Business 2 Business Marketing Through Twitter...

The following text is taken from my recent article for B2B Marketing Magazine in the UK:

Twitter is the perfect example of social media – an online tool powering conversation. B2B marketers have the potential to use it more effectively than B2C, not only due to the length of sales cycle but more importantly the long relationship cycle.

As a business marketer, you need to find out if your customers are talking about your brand, products, services and indeed competitors on Twitter. If they are, then you need to engage with them and be there before the sale. If not, then register your brand’s ID on Twitter and get involved before your competitors do.

With any communications tool, you should have a strategy in place to effectively handle the relationships with customers. Here are guidelines on how to best communicate your brand on Twitter.

1. Register your brand
Don’t get brand jacked – register your company name on Twitter! You can then link this account to your company blog so you are integrating your communications and syndicating content.

If your organisation does not have a blog, consider using Twitter – it can be cross-platform integrated, easier to maintain and your customers can see what you are up to.

Your sales and marketing team should also look to register their personal Twitter accounts. Dell employees use their personal name and company Twitter ID (e.g. JohnatDell) to reinforce transparency.

2. Find your customers
Using the Twitter search tool you can find users who mention your brand, product, service, industry or competitor, and then follow them.

They hopefully will check out your website or read your ‘tweets’ and follow you back. Even if they do not follow you back immediately, you can earn their following by answering any related questions adding value with an ‘@reply’.

Do not fall into the trap of using ‘auto-follow’ tools or following everyone who follows you, keep focussed on your strategy and your audience.

3. Set your brand apart from the noise
Thinking of what you should ‘tweet’ about? Twitter gives you 140 characters to answer the question ‘what are you doing now?’ so make it relevant and remember that anything you tweet will be indexed by Google.

Give some thought to your tone of voice. I would recommend that your tweets are conversational.

As with any social tool it is your contribution to the community that will set you apart from the noise and encourage followers to engage with your brand. Offering social currency such as links to industry white papers, reports, case studies, hints and tips may earn your brand social endorsement in the form of a ‘retweet’, a powerful feature of Twitter of online word-of-mouth marketing in action.

Twitter is a business ecosystem bringing together people, conversations, offerings and entire industries into one busy marketplace where the savvy can extract value and form long-term relationships.

B2B marketers should look toward Twitter as a cost-effective way of getting closer to customers. The question you should be asking yourself today is ’should I be looking to extract value from social media tools such as Twitter now, or play catch up, spending more time and effort later on?

sm4b on Facebook

It might be from the US (New York Times, 22nd July 2009, Claire Cain Miller) but this is a great article demonstrating the power of Twitter for small businesses…

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter. Curtis uses Twitter to drive his customers to his changing location.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner. He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide. Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.

Just how big is Facebook?

Facebook's popularity continues to grow day by day. The company claims that it has more than 57 million active members -- users who have logged onto Facebook over the last 30 day period -- on the site. Since January 2007, the average number of new registrations per day is 250,000. Facebook says that the number of active users doubles every six months. Members from the United States account for most of Facebook's population, followed by members in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Facebook also claims to be the No. 1 image-sharing service on the Internet, drawing more traffic than the second-, third- and fourth- place sites combined. In terms of image numbers, this means that Facebook receives more than 14 million uploaded images every day. Because there's no limit on how many images a member can upload and new members arrive at Facebook every day, this number will likely continue to rise exponentially.

Since June 2007, when Facebook first allowed third-party developers to create applications, developers have debuted more than 7,000 programs on the Facebook platform. Every day, developers introduce another 100 applications to the site. Facebook estimates that more than 80 percent of all members have used at least one third-party application.

Because it is so popular and heavily trafficked, Facebook requires massive amounts of storage space, both in a digital and physical sense. According to one Facebook employee, the company relies on around 200 memcached servers for production (day-to-day operation of the site) and a few more for developmental purposes [source: Grimm]. "Memcached" stands for memory caching, a method of temporarily storing data. A memcached server temporarily stores information in the server's memory, reducing the need to search a database for information. This decreases the amount of time it takes between a request for information and the delivery of that data.

Facebook also uses custom-built servers for back-end operations and a monitoring system to keep track of all the servers. Servers take up space, so Facebook leases facilities from vendors for server storage. In 2007, Facebook signed an agreement with DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) to lease 10,000 square feet of space in an Ashburn, Va., storage center [source: Data Center Knowledge].

So how does Facebook make enough money to cover its expenses? It generates some revenue by selling web advertising space, but the majority of its funding comes from private investors. According to Facebook, it has received more than $40 million in funding since it launched in 2004.

Barack Obama - 6.5m followers on Facebook.

Barack Obama has 6.5 million follows on both his Facebook fansite and Twitter. He (or somebody) uploads videos and podcasts, as well as links and comments/news on what he's upto and what he will be upto. He is actively hanging out where his public are hanging out...he is directly (as well as quickly and effectivly) communicating directly with his public....through uing a personal profile he is also rivaling traditional parliment figures by creating a personal presentation of himself - www.facebook.com/barackobama