PitchPersuasion

Twitter is a relatively well known microblogging tool. Most normal people will be lost at ‘microblogging’.

Misunderstanding
The main misunderstanding of Twitter is as a result of it’s marketing which says: “Twitter is based on the simple question of ‘What are you doing right now?’”.

What people typically use Twitter for?
What Twitters front page it should really say is:
-For when you want to send a message to someone but don’t know who, so send it to everyone
-For when you want to share information or links with friends and colleagues
-For when you want to poll opinion on an idea/topic of interest to you or your followers/friends
-For when you want to promote something that you or your organisation has just done

Who Cares?
Initially no-one. First you have to make your presence known by looking for people you know, these might be through work or social or both. You can then ‘Follow’ them, this is a little like adding a friend on Facebook except that by default they are accepted.

People who you follow are notified by an email (assuming they haven’t turned this feature off, most don’t), and can then if they think you might be interesting follow you.

What if I have private stuff that I want to say?
Twitter is like your own little press release news wire. If it’s private there are many many alternative modes of communication you could use like email.. This is especially worth noting as Google tends to like indexing everyones messages aka ‘Tweets’

If you are interested in what I have to say, check out my twitter@ http://www.twitter.com/duncan_m/

Just a quick post regarding sucessful blogs, Danny @ SEOmoz posted a very interesting post covering his research into what makes blogs sucessful.   The results are very interesting and show some very interesting common factors.

Domain Names & Blog names

From a marketing perspective .coms are still leading the way domain names and 76% of the top 100 blogs according to Danny, their names/brands are either made up of one or two words.

Unsaturated Market

Of the top blogs, a very large proportion of them were technology orientated with a serious shortage in the areas of fashion & green topics.  This would suggest that there is still pleanty of scope to win over the marketplace.

Only 13% of the blogs focussed specifically on women which Danny felt was mainly due to demand but could also be interpreted as lack of supply..

How do we keep a blog running

People

It takes more than one man to run a ship and indeed of the most sucessful, only 20% are run by one person.  I would suggest finding some good journalists who work within your area, getting some aspiring journalist interns to help you or get some of your clients to do it for you.

Content

In the land of blogs content is king, agencies are lucky in that if they are able to convince the client that it’s a good idea (more on this anouther time) they will be able to get a stream of the hottest news, information and comment on everything that’s going on within that industry.  This effectively allows them to own a party of the conversation and direct some of the conversations.

How do we do it sucessfully

While I’m in no position to tell anyone how to do their job, I would advise that a good bit of planning, research  and ideas generation into the specific niche that you want to target and then do a test project over 2-3 months to demonstrate to the client that you are able to build a community and that it is not bad for them.

Any final words?

Don’t lie, as soon as you start the online community will sus you out very quickly.  There’s no point creating anonymous/semi-official blogs, be true to what you are doing and transparent and you will be able to build trust much faster than if you try to start hiding things.  If your client has skeletons in the closest then they should address them and move on, why just talk to the press when you can also tell your clients/customers/brand lovers directly.