- The document describes the author's experience using Twitter to share information about Manchester under the handle "rainycitytales". It discusses best practices for engagement on Twitter, including monitoring, participating, and advocating. It provides examples of successful corporate Twitter use by Dell and Best Buy. Metrics for measuring Twitter success like retweets, hashtags, and interactions are also outlined. The author has since expanded their presence to include a Wordpress blog integrated with other social media platforms.

1. A Rainy City Tale
- a social media case study
B Hunter, Digital Development Manager
Introduction – who am I?
- Digital Development Manager All About Audiences
- Undertaking Social Media MA at the University of Salford – which also involve consultancy projects for example with St Ann’s Hospice
- Activity participant in Manchester’s social media and blogger community
- Social media evangelist

2. Social media
- take your pick
• Blogs and micro-blogs
• Image and video sharing
• Podcasts
• Social networks
• RSS
• Forums and chat rooms Image c/o nzbuu
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- Social media – is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social
media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It
supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
- Is it a new phenomenon? Surely the inherent nature and original purpose of the web. Now however it is the ease of access opens these platforms/
technologies up to a ever widing demographic.
- The problem though is there is lots of choice...
- With social networks alone there is so much to choose from – Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, Linkedin etc.
- Even social networks for ‘speciality interests’ Last.fm, Good Reads - it has even been said that these are becoming of more interest than ‘general’ social
networks
- There is too much choice? Where do you start…?

3. Where to start?
• Skills
• Resources
• Return on investment
Image c/o Matt Hamm
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- With so many options where do you start?
- It can be scary/daunting
- Do you need a social media strategy?
- Start with taking a step back – look at the following skills (internal vs external)
- Financial resources – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel / have something built, there are tools out there – however the financial implications may budget
towards training / skilling up your workforce, with the right guidance social media can perminate all levels of an organisation
- Return on investment - what you what to get out of it? what are people going to expect in terms of results?

4. All a Twitter
• Micro-blog
• Status updates
• Limited to 140 characters
• A free service(?)
Image c/o petesimon
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- Twitter is a free micro-blogging platform
- Allows the sharing of thoughts and ideas – via tweets
- Real time
- Focuses the information being posting
- Ability to follow other users and to be followed
- Ease of entry – anyone can do it!
- Think about who should for your organisation – multiple contributors? tone of voice?
- Estimated that over 15 million people worldwide are now using the platform on their desktops or mobile phones
- Rate of growth - Reported on the 5th of March 2010 Twitter had hit it’s 10 billionth – November 2008 1 billion, November 2009 5 billion. Users are sending
around 600 tweets every second, which equates to more than 50 million tweets per day. One in five tweets now includes a reference to a product, brand or
service.
- Recent survey by Virgin Media Business, only 16 of the UK's biggest 100 listed companies are using Twitter to engage with customers. Around 57 of these
FTSE 100 companies had signed up to the service, but 72 per cent had not actively used their account to respond to customer enquiries or comments.

5. It started with a tweet
• “Sat in my Northern Quarter
(or is it Ancoats) pad – the
start of my Manchester
tweets”
• 4:30 PM 9th March 2009
• twitter.com/rainycitytales
• An information source (with
a personal touch) for all
things Manchester related Image c/o Matt Hamm
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- Just over a year ago - started tweeting
- Talk about what was going on in Manchester - arts, culture, food & drink, sports.... a bit of fun

6. 6

7. The rules of
engagement
• Monitor
• Participate
• Advocate
Image c/o db*photography
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Monitor
- Track what people are saying
- Track what people are sating about you
- Gain insight
- Identify problems
Participate
- Thank people – it gets people to stick with you
- Try to resolve problems
- Be prepared to manage a ‘crisis’
Advocate
- Engage and start conversations
- Share ideas and thoughts
- Talk about things that matter – but make it relevant to your audience
-Understand your purpose and intention
- Transparency
- Clarity
- Equality
- Passion
- Shared values
- Responsibility
- Commitment
- Back to the start... Listen again

8. Rewards and risks
• Getting it right
• Best Buys
• Dogs Trust
• Dell
• Museum of Liverpool
• What can go wrong?
• Broadcasting
• Spam
• Lack of engagement
Image c/o avyfain
• Free(?)
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Great examples:
- Best Buys – Customer relations - is a US consumer electronics retailer. Describe on their Twitter page they are “Best Buy employees tweeting for and about
Best Buy as we see it” They have creating a TWELPforce handling online customer service and promotion.
- They have been very public about how they engaging staff in this process you can even see the tips and expectations for the TWELPforce at Best Buy
Connect “When you start, remember that the tone is important Above all, the tone of the conversation has to be authentic and honest. Be conversational. Be
yourself. Show respect. Expect respect. The goal is to help. If you don’t know the answer tell them you’ll find out. Then find out and let them know.”
- As part of the process have started advertising just the Twitter URL
- Senior Manager - Emerging Media Marketing, that required the eligible candidate to have at least 250 followers (July 2009)
- Dogs Trust – Engagement. Wanted to grow the range/diversity of the people and organisations they were speaking too. Also attracted celebrity support.
This has resulted in them having more people come to them for advice about caring for dogs. And also they have been able to re-home dogs via Twitter too.
- Dell - Sales - Over 100 staff representing them on Twitter. $6.5 million worth of revenue (December, 2009). "With using social media our alert system reacts
very fast, and we recognise problems throughout the company, whether they are technical or logistical, within weeks. We have seen the negative
commentaries decrease about 30%," (Senior Manager for Corporate Affairs)
- Museum of Liverpool - Arts - Already over 2400 followers. Unique approach that the tweets come from the “building”. Venue doesn’t open until 2011. Joined
Twitter about a year ago.

9. Measuring success
• Positive mentions
• Retweets
• Hashtag
• Customer interactions
• Social capital
Image c/o Darren Hester 9
-twitter.com/rainycitytales - 901 in just over 12 months
-Not everyone will achieve high number of followers – and are these figures ‘true’ inflated by spam + the rule of follow to be followed
-Also unlikely that you will be able to drive big numbers to special offers or direct to product pages
-Can look at loyalty, interaction and feedback
-Opportunities – have been contacted by organisations looking to promote vodka, chocolate, computer software, a book, a networking event, a night club, a
charity
-Importance of relationships
Tools available for measuring the impact / to get started:
-Mr Tweet
-Twitter Grader
-Tweetstats
-Twitter Counter
-Hootsuite - tracking URL click throughs in tweets, monitor conversation streams

10. Social media ROI
Image c/o Intersection Consulting
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- Social media requires the re-definition of ‘traditional’ measures of ROI
- This means there is the opportunity to created your own metrics and benchmark against these
- The ROI comes from the further developments, and the growth from a small start using one social media platform

11. Beyond Twitter
• rainycitytales.wordpress.com
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- Development of ‘full’ blog – based on Wordpress platform
- This has been integrated now with Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, FourSquare
- In November shortlisted for the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards – Best City/Neighbourhood blog
- 43% of referrals from Twitter
- = 12% of total views from Twitter

12. 12
The sky’s the limit in the ways in which the ways in which the use of Twitter can be expanded:
- User friendly desktop clients:
- Tweetie
- Tweet Deck
- Feeds / widgets – for websites
- Share / autopost to other sites (in both directions) – integration with Facebook for example
- Twitpic - images
- AudioBoo – audio
- Visualisations – great for live events
- The data is interesting and useful too – API and #uksnow

13. Contact
All About Audiences: allaboutaudiences.com
twitter.com/aboutaudiences
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