Adapted from his book Engage, Brian Solis presents his list of suggestions to help businesses learn how to engage customers on Twitter through the examples of those companies, from Dell to Zappos, already successfully building online communities…as reported in Fast Company, April 23, 2010.
A must-read, must-know, for twitter marketers and the voice of a generation shaping the next social agenda in a realm, kkm calls, BrandCulture.
Of particular are the following :
Tip Context and Importance
18. ….. Events Marketing and promotion traffic building,
19. ….. Research and Intelligence Direct access and data bases; knowing your consumer
20. ….. Fund raising For the Greater Good (take note Documentarians).
Excerpts:
Number 18. Events
Organizing and promoting events are natural applications for Twitter. Tweetups transcend online relationships and become real-world connections.
Using Coffee Groundz as an example again, the Houston-based business regularly organizes tweetups to draw hundreds of customers into the store for each event.
Number 19. Research and Intelligence
The Social Web is a real-time collective and assembly of valuable information that mostly goes unnoticed. A few existing services are dedicated to applying a magnifying lens into the dialogue that leads to insight, direction, creativity, and inventiveness.
For example, brands.peoplebrowsr.com and celebrity.peoplebrowsr.com provide real-time insight into the most actively discussed brands and celebrities on Twitter at any moment in time, while also revealing the sentiment that is most associated with each.
StockTwits provides an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can listen to traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation. The service leverages Twitter as a content production platform and transforms tweets into financial related data structured by stock, user, and reputation.
Number 20. Fund Raising
This is a big opportunity and one that will yield amazing stories on how people are using Twitter and social media to raise money for charitable causes and capital for projects and companies. It’s the art of spurring contributions through information and education, not solicitation.
When it comes to social media for Social Good, we don’t have to look much further than anything Beth Kanter touches or spotlights. She’s one of the most influential people in using social media for raising awareness and money for her causes. One of the projects that she remains dedicated to is helping orphans in Cambodia and, to date, it has raised over $200,000. She has also used Twitter, Widgets, and other social networks to help many other organizations and causes. In one live demonstration, which still leaves me in awe, she raised over $2,500 to send a young Cambodian woman to college while she was on stage at Gnomedex in Seattle.
