversation?  If your brand went to a cocktail party, how would it strike up a conversation?  What would it talk about with at a night out with friends?  Start a conversation with your customers, and maybe they’ll tell their friends.

Examples:  Toyota’s Open Road Blog, Playtex Laugh, Play, Share pages (definitely made just for sharing with other girls)

Let us know who you think is doing a good job of moving from messaging to listening and starting a conversation!