NewsBusiness

As people continue to debate the usefulness of Twitter from a business perspective, and as Twitter continues to think about what it can do to help businesses and in the process make money from the application, we can only speak from our own experience here at NewsBusiness.

Here are a few things we have been using Twitter for:

Looking for business

Over the past month or so, every week we have been typing into the search box “PR Brisbane” to see what comes up. Most of what appears is not relevant (unless we wanted a job in PR), but we have come across two Twitter users who tweeted that they needed a PR firm. So we replied. So far neither has actually turned into a client, but its early days yet!

In fact the other evening at a PR/marketing network event I was speaking with someone in web design who said that their firm had had around 4 new contracts through Twitter. Interestingly, the contacts had come through individuals who worked at the firm on their personal Twitter accounts, not from a corporate Twitter account.

When we get our first client over the line from Twitter, we’ll certainly let you know.

Brand monitoring

Want to know if anyone is talking about your business on Twitter? As above, just type your business name into the search box and see what comes up. I did this recently for a large multinational brand and came across some comments made by someone in Brisbane directly of interest to a colleague who works with that company. If you know what’s being said, particularly if it’s not complimentary, you can do something about it (see our previous post).

Meeting gurus

The other day I was sitting at my desk working when the Tweetdeck application I have in the background chirped and I checked my “Tweets”. A digital media guru I follow (@cameronreilly) was in a cafe about 100m away and had just complained about the coffee. I nipped down to say hi and he ended up buying me a beer (it was a Friday) and we had a very interesting conversation. If the cafe had been on Twitter (or perhaps their PR/marketing people) they might have been able to respond to a complaint that (in theory) could have been read by all of Cameron’s 9,653 followers.

By the way…

You don’t actually have to be registered with Twitter to search messages – you can do this straight from the Twitter home page. So, unless you want to be able to respond to people from within Twitter, you can do most of the things above without signing up or being an active participant in the system.

In the last few days another major US brand has announced it will launch in Australia, and will promote itself only via PR and social media sites Facebook and Twitter. B&T and Franchising have both covered the forthcoming launch of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream down under. The company was founded by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in the US 31 years ago and the brand is sold in 30 countries, with 700 outlets worldwide. One in three Australians are already aware of the brand.

The company (now part of Unilever) will – according to B&T – focus on engaging “18-34 year old students and young professionals by using traditional PR and social media as well as sampling campaigns in Sydney and Melbourne.”

Brand manager Caroline Simpson told Franchise magazine “Our targets spend time online, so hopefully the fun of the brand will come through on the website,”

The company will also run a flavour naming competition online to build brand awareness.

An Australian PR company has been appointed (unfortunately not News Equals Business), but the launch campaign will have no above-the-line advertising component at all. News of Ben & Jerry’s PR only approach comes hot on the heels of a similar announcement by US retail chain Costco for its Australian launch.

Jump on Google and tap in this question and you’ll see you’re not alone if you’re wondering what Twitter is all about. I took a look at it about six months ago but only really got to grips with it over the Christmas break.

Twitter itself started in 2006 (see this Wikipedia entry) but it only reached its ‘tipping point’ in the last few months, with a current estimated 6 million users worldwide.

How Does It Work?
Basically, Twitter allows you to send short messages (a maximum of 140 characters) out to the Twitter network. Originally used by friends, family members and co-workers to keep in touch – much like an internet equivalent of SMS – Twitter has evolved into something much more useful from a business perspective, if only due to the huge increase in the number of users.

Twitter allows you to ‘follow’ people ie read their messages (called ‘tweets’) and in the same way people can follow you as well.

When I started off I decided to follow Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull just to see what they had to say, and then slowly added people I knew – business and personal contacts – as well as people whose newsletters I subscribe to, or authors of business books I have read recently. What I found was that as I followed other people, they would often follow me back, so my list of ‘followers’ has grown as quickly as the list of people I follow.

You can search Twitter for people, but it’s also easy to search the overall Twitter conversation by topic, or geographic area (eg ‘Brisbane’).

So – how does Twitter help my business?
Much like a blog (see our previous post on blogs) – in fact Twitter is sometimes referred to as a ‘microblogging’ site – Twitter is a way of talking regularly to your ‘fan base’, for want of a better analogy.

You can use it to notify people of your business news – for example if you have added a new blog entry, or you have written a new report or whitepaper, or if you are speaking at an event. Twitterers also use the service very effectively to ask questions and during the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai, Twitter users were the first to know what was going on – ahead of the media – as people who were caught up in the attack updated their friends on what was happening using Twitter on their mobile phones.

So Twitter may be a marketing tool you can add to your armoury if you want to get information out to the world. But not everyone is a fan of Twitter, as you can see from these recent forum posts I found here when I Googled “Can somebody please explain Twitter?”.