Let’s look at other kinds of conversations you can join, start, and nurture. We’ll start with a twitter search, which is a particularly fine place to start.
I’m amazed that companies seem to be so slow on the uptake of what to do with Twitter. Most decide it’s just a great big market and they should spam it. Dumb, and pointless. Twitter conversations have the life expectancy of mayflies.
I’m certain that I’m missing dozens of uses for Twitter, but I’m focused on conversations and market intelligence, and Twitter is amazing for that. It can give you maore market intelligence in an afternoon than a fleet of consultants could deliver in a week. You can put your keywords into Twitter and see who is talking about your company, products, market, competitors and world. The volume of conversation on Twitter is so large that you can find tweets about nearly anything.
Of course Twitter is also a place to put your own tweets about what “you” are up to. Ke Nalu automatically sends it’s posts to Twitter, Facebook, and many other social sites.
Consistent with my assumption that you know little or nothing about this weird online world, here’s a quick and dirty Twitter primer.
You sign up for a free Twitter account by going to http://www.twitter.com. The signup page is a great model for how registration should be done on the web. Quick, easy, and unfriendly to webbots.
You get a username (like @ponobill) and can set up a profile page. Then you can use twitter on both your computer and your mobile phone. You can post a 140 character “tweet” to your page as often as you like, about anything. If you want to send a message to a particular person you preface it with their username, like @ponobill. With phone companies charging ridiculous amounts for text messaging that requires almost no bandwidth, people are using twitter as a more convenient, multi-device replacement for SMS.
You can find friends, groups, brands, companies, and twitter stars to “follow”–meaning you’ll have their tweets delivered to your page. That sounds odd, but play with it and you’ll see the utility. When you follow someone, Twitter will send them an email notifying them. Sometimes they will reciprocate by following you.
Twitter search, as shown here, is not as complete as some of the third party applications. There are LOTS of add-on applications that use the twitter platform. Many of them make it easier to write and follow tweets by tracking multiple pages. Some automatically shrink the URL links you place since long links eat up too much of the 140 character limit. Some allow you to share other content such as video and pictures.
Twitter also has some conventions that people have adopted that are not really part of the original design. One such convention is hashtags, such as #kenalu. The hash mark (pound sign) indicates that this word is a tag, much like the metatags that can applied to other web content. But Twitter has no facility for tagging, so a simple inline convention was established by the users. There are no real rules for using hashtags, but if you are writing some post that references a common topic you can gain readers by adding a hashtag, such as #marketing.
When you search for the hashtag #marketing you find everyone that has recently posted to twitter that included that hashtag. You can see that Twitter notified me that 5 more people posted tweets with the hashtag #marketing between the time I made the search and the time I captured this screenshot–perhaps fifteen seconds! Half an hour later it was over 200.
Twitter is fast becoming the hub for all kinds of information dissemination, in part because of this feature which isn’t a feature. Excuse me for going on and on about the genesis of hastags, but it’s an example of the value of crowdsourcing–developing elements of your marketing and even your product through the freely given efforts of your customers. We have a couple of chapters about crowdsourcing, it has amazing potential.
You can make up a keyed hashtag to coordinate an event or enable discussion with anyone that uses that hashtag. For example if I were doing a web presentation I might offer the hashtag #preskenalu to my participants, which would allow them to interact via their mobile phone or computer during the presentation via twitter. I use the hashtag convention to make what I’m up to more searchable. I could just as easily use any nonsensical combination of symbols and letters to make a searchable entry. The hash mark is just a convention, not a rule.
I’m getting sidetracked–welcome to my world. Time to go take some Concerta(tm). Where I was headed originally was explaining how you can use these social platforms actively, for pushing people to your site and interacting directly with consumers, critics, pundits, etc.. They are powerful for initiating and participating in conversations, for monitoring attitudes about your products. We’re going to get much deeper into the hows and why of social sites later.
Here’s an example of how I use twitter directly from Ke Nalu to post abstracts from the e-magazine. This is NOT an optimal approach, I’m being very lazy. There should be real tweets interspersed between these automated extracts. But it makes a good example, and these do show up nicely on searches for keywords I care about as long as I’m careful to include the keywords in the first few words of the article–which I rarely do. We’ll fix that so you can see how the site will benefit.
My laziness is paying great dividends–we’re going to be able to show excellent progress by simply doing the stuff I know I should have been doing all along.
What’s In It For Me
Well, let’s see. I’ve shown you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join conversations about your company. We have a lot more work to do on those topics.
Your assignment is to take the lame little list of keywords you have generated and use them in the same manner I did here: Go find the blogs and forums that talk about your business. Join the most important ones and start establishing yourself as a contributor. DO NOT talk about your company and it’s products, though it’s perfectly fine, and even important to your long-term credibility to reveal your affiliation. Then do a Twitter search on your keywords to see what people are saying there. Most likely you’ll find some startling things.