PR & Marketing Leadership

I have been Tweeting on Twitter for awhile and I really enjoyed a recent session on Microblogging and Twitter: who’s using Twitter and for what purpose? What is the business value of use cases?

Some current uses of Twitter from the group:

• Drive Traffic to other web content - such as blogs, announcements, articles, etc. Promotion - PR - push out/ broadcast announcements, events, etc.
• News, breaking news, awareness
• Social Filtering - getting your news via Twitter now - some rely on Twitter now to get general news.
• Communication efficiency - the nature of the brief and frequent posts, its efficient and effective
• Brand Cachet - for those who are currently on Twitter
• Work streaming - updates, status,
• Reports from the field, live messaging
• Member support
• Conversation monitoring/ brand tracking

Twitter etiquette - “Twitiquette”
Things to think about…

• Tweet Formats: A lot of discussion about “is it acceptable to have multiple persona’s on Twitter?” General consensus was yes, similar to having multiple emails.
• Do you Twitter professionally vs. personally? Public persona’s - some people are experimenting with multiple identities in Twitter (personal vs. private). There are examples at companies like Zappos where there are many employees with Zappos in the Twitter name alias.
• What happens when a “fan” takes over your brand name on Twitter?
• When do you use Twitter to broadcast only vs. get into dialog?

Signal to Noise: What makes a good tweet? Consensus: Succinct, pithy, poetic posts

However: * If your reply isn’t pithy - then maybe it should be a direct message instead * If your reply is relevant to others (not just the receiver) its ok to broadcast it to everyone * Frequency of Tweets - what is too much? 7x per hr

Does anything go on your personal account? general consensus is yes.

How do you decide who to follow? General consensus is that you can easily reach overload so you need to be selective about who you follow. Jeremiah Owyang uses Friend Feed.

Is it fair expectation that if someone follows me when I am following them? Consensus was yes. Some people are weirded out with “branded persona’s” who follow them out of nowhere.

Some people are experimenting with Twitter around events. Experimenting with importing participant lists and doing follow up on Twitter post event.