How Should Brands Leverage Twitter (Meeting Notes 19/12/09)

Below are the meeting notes from last Saturday.  We had video too, trying to get that up soon.

General Notes
Participation was lower this week, not sure if that’s due to the holidays or what but we only had about 8 people (a far cry from the 25 we had a month ago). We decided we need to do more stuff. In our next meeting Jan 9th we will be launching a SMM campaign for … wait for it … SMC MUMBAI! We’ll discuss strategies to raise awareness about our group (now that we have some content and consistency across meetings) and try to set some goals (i.e. getting 30 people to the following meeting).

Twitter Discussion
Brands leverage twitter for the following reasons:

Research

• identifying evangelists / key advocates
• identifying biggest critics / attempt to reach out and convert
• tracking sentiment / buzz / what people are saying about your brand
• track keywords – retweeting – responding to tweets – introducing to product
• product feedback
• identifying trends in your industry
• finding out what people are saying about your competitors

Sales

• deals / offers / coupons
• @threadless – case study
  • give teasers
  • make retweetable content
  • combine with a contest
  • measure response – 4% conversion rate – record sales – 70k visitors from twitter
• accepting orders (restaurants / coffee)
  • twitter small business case studies
  • korean bbq
• micro transactions (tipjoy)

PR

• creating a buzz around new product launches / events
• announcements / new products / events
• sharing wins for the company
• promote blog posts / news updates
• loyalty / engagement (giving people a chance to interact)

Contests

• priyanka chopra – tell your favorite love story
• games (movies) – spymaster

One off campaign

• mad men example (characters from tv series dedicated accounts tweeting)

Customer service

• managing customer feedback / addressing complaints / customer service
  • kingfisher airlines – pretty good job
  • icici bank – sucks
  • cleartrip – not focused

Increasing reputation / authority

• individuals – @chrisbrogan
• b2b – @Wockhardthosp

Best Practices?

• Aggregating all employee tweets (a la twitter.zappos.com) – dangerous though promotes transparency
• Don’t just tweet about you / your product – Tweet about the industry / tangential (but still on brand and related) content
• Retweet other people / engage / answer questions / ask questions
• Listen before talking
• Show biographical information (photo, info) – don’t be a corporate
• keep tweets under 110 characters – so people can rt
• transparency – don’t move it offline – whatever you can – make public
• guykawasaki – repeats everything 4 times – for worldwide audience – 3rd tweet that gets the most traffic – is this a smart strategy?
• dont tweet all the time
• posting a link – add something to it – your opinion – not just post a headline and link