Plenty has already been said about Twitter and how it has changed social networks. One of the areas that is not talked about enough is the impact consumer engagement can have on your product lines.

I am going to use Adobe Dreamweaver as a case study to demonstrate the various kinds of customer tweets and how Adobe could be positively engaging their Dreamweaver customers on Twitter. I’m picking on Adobe a little bit because I think their current Twitter Dreameaver account isn’t very engaging and could be a valuable resource to the company.

Millions of Twitter users are talking about what they are doing, experiencing or interested in at any moment in time. That practicality guarantees that someone, somewhere is talking about your products or service. You can group these tweets into five categories:

• Praise: The best kind of Tweets. Spontaneous endorsements from actual customers.
• Problems: Oh oh, someone is having a problem with your product or service and they are complaining in a public space! Quick, turn that negative into a positive by showing your commitment to customer service and a speedy resolution.
• Solution: Congratulations, someone has figured out that your products or services are actually helpful at solving some kind of problem. Even better, they are telling others about it.
• buzz: Sometimes your product or service just because part of a conversation.
• Pirate: Some has just posted a link to a message board or another new “warez” site. Oh great, yet another avenue for pirated software to make it into the hands of your potential customers.

Classifying the types of messages that are likely to be generated by your customer base makes it easier for your marketing team to create workflows and policies for corporate communication. You need to create policies that can engage these users and have a positive influence on the twitterverse. Read more…

Social Media Marketing Adobe, Dreamweaver, soical marketing, Twitter, twitter for business

…or is Twitter really broken?

I am fairly new to Twitter, but  I am not new to marketing. I have been posting regularly, trying to add value and trying to contribute to the community. When people started following me, I was honored. I would carefully examine their Bio, their latest tweets and links to see if they added value. If they did add value I would follow them back. If they were not in my space or a space I was interested in, I wouldn’t follow them. Throught the day I would notice my follower stats would rise and fall. What was going on? Were they not interested in what I had to say or did I say something that was offensive? I have to admit I felt a little self-conscious. Well, it turns out that a lot of people on Twitter will only follow you if you follow them back–they are gaming the system. Read more…

Social Media Marketing authority, ranking, social media, Twitter

I came across a new Wiki service called MediaOnTwitter which is trying to build the “ultimate Twitter resource”. It is meant as a resource that lists media outlets, journalists, and bloggers from around the world.

You would use the service in two ways:

1. Finding reporters, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter worth following
2. Contacting them through Twitter to pitch stories and articles.

It will be interesting to see how the site plans on maintaining the integrity and quality of the content on their site, esspecailly with an open wiki interface.  Thanks to Guy kawasaki for tipping me off to this site!

Social Media Marketing MediaOnTwitter, Twitter

Why should you post link notices to your Twitter account?

Everybody has different reasons for starting a blog site (personal, corporate, or industry related), but they all have one thing in common – they want to increase their readership. One way to do so is to give your readers different ways to discover your blog and get alerts when you post new articles.  Besides the obvious FeedBurner, RSS integrations, you might want to think about creating auto-generated twitter links.  Whenever you post a new article to your blog, a new “tweet” will be created and will alert all of your followers. Not only will it alert your current followers, it will set off an entire series of “pings” which will trickle down to different social networks and feed monitoring services so that more and more readers will discover your amazing blog!

Why auto-post?

As with most marketing campaigns, having consistent sustainable processes is a valuable part of creating a successful campaign.  Just planing to update your Twitter account every time you post a new article is not enough.  No matter how diligent you or your marketing team is, eventually it is going to slip.  The key is to automate the process. Read more…

Social Media Marketing auto-post, social marketing, Twitter, Typepad, WordPress