Potential promotable tweet from Panera

When are they going to make money? How can their valuation be so high? Remember MySpace and Second Life? Or even AOL? Platforms that were flying high and then hit a virtual ceiling.

Well it appears Twitter may finally have an answer. Or at least a first step. The fast growing micro-blogging service – from 500,000 to 22 million monthly uniques in the last 12 months – announced Promoted Tweets this week.

Advertisers will be able to buy keywords, which will return branded tweets when those keywords are searched. For example, search “Panera” and you could get the café’s most recent post at the top of the search rather than the community’s most recent updates, responses or conversation about the brand.

Paid posts that appear without having to search will follow soon.  These brand generated Tweets will appear in a user’s stream based on perceived relevance to that individual’s interests. Twitter will attempt to determine whether a brand message makes sense based on whom you engage with and follow. Keeping tabs on Lance Armstrong? Expect a Tweet from Trek bikes.

It might take Twitter and brands a while to determine the value and efficacy of promoted Tweets. Initially the platform plans to charge based on how many people “see” a post in their stream, whether they replied to it, RT’d it to their followers, or clicked on an embedded link.

No doubt this will take a while to figure out. If you follow 5,000 people, for example, even a paid Tweet won’t stand out. (Good for the  user if she doesn’t want it; bad for the brand trying to engage.) On the other hand if you follow 200, it might be rather prominent in your stream.

Promoted Tweets will be tagged as such, so it’s my guess that people won’t really mind them, as long as they don’t become too prevalent. My advice to Twitter is to put limits on how many promoted Tweets can show up in anyone’s stream in a given time frame. We all know how annoying it is to log into Facebook and find our page dominated by brand or media posts treating Facebook as if it’s just another RSS feed.

As someone who spends a lot of time using Twitter as a marketing tool, my one caution to all brands would be to avoid thinking this is the easy way out. Pure advertising messages on Twitter will be rejected by users. And anything less than a well-planned conversation strategy that takes into consideration a balance of paid Tweets, earned engagement, and genuine interaction with your community is destined to fail.

I think this is great for Twitter if it earns them some revenue. But we’ll be advising our clients to make sure it’s only one aspect of their Twitter strategy. What do you think?  About time?  Or one more opportunity for a brand to intrude on a user’s social space?

Twitter is like a more-manic version of Facebook networking – consumer interest only lasts as long as an item appears on their feed and users can remove followers from their list for any fickle reason:  they don’t get the user’s attention, they annoy the user or they just lose interest.

The trick is making Twitter more interactive for the user and spreading the brand name every step of the way. That’s where the new Twitter application TweetSwell comes in.

TweetSwell, still in beta form, is an engine for surveys, quizzes and polls that allows organizations a new way to engage with followers. We’ve been casually playing with TweetSwell for about a month and have been pleased with how interactive it is. We also appreciate the frequency with which the results are re-tweeted, spreading the brand name every step of the way.

How it works: Companies create a survey for the purpose of collecting consumer sentiment, sparking discussion or conducting product reviews. You write and manage the survey, then TweetSwell hosts it and uses your Twitter account’s design settings for a seamless brand experience. Once you publish the survey and promote it on Twitter, respondents can personalize their Twitter responses. TweetSwell collects all the metrics to show how successful the application is.

Other online survey and polling applications exist, including KwikSurveys and SurveyMonkey. For Twitter, however, TweetSwell founder Eric Chang saw an opening.

Chang acknowledges that Twitter-friendly applications already offer surveys and contests: TwtPoll allows you to create branded surveys on Twitter; PollDaddy offers easy, free polls that you can publish on your blog, Web site or social network; and CrowdCampaign allows users to create a contest while promoting a brand.

Where TweetSwell is different, Chang says, is that it focuses on creating customizable tweets from the surveys, so the survey is more engaging and has more marketing potential.

“Many companies have already been using Twitter to collect anecdotal feedback and address consumer questions and concerns,” Chang said. “What’s been missing is the ability to back this anecdotal feedback with some real analytics and do it in an automated way.”

Chang’s focus is twofold: to create deeper analytics for the clients, showing the “social reach” of the brand; and support better incentives for followers to engage companies through Twitter.

There are currently a handful of organizations testing the TweetSwell service. Chang hopes to use their feedback to better hone the design and metrics. One tester is the maker of men’s clothes, Bonobos, which is using TweetSwell to see what its customers want out of a good dress shirt: “Should cuffs have one button, or two?”

Once TweetSwell is officially up and running – sometime early next year – Chang says he’ll have a pricing system in place.

For now, he’s working on developing even more utilities for TweetSwell. He recently included a “roll your own tweets” feature that allows hosts to pre-populate the respondent’s “What’s happening?” box on Twitter, and the ability to add images to the surveys.

Photo links to G20Buzz.com

When the White House announced earlier this year that Pittsburgh was to be the host of the next G-20 summit, Pittsburghers everywhere initially reacted with shock, which turned into excitement, which turned into a feeling of ‘it’s about time.’ Pittsburgh has made a smooth transition to a new economy, and we’re proud to play host to one of the world’s largest international events, The G20 Summit.

Mullen Pittsburgh viewed this as an opportunity to use our interest and knowledge of social media to benefit the Pittsburgh community by creating a clearinghouse for all information about the G20 Summit – a web site called G20Buzz.com. The site is a real-time aggregate of sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and it also includes up to the minute articles by harnessing Google News. This is where the user-driven aspect of the site really begins to shine. By creating G20Buzz.com, we wanted to make sure we could create a place where people could find all G20 news.

The G20 is a deeply polarizing event, both on a local and global scale. For Pittsburghers, is the headache of hosting the summit worth it in the long run? For the world, is this really a beneficial meeting? Is globalization the future, or is it an evil? Everyone has something to say about it, and G20Buzz.com lets everyone tell the world – all in one place.

While you’re at it, check out some of the buzz the site has been getting in Pittsburgh:
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: New Web site says it has buzz on G-20 summit
Pop City Media: Want more G-20? Don’t miss a beat this week with G20Buzz.com
Exponentialweb.com: Pittsburgh G-20 + Social Media = LOVE

This shutdown was also not born out of any bitterness towards Twitter. While we are disappointed that users cannot choose their URL shortener, that is Twitter’s decision to make. We are simply accepting the business reality of the situation, and moving on. Life is not fair, and such is life as a Twitter developer (which none of us here will be any longer). We are all actually excited at pursuing larger opportunities, of which there are many.

Which is all well and good for Nambu, the company behind tr.im. But it really stinks if, like me, you enjoyed their service and lost access to all of your great charts and stats that revealed who was clicking on the links in your tweets. Basically, Nambu concluded that because the information is out there for everyone, their service didn’t offer anything that others couldn’t offer. But I, and many others, disagree. The stats I could get out of tr.im were far superior to what Bit.ly, tinyurl or ow.ly from Hootsuite provide me (in terms of the look and feel). They were client-ready charts and graphs that provided geographic locations of those who clicked on links, and the browser and operating system they used. And that was hugely valuable to me (see clicks to Olympus E-P1 Blendtec Will It Blend video).

But the story gets even better. Having died on a Sunday, tr.im was resurrected in the same week and reports of its revival by popular demand are flooding the blogosphere. Now, according to the latest reports, it is going open source.

Who really knows how long tr.im will last? But the bigger issue is that all URL shorteners are just like remora “sharksucker” fish living off the shark that is Twitter (or the Fail Whale that is Twitter). Unless Twitter decides to get real about the businesses that are migrating to its service, and seamlessly incorporates the same sort of Facebook Insights analysis that make Facebook so useful for marketers, the Darwinian shakeout of URL shorteners will continue. For now, I am happy that tr.im wasn’t trimmed permanently, but I feel a little bit like a sucker fish myself.

Social is everywhere

• Social networking users have doubled since 2007, representing 60% of the online population and users go to their favorite sites five days per week, four times per day for about an hour per day.
• Facebook and MySpace represent two of the top ten sites and provide similar scale to the big portals.
• Social is bigger than facebook, MySpace, twitter and LinkedIn. It has become so pervasive that it has seeped into all parts of our lives: Music (imeem), movies (flixster), parenting (cafemom) and even ethnic communities (BlackPlanet and AsianTown).
• Smart marketers are starting to replace click thrus to their own site with click thrus to facebook where they encourage you to fan their brand. They understand that if I click thru to their site, they have reached one person, but if I click thru and fan their brand, they have reached me and all of my friends via facebook’s News Feed. Absolut Vodka has started to use this execution.
• Facebook and twitter are starting to infiltrate TV as there will be a twitter and facebook app in the Verizon Fios Widget Bazaar. In the first iteration of the twitter app, Fios subscribers will see a spilt screen with the programming on the left and the tweets on the right based on the programming or genre they are currently watching.

Social is nowhere

Ad land tends to look at the world through a myopic lens vs. understanding what is happening in real America. And although social is huge and is growing, we are sometimes startled and receive a much needed dose of reality when we hear contrarian numbers:

• 69% of all adults 18+ have little knowledge of what twitter actually does.
• Social networks receive less than 7% of the overall digital investment.
• TNS recently polled 60 big brands and the consensus was that agencies don’t get it and one went as far to say that traditional agencies have very little contribution to make.
• Ask any major marketer if they feel they have search or OLA figured out and most of them will say yes, but ask them if they have social figured out and the majority will say no.

So there you have it. The next time a client asks you to opine about social, tell them social is everywhere but nowhere. And FYI, you don’t have to credit yours truly.

If Godin wrote the book in 2009 his lesson of storytelling as the foundation for good marketing would be even stronger, given that I believe social media marketing IS storytelling. If you don’t have a good story to tell on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or any other social network you’re directing your fans, friends and followers to, you’re dead in the water. Sure, it’s a story that will evolve based on dialogue with the community and what it wants, but it’s a story all the same.

The best brands today have embraced storytelling on every level. Take Five Guys, the burger and fries joint. They opened up a local franchise near where I live and have had lines out the door from day one. Their walls are plastered with all the press clippings touting their amazing food. And it is amazing. They cater to the customer and tell a good, authentic story about quality food done fast, and with free toppings! No wonder Obama took Brian Williams there when he was interviewed for an NBC special. Even the Commander in Chief buys their story.

So, if you want to truly succeed in social media marketing today, it doesn’t matter if you’re a master of every Twitter tool on the planet (Developers: I’m begging you, stop calling your service “tweet-[insert name here]” already! We get it, Twitter doesn’t work right, and you’re the spoiler on the back of my low-riding Honda Civic to pimp my tweets). If I told you in 1999 that I was a master of Yahoo! Instant messenger, could work a Hotmail chat room like nobody’s business, and built the best-ever GeoCities websites, you would probably have laughed in my face. So the next time that someone tells you they’re a social media guru, tell them you already have a plumber, and what you need is an architect who can build a great story for your brand.

Recently Mullen had a wonderful experience working with Olympus to launch its new E-P1, the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera.  This beautifully designed camera shoots great stills and HD video.  As a content creating machine, it seemed the perfect product to bring to life in the social media space.  After all, aren’t YouTube, Flickr and Facebook where we show off our photos and videos?

However, you don’t simply appear, announce your presence and hope people pay attention.  You start at the beginning.  So here’s what we did and what might work for you.

1.  Make a commitment to listen, engage and share

Seems obvious, but it’s important. Social media isn’t a campaign or a program, it’s an ongoing relationship.  Olympus understood this and made that commitment.

2.  Define your community

The more clearly you define your community and learn how they engage with a category, a brand, content and media, the more effective you’ll be. We weren’t trying to reach a mass audience, but rather to connect with digitally savvy photo enthusiasts who might enjoy learning and talking about the new camera.

3.  Determine objectives

True, Olympus signed up for the long term — to listen, learn, share, contribute — but our real objective was to launch the E-P1, generate buzz, get bloggers to pay attention, and have the press pick up the conversation.

4.  Engineer your presence

Essentially we constructed a social media brand platform, connecting Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube so we could take our questions, content and conversation to the community rather than ask them to come to us.  Of course, Olympus prominently displayed links on its website, too.

5.  Build a following

You can let it happen serendipitously, or you can develop a game plan.  We chose to follow key influencers, promote their content, contribute to their conversations, and offer them value in hopes they might follow back.

6.  Engage, share and inspire participation

Long before we were even ready to talk about the new camera we got fans and followers engaged in discussions.  We shared videos, product demos, invited them to submit content, and simply talked.

7.  Do something attention getting

Even in the social media space, you have to compete for attention and generate content worth talking about. We did it by partnering with Tom Dickson of Will it Blend fame.  We started with a teaser video that generated nearly 200,000 views in the first couple of days, then followed with a full blown product introduction. We didn’t create a viral video for the sake of creating a viral video; rather we came up with a fresh new way to demonstrate the totality of the camera’s features.  It worked, evident by this blurb in Wired.

8.  Mobilize your community

Ok, in this case we did something social outside the digital realm.  We invited bloggers and reporters to a product demo and photo shoot at Coney Island.  But we also provided our fans and followers with the full story and useful background about the camera.

9.  Measure results

As our head of analytics likes to say, “you can’t put up a weather station and measure yesterday’s weather.”  So early on we put in place systems to measure the conversation, sentiment, tweets, RTs, web traffic and impressions from both online and offline media coverage.  This gave us a base to compare the conversation at the start of the project with the buzz generated after the announcement.  It will also give us a baseline to use in determining actual sales and their relationship to the conversation.

10.  Keep on going

As we said, and as Olympus knows, this isn’t a program or a campaign, it’s a commitment.  So we’re still at it.  Listening, talking, sharing, responding.  Of course it’s too soon to see the sales numbers, but feedback from dealers has been very positive.   And we know based on previous experience that there is a correlation between buzz and sales.  So that’s a good thing, given that bloggers and press are writing, prospective customers are talking, and the videos are getting shout outs everywhere.

Can you think of anything we missed?   Are there best practices we didn’t consider? Have you introduced a new product this way?  Please share.