A new twitter version is out and it looks a lot like facebook to me. I think we have now a 3 way competition for the best social network, facebook now is not only competing with Google + but twitter got into the race too. You might think they where already, but tweeter was left behind by the power of facebook and the business pages...  well, now twitter announces branded twitter professional pages coming up...  

 

Twitter is not for everybody or every business, but it has proven a great way to extend the conversation with your public – however you define that public and that conversation.  But once you define that group of followers and you begin to attract them – be they potential custormers, clients, associates, or fans – here are some basic do’s and don’ts
 - DO have a personality, talk like a person, share stories. No one wants to follow a boring robot, unless your account is a boring robot with a specific function.
 - DO NOT get carried away or tweet too far off topic. We'd love to occasionally learn about your employees or general industry or local topics. We generally don't want to hear your views on politics or sports.
 - DO share links, photos, and videos. If you're a retail store, pictures of your newest items could be a great sales pitch. If you're a tech company, sure, show us some of your press. If you're a cafe, maybe a video of your superstar barista.
 - DO NOT spend too much time retweeting customers saying nice things about you. Once in a while, maybe. But too often, companies blast 4 or 5 tweets of praise in a row. Many people simply unfollow those accounts.
 - DO engage with customers over customer service concerns -- only if you think you can provide sufficient, consistent, and excellent care. Your best bet will probably be to use Twitter to funnel customers into your existing customer service channels, such as email or phone support.
 - DO NOT negotiate or try to service an unhappy customer in public. There's generally no reason for the rest of the world to see you discussing an issue they're having with your service. Try to get the customer to chat via email, direct message, or phone. If anything, to avoid the negotiations from ending up in the press.

Gayle Williams Vision PR & Marketing
www.visionprm.com

Original Blog Post:  http://www.visionprm.com/blog/6-dos-and-donts-for-your-companys-twitter-account

Social media can be many things: a place to network with friends, a way to follow market trends and monitor brand sentiment, a customer service tool for identifying unhappy customers. But is it a tool for demand generation? I believe the answer is yes, but that it requires a different mindset for lead generation and measuring ROI.


I’ll begin with a short history of B2B marketing trends, including the evolution of social media.

The Changing Buyer and Evolving Marketing Trends

A key tenant of Modern B2B Marketing is that buyers will use search and the ready access to information to take control of the buying process – and as a result do not want to engage with Sales until they are much further along in the cycle. But this was not always true:

Before Google (more than 10 years ago)

Buying behaviors: Information was not readily available and the only way a prospect could get the necessary information way to engage a sales rep from your company. Mistrust ruled the day, and buyers created RFPs and purchasing centers to try to equal the playing field.

Marketing trends: Marketers focused primarily on brand building and awareness. Most investments focused on hard to measure methods such as mass advertising, tradeshows, and PR with traditional print media. Direct mail and cold calling made up the majority of targeted interactions, and marketers passed all new leads to Sales for follow-up.

Before Social Media (2 to 10 years ago)

Buying behaviors: Corporate websites were mature and search became the dominant way to find information. Prospects were willing to share their contact information in exchange for the information they wanted.

Marketing trends: Marketers began to focus on SEO, PPC and email marketing to drive traffic, and created content such as whitepapers and webinars to convert traffic into leads. Marketers reallocated budgets towards highly measurable channels and began to be more accountable for lead generation. The best marketers realized that their leads were often too early to send to sales, and invested in lead scoring and lead nurturing to find the hot leads and develop the rest.

The Age of Social Media (today and future)

Buying behaviors: More and more information is available off the official corporate website and on social media sites ranging from LinkedIn and Twitter to YouTube and SlideShare. As buyers tire of “marketing speak” and over-aggressive marketing tactics, they search social sites as part of their research, and interact with other prospects to get and share word of mouth recommendations. Prospects are less likely to register for early stage content on the corporate website, and typically contact the company only when they are ready to engage in a sales cycle.

Marketing trends: Marketers will reallocate investments back to brand, buzz, and awareness – but instead of mass advertising and traditional PR, marketers will invest in smart ways to build brand such as social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing. Lead nurturing will evolve to include building relationships with prospects before they ever give you their name by sharing relevant and useful information across a variety of sites and channels. These changes will have a positive impact on lead generation by increasing the number of highly-qualified inbound leads, but measurement of ROI will be a challenge.

Social media translates into higher quality inbound leads.



Original post: blog.marketo.com

Twitter Search is a great tool because it can give you real-time feedback about what's going on. That is, if you know the smart way to use it. Both TweetDeck & Seesmic allows you to open special search panels, allowing you to “follow” a search term, instead of a person.

Here's a video about Twitter search and some smart ways to use it bellow.

Here you have some good ways to keep on top of things.

1 - Get up to speed with all the latest news about a specific thing:
let say you want to get all the new links about "internet marketing", not including the many re-tweets that people make use this term:
“internet marketing” -rt filter:links

2 - Find all the people who are not talking about you directly:
If I want to find all the people who mention your name, but aren’t replying to you use this term:
qualityseoweb -to:qualityseoweb -from:qualityseoweb -@qualityseoweb

3 - Get all reactions across multiple twitter accounts:
Lets say you have 5 twitter profiles and you would like to see everything in one place.
to:qualityseoweb OR to:qualityseoweb2 OR to:qualityseoweb3 OR to:qualityseoweb4 OR to:qualityseoweb4

4: Follow what people say about your competitors:
If you want to follow not only what your competitors are saying, but also how people respond to them, try this:
from:competitor OR to:competitor

5 - Only follow links from certain people:
Let’s say that you only want to see the links that I share, then you simply search from, try this:
from:qualityseoweb filter:links

6 - Only get the new info about a topic:
if you want to search for anything about ‘apple’ but without the re-tweeted stuff
“apple” -rt -via

7 - Find all shared pictures about a specific topic:
It can be interesting to see only the pictures that people post about a certain topic or event. Try this:
“le mans” twitpic OR yfrog OR post.ly OR twitgoo OR pikchur filter:links


Have you figured out any other ways to use Twitter Search that you’d like to share?
How about trying these above and letting us know what you think, in the comments?

Draw traffic to your website using Twitter:

Every time you have a new product, a new services, a special or anything that might be useful for your customers you should communicate that to your followers on Twitter. There's a chance they will click on it and go to your site to read more about it and that generates more traffic to your site.

Follow your brand and products on Twitter:

Twitter has become one of the best tools to see what people think about your brand and products, competitors and keywords related to your business. This allows you to reply to any concerns immediately and really know what is what people is saying about these issues.
You can use Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) to find your brand on twitter and subscribe thru RSS Feed to get updates of that search.

Use favorites in Twitter as your Testimonials:

Mark all good comments about your company and products in Twitter as Favorites and then use this as a new source of Testimonials. This is done thru the STAR icon on the top-right of every tweet.

Be the expert and leader on your area:

Use twitter to help other people, send tips, recommendations, and valuable links thru Twitter. This will help improve the credibility and image of the brand and company on twitter.

Use Twitter as a customer service tool:

• Reply to all comments about your company and brand:  Designate a person in your company to check search.twitter.com every day and if there are questions or issues about your products reply to them as soon as possible. This will help keep the image of your company and your customers happy thru good customer service.
• Use twitter to let people know your site or blog is under maintenance or down: This will help communicate this to a lot of people very easily and fast.

We believe there really is a new era emerging in the Web's evolution. So what's next?  What will define Web 3.0?

One explanation is that:

Here are a few trends that are distilling the conversation and, in the process, defining Web 3.0:

1. Aggregators

 No one wants to manage accounts on 25 different social sites. This frustration has driven the creation of tools like iGoogle, FriendFeed and Netvibes — all aimed at streamlining your social Web into one space. But more importantly, it has led to the reinvention of Facebook as the ultimate social aggregator.

Recent redesigns of Facebook have turned it into a place where your photos, videos and blog posts can be easily (and automatically) funneled into one place. That's an approach that FriendFeed pioneered years ago, but there's a big difference: Your friends are actually using Facebook.

And now they can even comment on your shared items without leaving the social network. That's bad news for YouTube and other sites that need traffic to create ad revenue, but it's good news for users who don't want to scramble all over creation just to say "Cute video!"

2. Simple sharing

 We've all been seeing those "Share this!" buttons for years now. If you're a marketer or PR person, you've probably plastered them all over your work in hopes of helping it "go viral." But the reality is that these links to sites like Digg or Reddit just haven't been that useful.

That's finally starting to change thanks to Web and smartphone tools that simplify the sharing process.

A few examples:

 • Hootsuite's Ow.ly Social Bar: A bit more comprehensive than TBuzz, this tool shares sites but then also makes it easy for the viewer to share it again. So if you like the link I send you to, you can click a button at the top of the page and keep the share train rolling.

• Smub.it: Designed to make sharing easier on an iPhone, Smub actually works on just about any device with a Web browser. You simply add "smub.it/" in front of any URL, and it will pull up a page of simple buttons to share that site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

3. Un-Sites

The design-heavy microsite has been under serious assault lately. Why? Because businesses and marketers are realizing that there's an infinite supply of content out there, being refreshed every day. Why go through all the trouble of creating 100% of your site's content yourself?

And here's another point: A few years ago, if you wanted video on your site, you had to write or find a code that would let you host the video. Big pain in the butt. Now Google is dumping millions of dollars into making YouTube the best, most advanced video service on the planet. Why would you still go it alone, when you can just embed YouTube on your own site for free?

Right now, this concept is being pushed to its limits by ad agencies and others who want to get buzz by showing how minimalist their Web design can be. The most notable examples are Modernista's pop-up home page, the similar Skittles project by Agency.com, and most recently BooneOakley's bizarre conversion of its agency site into a YouTube video. (watch bellow)

 

For now, these kinds of projects are mostly just publicity stunts. But there's no denying that repurposed content from sites like Twitter and YouTube is going to become the norm with almost any site design in the near future.

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On another angle we've heard that if Web 1.0 was characterized by connecting people to content, and Web 2.0 is connecting people to people, then Web 3.0 is certainly connecting objects to people and to eachother. The Internet of things. Tim O’Reilly has also been talking about this for a while.

Inanimate objects can be embedded with sensors and connected wirelessly to the Internet. This enables us mere human objects to effectively communicate with those formerly inanimate objects. The hope is that as we are able to collect data from these embedded objects and analyze it we’ll be able to make better, more informed decisions based on all the available information we have.

This requires, of course, better analytics to makes sense of it all. But coupled together (data+ analytics) it’s truly the next transformative era of computing. 

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So what's your take on the term "Web 3.0"? Is it a bold new era? Or just a reorganization of all the information we have today? I'd love to hear what trends you've noticed and where you think they're taking us.

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Original Blog Posts: thesocialpath.com  and  asmarterplanet.com

# 1 - Drive Traffic:
You can use Twitter to let know your followers you have a new blog entry on your website, or you have a new products line and always include a link to your website or the article you are relating to.

# 2 - Develop Brand Loyalty:
One of the many ways of building BRAND LOYALTY is to release good, related and useful information to your own customers.

# 3 - Improve your Exposure (Buzz):
In Twitter you will be able to interact with thousands of potential customers.

# 4 - Networking using Twitter:
This system allow you to interact with people and it could help you know you clientele or your potential customers a lot better.

# 5 - Real Time Research:
Find out what people is doing, buying, searching, etc. You can decide what content people will enjoy the most by using the search function.

Want to learn more?  Contact us!

 

Here you have a nice video about TWITTER SEARCH:

This is a great video that explains what twitter is... Now, can you use this for your business?  Can you help your website be more prominent on the search engines by using twitter?  Yes.

1 - Follow as many people as you can, friends, coworkers, customers, etc...
2 - Do not copy paste your website link over and over again every 5 minutes...  try to create relationships, promote your business by helping others...  with their problems, etc.
3 - The Goal here is to have MORE FOLLOWERS than people you follow, IF YOU BUILD GOOD RELATIONSHIPS, more and more people will follow your feed.
4 - Promote your services, products and your website at twitter and your followers will convert into potential customers.
5 - Keep in touch, and you'll see you can get business from this and also make your web presence grow.

MAKING YOUR SOCIAL PROFILES WORK THE EXTRA MILE FOR YOU:

1 - USE THE SOCIAL NETWORKS:

The best way to make these profiles work for you is by actually using them to communicate with your customers, colleagues and other professionals. If you can don't have much time at least use ONE of the many social networks like FACEBOOK or TWITTER, to start communicating and you will see improvement into the web presence of that specific profile and so forth an increase in links from it to your website which will translate in a better SEO campaign and increase in your ranking online.

We recommend taking one of them to start, it could be facebook for example...

Start by writing a different blog entry there or putting part of a blog entry and say "read more here" with a link to your website... You can also publish more pictures (very easily) and having them link to your website.

This will make your social network profile grow even more and also have real communication, since people will start sending you messages about those entries and you may be able to help someone with a problem and even get a customer using this new way of communication.

2 - INVITE MORE PEOPLE:

The other way you can make those social network profiles grow is by actually inviting as many people as you know to join them... the more friends and followers you have the better that social profile will work for you.