Twitter For Business
Using micro-blogging to build community, trust, and sales.
Preston Lee, Founder, OpenRain.com

Today’s agenda.
About micro-blogging in general, and Twitter specifically.
✤
Text/SMS mobile messaging basics.
✤
How to start building a relationship network online.
✤
Building trust that can ultimately lead sales.
✤

Micro-blogging?
Micro-blogging: “...brief text updates or micromedia...to be viewed
✤
by anyone or by a restricted group...” (Wikipedia, May, 2009)
Fills a void between phone, email, blogging etc.
✤
Lots of meaningless chatter, yes, but also lots of value.
✤
Satisfies different needs for different people.
✤

SMS messaging relevance.
“Texting” up to 160 characters. Business integration is
✤ ✤
relatively expensive.
Fast.
✤
MMS not 100% consistent
✤
across carriers.
Mobile.
✤
Not meant for group
Media via MMS. ✤
✤
communication.
U.S. carriers charge both sender
✤
Not all cell phone users have
and receiver. Frequent users get ✤
data plans to view links etc.
unlimited texting plans.
Short codes are expensive.
✤

Micro-blogging implications.
Fast to produce.
✤
Fast to consume. A river of information from which to sip.
✤
Reach huge audiences.
✤
Supports “direct messages”.
✤
Bi-directional dialog.
✤
A data gold mine.
✤

Just a few related (free) services.
Twitter: the current king of general-use micro-blogging.
✤
Seesmic: video micro-blogging.
✤
Jaiku: general-use micro-blogging.
✤
FriendFeed: real-time activity aggregator on friends activity.
✤
Facebook: starting to look remarkably similar to Twitter.
✤
Many more...
✤

Twitter history.
Created in 2006.
✤
VC backed. Closed a third round in February, 2009 for ~$35M. Over
✤
$100M total.
Ridiculous growth. Rough at times. ~98% uptime in 2007.
✤
Currently one of the fastest growing and most frequently used social
✤
networks in the world.

Twitter features.
140-character or less “micro-blog” entries.
✤
Optional mobile text/SMS notifications.
✤
Send messages to followers.
✤
View timelines. (Public, user-specific.)
✤
Powerful search features.
✤
Many integration points.
✤

Common Twitter terminology.
Tweet (n): a message sent via @reply (n): a public message
✤ ✤
Twitter. directed at a specific person(s).
Tweeting (v): the act of posting Direct Message (n, v): a private
✤ ✤
a tweet. message sent between two
people.
Tweeple/Tweeps (n): people
✤
that use Twitter. #hashtag (n): user-defined
✤
tweet grouping mechanism.
Very useful for searching and
Timeline (n): a sequence of
✤
finding an audience.
tweets sorted by date. (Public
or personal.)
RT/retweet (n, v): reposting a
✤
message of someone eles.

But how is this useful?

Twitter is everywhere.
U.S. Airways Hudson River plane crash. (January, 2009.)
✤
Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN. (April, 2009.)
✤
CDCFlu, mexico_df. (April, 2009.)
✤
Oklahoma City Tea Party Arrest. (April, 2009.)
✤
nprpolitics, nprnews, scifri, algore, rainnwilson, oprah...
✤

How do I do all this?

Getting started.
Sign up for an account.
✤
Follow people you know, and interesting people you don’t know!
✤
Listen to your existing customers and interact with them.
✤
Reach out! Publish information/thoughts useful to your target
✤
audience.

Twitter clients.
The web interface. Twitterific (iPhone)
✤ ✤
Snitter (Desktop) PockeTwit (Win Mobile)
✤ ✤
Spaz (Desktop) TwitterBerry (BlackBerry)
✤ ✤
Twhirl (Desktop) BlackBird (BlackBerry)
✤ ✤
Twidget (Mac Dashboard) Many, many, many more.
✤ ✤
TweetDeck (Desktop)
✤
TwitterFon (iPhone)
✤

Supplementary services.
TwitPic.com JustTweetIt.com
✤ ✤
bit.ly TwitSay.com
✤ ✤
TweetBeep.com Qwitter.com
✤ ✤
DoesFollow.com twInfluence.com
✤ ✤
FriendOrFollow.com Tweetake.com
✤ ✤
Twitscoop.com Twitterholic.com
✤ ✤
TweetLater.com Many more...
✤ ✤

What about my business?

Common business use cases.
Building social capital: a community of trusting followers.
✤
Reaching out to new people.
✤
Customer feedback.
✤
Finding new business contacts.
✤
SEO/Keyword research.
✤
Trend analysis and general research.
✤

Social capital to sales.
Provide value first and marketing second.
✤
Use Twitter to complement your other marketing. Make your presence
✤
known.
Funnel traffic towards your online presence. Encourage people to call,
✤
request a quote, come in to the store etc. for detailed info.
Encourage marketing-related involvement through other campaigns.
✤
Encourage feedback and participation publicly.
✤
Thank people for their good work and patronage publicly.
✤

Twitter “don’ts”.
Do not blanket people with ads. If you want to distribute coupons,
✤
sales etc., make the purpose of the feed clear.
Do not overly outspoken in such a way that could come back to haunt
✤
you.
Do not represent your business inconsistently with your brand.
✤
Do not post paragraphs of text spanning numerous tweets. It’s called
✤
micro-blogging for a reason.
Do not post too much. High volume people are annoying.
✤

Integrate!
Include feed in your website.
✤
Auto-post your blog headlines.
✤
Upload pictures directly from
✤
your phone.
Possibly auto-follow those
✤
following you.

Questions and answers.

Presenter Information
Preston Lee is a founding member of OpenRain
Software: bringing businesses online with
dynamic internet applications. He has provided
senior engineering leadership for Apollo Group,
Cisco Systems, the U.S. government and many
other Phoenix-area and multinational institutions
OpenRain provides expert web design,
where he has become recognized for a wise
development and marketing services for the
balance of technical, business and customer
desktop and mobile web. Based in Phoenix and
perspectives. He has also earned MBA, BS in
one of Arizona’s most successful web
Computer Science & Engineering, AA and AGS
development shops, OpenRain services national
degrees.
clients and also offers personalized hosted
deployment and training services.
While not on the job, Preston is active in over a
dozen local tech communities and enjoys
OpenRain, LLC
woodworking, music production and filling
1 (623) 691-7869
frames on his digital SLR. He can be read regularly
sales@openrain.com
and contacted via his blog at...
http://openrain.com
http://prestonlee.com
http://blog.openrain.com
http://twitter.com/openrain