Insight from #140tc 2009
Throughout the two days of the first ever Twitter Conference in Mountain View, CA (hashtag: #140tc), it was apparent that Twitter, the platform as we know it, is only the beginning. While rapidly growing, the organization takes each step lightly and the lasting sentiment of the convention was by far the notion of “stay tuned!” Some like Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) felt Twitter would one day run our common day machines while others discussed the various apps to come in the space, but one thing was clear, Twitter is the platform that will become the baseline for future technology to grow onto, not without. Or, as Jeramiah Owyang (@jowyang) put it, the most important milestone for Twitter will be when Twitter “goes away” or becomes data protocol, like email, and fades into our technology woodwork as it becomes so commonly used.
Warren (@warrenss) from Radian 6 (@radian6) showcased new categories that they are tracking to consider when monitoring conversation:
- Exuberance – favorable tweets about brand/product during ongoing programs/initiatives
- Potential sales and closures – point of sale, point of needed conversation
- Share of conversation – certain key words, how many people on the keyword are talking about you vs. competitor
- Life span- tweets that are RT and commented on
- Reverberation – linking to your content and tweeting about it
- Activation – how many new people each month are talking about you
- Engagement – how many people overall are talking about your brand
Brian Solis (@briansolis) provided additional insight into the art of understanding the influx of Twitter data
- Start to think about what you are going to do with all of the data
- Focus on building a more effective organization internally and then build a bigger more empowered community externally
- Transforming, listening, engagement, participation and transparency are words you will often hear – monitoring tools give you more than trends and graphs, they give you the intelligence to be more successful in the world of business
Key Take Away – setting benchmarks at the beginning of the program is the best way to measure success. Are you looking to grow your followers? Engage more people in a one-to-one conversation? Draw more traffic to your blog? Set your benchmark against your end deliverable.
–Listening: all brands can benefit from understanding
–Energizing, WOM: never before has technology allowed WOM to spread SO fast
- Zappos has an internal feed of ALL tweets that mention their company, access for ALL employees
- Dell generated over 1 MM in revenues from their social media outlets
–Supporting: savvy brands will support their customers in real time.
- Comcast Cares grew from Frank to approx 10 folks handling their Twitter handle
- Have staff ready all the time, i.e. Motrin Moms happened on a Friday night, can’t turn off on the weekend
- Best Buy CEO has a Twitter-feed in his office
–Embracing: make sure your company is READY for this feedback then use the tools to identify your most vocal followers and engage
3) Brands are learning and adopting with Twitter. At a flash panel put together by Joey Shepp of @OpenBrands, Morgan Johnston (@mhjohnston) from @JetBlue, Jeff from @DpzInfo (Dominos Pizza) and Robert Brewer-Hay from @Ebayinkblog discussed sustaining and elevating a brand image on Twitter.
- The most common keywords from the panel and the attendees included engagement and sentiment. Interest mostly revolved in being able to assist and direct those consumers who may have an issue with the brand or simply wanting to learn more while monitoring for both positive and negative feedback on the platform.
- A key learning from the panel was focusing on growing slowly and organically and ensuring you have the proper staff available (@JetBlue utilizes 10+ people).
4) You don’t have to be a sponsor, speaker or Twitteratti to get attention for your brand at these kinds of conferences. Many times our clients don’t have the budget to be a high level sponsor at something like this but that doesn’t mean they can’t affect the audience. Before even arriving in California we had been contacted, had a conversation and had a Twitter Conference DISCOUNT at the Four Seasons where we were staying for the #140tc – all through Twitter. @MyleneValencia, @FSPaloAlto and @kellyanelson were more than aware that the #140tc was happening in their backyard with numerous chatty social media folks and went out of their way to support, be a resource and, ultimately, be a destination for those already staying there or those looking for a great deal for an after party. It wasn’t minutes after @FSPaloAlto Tweeted “Special Offer – Mention #140tc & #FSH today and receive 50% off your entire bill at Quattro Bar!” that an impromptu after party was formed after day two of #140tc and numerous tweets sent about it. Once there, even the servers were passing around their business cards including their Twitter handles.
- Twitter(url)y – tracks and ranks top URLs people are talking about on Twitter
- PeopleBrowsr – comprehensive desktop application allowing you to monitor and respond in real time with search functions that pull in Twitter data
- bit.ly – allows you to shorten, share and track your links, can show stats of who clicks your links, where, how they clicked onto it.
- CoTweet – allows you to manage various twitter handles from one desktop and allows for multiple contributors to tweet from one handle/profile
- HootSuite – built similar to Tweetdeck but functions like CoTweet
- Tweet later – Allows you to schedule tweets to release at set times
- Twitter.mailana – Great way to track who’s talking to/with your brand Twitter handles
- YFrogVideo (@yfrogvideo) – upload streaming video and pictures to Twitter
- Twit vid.io – upload video to twitter
- StockTwits – use $ sign to track stocks on Twitter
- Twitterdata – a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages for you programmers out there
- VisualTweets – arrange data in a colorful and organized slide show
@marymassey and @gillianK – out.
Tags: #140tc, Ebay, JetBlue, social media, Twitter
