Business Insight Zone

The social network Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds, but is it useful for businesspeople?

On Tuesday, I had the pleasant task of explaining the potential and pitfalls of Twitter for business at the monthly meeting of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (current site / new site). This post is to share an annotated version of my slide deck from the presentation. (You can find photos of the event here, and a short video recap here.)

Although I’ve written about Twitter and business before (for example here and here), and although I’ve spoken for groups many times, this was my first time to speak on this topic, so I followed my usual M.O. and collected, oh, five times as much material as I could have used during the 45 minutes of the talk. In subsequent posts, I’ll use that background material to flesh out more thoughts in this vein; for now, these slides can serve as a stake in the ground for some of the issues that I think are most important when it comes to using Twitter for business.

(If the embedded player doesn’t work for you, check out the deck on SlideShare.)
My style is to use a lot of slides an go through them rapidly — there are 99 slides here for a 45-minute presentation. If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, you can read short annotations of the slides after the jump.

[UPDATE, 11:10 a.m. -- Neat: SlideShare is featuring this deck in its Business & Marketing category.]

Slide 1: Title slide

Slide 2: Although Twitter doesn’t report exact numbers, there are something like 5,000,000 Twitter users, the number is growing, and that population is weighted toward people who are highly active online. If nothing else did, the size and behavior of this audience should draw the attention of interactive marketers.

Slide 3: Just a visual joke to warn people that, setting aside any business merits, Twitter is a lot of fun to use and can become highly addictive.

Slide 4: An itinerary laying out the three sections of the talk (bolded in the descriptions below).

Slide 5: In the promo for the talk, I had promised three takeaways for the audience, so I put them here as a reminder and asked the audience to make sure I covered these to their satisfaction.

Slide 6: As I mentioned the other day, over the past weekend I came up with the idea of creating a freestanding Twitter account — @HIMAtalk — dedicated to this presentation. I told the crowd that this was our “insurance policy”: even if they fell asleep, couldn’t see the slides, etc., they could go to @HIMAtalk and benefit from the links posted there and the “starter pack” of Twitter friends at that account, which includes some of the best marketing thinkers on Twitter.

Slide 7: I encouraged the audience to look forward to our Q&A session as a cultural event comparable in size and historical impact to Woodstock, and to jot down any ideas they had for discussion.

Slide 8: While I wanted big topics to wait for the Q&A session (I knew we had a lot of ground to cover before then), I encouraged people to interrupt me with clarifying questions if they found themselves looking as quizzical as this dog.

Slide 9: Section 1: What Twitter IS

Slide 10: The home/login page of Twitter, which explains that it’s all about short answers to the question “What are you doing?” Following the lead of Laura Fitton and Chris Brogan, I suggested that a more apt question would be “What has your attention?”

Slide 11: Alternate definitions of what Twitter is like.

Slide 12: I think that Twitter is like a cocktail party where almost all of the guests are always sober. (I’m hardly the only or the first Twitter user to employ that analogy.) But thanks to technology, this cocktail party has the advantage of being placeless, operating 24/7, allowing you to find the conversations you’re looking for, and to engage in multiple conversations at once.

Slide 13: The types of conversations common on Twitter.

Slide 14: The tweet from HIMA program chair Raegan Hill, spotted by my Hoover’s boss, that led to my talk at Tuesday’s lunch.

Slide 15: What Twitter looks like when I log into it as @Twalk. I walked the audience through my own use of Twitter, how many people I follow, how many follow me, etc.

Slide 16: How to use @ to reply to someone publicly.

Slide 17: How to use direct messages to talk to someone privately.

Slide 18: How Favorites work.

Slide 19: When you want to sample from the giant river of tweets put out by everyone using the service — not just the ones you’re following — you can try the “Everyone” tab. It can be great for serendipitous finds.

Slide 20: This is what someone else’s Twitter page looks like when you come to it; it’s by looking at this page that I decide whether I want to follow someone or not.

Slide 21: The type of message I might use to start the day.

Slides 22 & 23: Two tweets from a funny friend of mine who has young children. I included these to give the audience an idea of the types of funny conversation that Twitter can foster, and to set up . . .

Slide 24: . . . the punchline of the joke, which also gave me a chance to explain what TwitPic is.

Slide 25: Explaining the retweet, and why it’s okay for someone like my friend Adele, quoted here, to toot her own horn like this — she’s built up an enormous amount of goodwill among her Twitter friends, so that a note like this is by way of celebration, rather than self-aggrandizement. And self-aggrandizement is bad, because you don’t want to be . . .

Slide 26: . . . “That Guy.”

Slides 27-52: A quick-quick overview of how to set up a Twitter account, using my experience setting up @HIMAtalk as a guide.

Slide 28: Use your real name for your username if it’s available, or at least something professionally acceptable as an alias.

Slides 29 & 30: Twitter will search your e-mail contacts to find people already on Twitter. This gives you your own starter pack of friends, if you want.

Slide 31: Personally, I wouldn’t solicit others to join Twitter by e-mail without explaining it to them first.

Slide 32: The vanilla result, prompting a visit to the “Profile” tab to customize.

Slides 33 & 34: Regardless of username, I would include your real name, a good URL, and a sensible self-description in the biographical fields.

Slide 35: If you’re using Twitter for business, I’d encourage you not protect your updates — no sense in giving people an extra hoop to jump through to follow you.

Slide 36: You can use Twitter from your mobile phone, which makes it very easy to build up a good Twitter presence during the interstitial moments of the day.

Slide 37: Configuring e-mail alerts (I use the defaults, shown here).

Slides 38 & 39: Your Twitter avatar picture. In general, I recommend that businesspeople use a professional headshot or a good snapshot that captures some of their personality. But in this case, I wanted the @HIMAtalk account to be visually distinct from my own @Twalk account, so I picked a photo of Steve McQueen to use tongue-in-cheek.

Slides 40-42: You can customize the color scheme & background image of your Twitter account, which allows you to include corporate logos. (I didn’t mention this to the HIMA folks, but you can check out our own @Hoovers account for a great example of this.)

Slide 43: Not so vanilla now. Time to start following people.

Slides 44-47: How to search for people you know, and the results of adding them.

Slides 48 & 49: Following the great @chrisbrogan. You may remember that I interviewed Chris early last year; he’s one of the most important voices on Twitter, so I wanted to call him out particularly, and I also wanted to show the crowd that a few people like him follow and are followed by huge numbers of people.

Slide 50: What the timeline looks like for @HIMAtalk after doing this.

Slide 51: Using Twitter Search to find more HIMA folks. I stressed that, if they did nothing else, the folks in the room could set up Twitter searches that tie into RSS feeds as a way of supplying themselves with a steady stream of intelligence about what Twitterites are saying about their company, their industry, their competitors, etc.

Slide 52: The fruits of my labors on @HIMAtalk a little while after starting.

Slide 53-56: “Whom should I follow?” I encouraged the crowd to do as they pleased, and particularly not to cave to pressure to follow more people than they want. I used the example of Wil Wheaton, who couldn’t possibly follow all the thousands of people who follow him fruitfully. (The contrast with Chris Brogan is that the social media are Chris’s livelihood and passion; Wheaton’s got other fish to fry.)

Slide 57: The past few months have seen a huge rise in the use of automatic direct messages to welcome new followers. While I’m not opposed to their use in all cases, I am opposed to their use in cases that turn their users into . . .

Slide 58: . . . “That Guy.” See the wise thoughts of Amber Naslund and, once again, Chris Brogan on this issue.

Slide 59: I offered these items as possible topics for further discussion. In particular, I encouraged people to approach Twitter with a sense of “serious play”; it’s an environment where you can set out to achieve certain objectives (e.g. monitoring your brand’s status among Twitter users) but then also take advantage of serendipitous connections.

Slide 60: Section 2: Twitter for BUSINESS

Slide 61: Twitter should work like my local hardware store, where the owner treats me as a human being with problems to solve rather than as a number or a mere source of revenue. I discussed this analogy a little while back in “Social Media Makes Merchants of Us All.”

Slide 62: If you’re going to use Twitter for business, you should follow Peter Drucker’s wisdom that every business activity should aim to create a customer.

Slide 63: Seems pretty basic, huh? Yet so often we fail to follow these steps.

Slide 64: The mindset I think you should carry with you into Twitter; it matches the mindset of the guy who owns the hardware store in my neighborhood.

Slide 65: A key slide, given the audience. I believe we ought to think of Twitter as a marketing instrument primarily in the word-of-mouth vein. (Paging Andy Sernovitz!)

Slide 66: I put “media outreach” in a separate category because it’s possible, using Twitter, to become friendly with journalists who use it in ways that simply aren’t possible under the old rubrics of P.R.

Slide 67: If our experience with @Hoovers is any guide, it’s quite possible to pick up sales leads and provide TLC to customers via Twitter.

Slide 68: Learning more about what’s going on in your market is a key function of Twitter, and maybe the biggest reason you should be using Twitter Search + RSS feeds daily to collect information.

Slide 69: People want to know what they’re getting into, especially in the frank and friendly cocktail-party atmosphere of Twitter. Don’t mislead them, be willing to talk to them as people, and be willing to associate your people, by name, with your brand. One advantage of this approach: as Collin Douma has pointed out, Twitterites (and other reasonable people) will cut you some slack if a person makes a mistake but then makes good on it; it’s much harder for a brand to make a mistake and get away with it.

Slide 70: I recapped what I said here and here about American Airlines’ (non)use of Twitter.

Slide 71: @JetBlue is doing it well.

Slide 72: So is @Zappos . . .

Slide 73: . . . to the point that they have their own special clearinghouse for tweets coming from Zappos employees.

Slide 74: Frank Eliason has done yeoman work for Comcast via @comcastcares.

Slide 75: I’m not looking for fashion bargains, but if I were, you can be sure I would follow @TJMaxx.

Slide 76: @TheHomeDepot is using Twitter intelligently . . .

Slide 77: . . . as is @WholeFoods.

Slide 78: Recently I profiled @ScottMonty and his work for Ford; he was a natural to include here, given how well he balances the personal and professional.

Slide 79: The big point is to go into Twitter intent on LISTENING . . .

Slide 80: . . . which implies that marketers have to soften their focus on messaging, in favor of having conversations with other Twitter users. (Nothing prevents you from conveying a consistent message via conversation, as @ScottMonty and @comcastcares so richly demonstrate.)

Slide 81: Some pitfalls to watch out for.

Slide 82: More fodder for discussion.

Slide 83: Section 3: Twitter TOOLS

Slide 84: Twitter lets you have the super-hearing and the speed of the Man of Steel, but also lets you go without sleep and process multiple streams of information like Brainiac 5. (Yes, this is my inner geek coming out.)

Slide 85: A preview of the types of basic tools I covered.

Slide 86: When all I want to do is shorten a link, I prefer Is.Gd.

Slide 87: Budurl has all sorts of nifty features that let you track the links you shorten; especially useful to marketers wanting to run promotions via Twitter.

Slides 88 & 89: Again I emphasized the simple power of Twitter Search.

Slide 90: Twhirl is my preferred desktop client, especially since it lets me monitor the @Twalk and @Hoovers accounts simultaneously.

Slide 91: Tweetdeck combines all kinds of great functionality, including the ability to run custom searches that update automatically, shorten links, post to TwitPic, etc. (For all I know, you can use Tweetdeck for air-traffic control; it’s scarily customizable.)

Slide 92: Just a quick mention of some ways you can use Twitter on your mobile device.

Slides 93 & 94: Friend or Follow lets you see where the mismatches are between who you’re following and who’s following you. NOT that there’s anything wrong with having these mismatches — you just might like to see where they are. (Somehow I had forgotten, until I was making these slides, that my pal Cesar Torres designed Friend or Follow.)

Slides 95 & 96: Mr. Tweet suggests people you might want to follow based on who you’re already following. I’ve just started using it, but I’ve found that it’s recommendations are surprisingly good.)

Slide 97: A reminder to checke out @HIMAtalk for more details and resources.

Slide 98: Revisiting the takeaways I had promised.

Slide 99: Time for a Woodstock-grade festival of discussion. (And, in fact, the HIMA crowd did have great questions, some of which bled over into one-on-one conversations and e-mail follow-ups after the event was over.)

Whew!