Note: I recently joined FirstRain as Director of Business Development after 12 years at Dow Jones/Factiva working with Enterprise customers on information delivery and consumption solutions- my focus and passion is to find, deliver and insure adoption of enterprise B2B business intelligence information solutions. As always, the opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past, future or present employer or any organizations i might belong to unless explicitly stated that is the case.

I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.

My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.

• I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
  
• I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
• I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
• How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
• I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
  
• Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
  
• Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
  
• Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
• I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
• I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
  
• I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
• To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
• I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected
  

My last point and probably the most important for people in sales and marketing was to be authentic. For example, i follow our Twitter brand accounts , i retweet things from the Dow Jones twitter accounts that MY followers will find valuable not as an advertising . I have seen others do a dis-service to themselves and the company by blatantly retweeting or promoting product specific things and nothing else. It is ok for the brand twitter account to do that but your personal account needs a good mix of personal and business.

Tweet away my friends.

Currently the New York Times has fewer print readers than Twitter followers.

"The last set of figures released, on 31st March 2010, put the New York Times’ print circulation at 951,063 and reports this week say revenue from circulation is in decline. However, with 2.6 million followers, the paper’s Twitter account is a roaring success. Particularly when you compare it to its rivals."

Following on Twitter could be something pretty passive especially for people who follow many, while physically picking up a paper (and having to go to the store to buy even more) is definitely not passive. I think a more interesting statistic to compare to print readers would be what the referring traffic is from Twitter to the New York Times site and engagement time- how long does a consumer spend reading the physical paper and how long does a vistior that comes from Twitter spend on NYTimes.com?

Image|Flickr|Jarjan

Every Morning /Afternoon/ Evening that i don't tweet, i feel guilty. The other day someone asked me if i had become a weekend tweeter (is that like a weekend warrior i wonder?) and i answered with my stock answer, no i am just too busy- work, new motherhood, sleep, and of course i am still 'listening' (thank goodness for TweetDeck). But not tweeting good content, still makes me feel guilty for not providing more value to my followers because i get so much value from the people i follow.

In addition to all my followers (current count 2,145), I am currently also listed on 109 Twitter lists (unfortunately i can't figure out how to view all 109 but when i do i will update the list below!), some pretty impressive ones that i am proud to be on include:

• @techmama/tech-moms curated by @techmama
• @techpundits curated by @Scobleizer
• @all-the-geeky-ladies curated by @StephanieBamBam
• @top-web-devs curated by @carsonified
  
• @techwomen curated by @sarahebourne

So good morning Twitter friends and here is a blanket sorry to all the Charlies and the other followers....i won't feel guilt anymore. It is what it is at this point. hope what i have to offer is good enough for you to stick around. thanks for understanding.

Image|Flickr|Earl- What I Saw 2.0

I kinda did it on purpose but definitely did it for longer then i originally anticipated- mainly because life got in the way- but i quit Twitter for a while (my last tweet was on August 23rd- WOW i can't believe it has been that long!!)

So every weekend for the last 3-4 weeks i have told myself, "Monday i get back on the bird"- but it has just not happened. I have also been less inclined to blog- all in the same cycle i guess. So what have i learned over the last two months with no Twitter participation? (every once in a while i would look at my stream to try to get myself back in the swing of things but with no avail):

• I feel dumber. no honestly i do. much much dumber.
  
• I went back to relying on Techmeme to keep up with what is happening in the industry- not 'real-time' because i don't visit the site 24/7 but definitely still a wonderful source to use (i also follow the stream on Twitter so i will go back to that)
• Although i probably have spent more time reading longer, in-depth articles etc. without applying what i am reading with the community and listening/conversing about them it has less impact- so i felt dumber per my first point!
  
• I crawled back to my Google Reader and noticed that many bloggers that i used to follow religiously aren't blogging as much- are they are on Twitter more? or like me on a cleanse with life in getting in the way? (yes there are many a blog post out there about the decline of formal blogging being replaced by Twitter)
• I had a customer the other day dropped me a note- they were worried about me because i had been so 'quiet' - they missed my input because they followed me and subscribed to my blog and i had not been producing much. That was a nice reminder that i needed to motivate myself!
  
• I have missed some major announcements- from people moving from one company to the next, new product enhancements, releases etc. eventually i find out but i was no longer one of the 'first' in the know
  
• I miss it- i do. the conversations i have been having with myself are not as entertaining and provocative :-)

So...I am back on the bird. tweet. tweet.

This morning i read that Dell Sold $3 Million in sales through Twitter an accomplishment that should be acknowledged and is import for other B2C businesses to admire and try to replicate. $3 million is a small amount to Dell but still relevant (about .5% of their annual revenue of $61M )- since they are just getting started with the medium . {CORRECTION-thanks to Sandro: revenues 61B not $61M, and thus this is only 0.005% (one part in 20,000) of their revenue.] They use other social media channels as well so based on the viral nature of Twitter into other channels (Facebook, blogs, Youtube etc.) it probably is a combination of the originating points of the promotion codes on Twitter spreading out.

But let's say that the average PC purchase is $800 bucks. Using that average (i made that up) through Twitter they acquired ~ 3,750 customers. Depending on their retention and loyalty rates, long term these consumer acquisitions can be even worth more.

So i checked out their Dell Twitter accounts, and there are multiple Twitter channels- 34 of them on the Dell on Twitter page and that is not counting other Dell 'employees', 'fans' and 'followers' that are not listed that retweet. Just looking at the 'Dell Offers on Twitter' category, there are 10 separate accounts. Between theses 10 twitter accounts as of this morning about a total of 2,081 tweets had been published across those 10 accounts- so if my math is correct, Dell netted about $1,441.62 per tweet. Not bad for 140 characters.


Image|Flickr|striatic

Lately my husband, in an attempt to obviously connect with me more over my Twittering habit has taken to yelling things out loud in a monotone voice like 'starting to make dinner by myself. lol' from the other room to get my attention away from the computer or 'OMG i just found the best shoes. and on sale!' when i pickup a new pair.

So of course, I just laughed hysterically as i watched this clip- on what would happen if the way we communicate on Twitter was the way we communicated in real life.


Hey at least we would talk to one another more- even if it was uni-directional!

I am guilty of sending internal group emails with questions like- "has anyone worked on something like this", "can you point me to a proposal that addresses this need that we have delivered on", "what are your thoughts on this article, "who would like to blog a post responding to this", "why do you all always ignore me" (ok they don't ignore me all the time but enough of the time that makes me paranoid...). I have tried to setup up groups on our internal Instant Messanger but the group features are weak, the team is globally dispersed so not on line at the same time, and some people just never log on and messages are not delivered when people are offline and come back on. I am sure my experiences are not unique.

I have however created a 'backchannel' with key folks that i work with on Twitter- the noise there is different i guess and using Direct Messaging bypasses the hundreds of other emails that person may get (especially if they use a Twitter client to alert them of DMs). As i get more followers and i follow more people however i have a hard time listening on on that backchannel (i keep hearing that Groups are coming to Twitter- when??)

Twitter like services- which allows users to broadcast short messages (usually 140 characters) have been coming up during client conversations- from using it internally or externally to communicate; to obviously monitoring what is being said about them- and how they should respond. I don't think Enterprises can hide much longer behind the ignorance curtain- it is becoming a new way to deliver information- one that is inherently powerful in the Enterprise space because it's main purpose is response and discussion- not only push.

Today this article on ReadWriteWeb about Best Buy buying an Enteprise Twitter application from Headmix caught my attention (although i don't read a "license to try pilots" as an full sale in the Enterprise but certainly understand that is a great foot in the door for them). Lucky for the Best Buy team- their project does not seem to be tied to regular metrics and goals since he comments "People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed."

Just last month Jeremiah Owyang, who is always ahead of the game, posted an overview of Enterprise Microblogging Tools or what he called "Twitter for the Intranet"- (i get the 'intranet' label but i would argue that the power of a microblogging tool is that it is device independent- it should not matter if i am using a browser, a phone (regardless of what type/platform), or another web enabled device). If you are looking for potential tools to use 'behind your firewall' you should take a look.


Of the Videos that have on the HeadMix site- this ones addresses specifically why Best Buy is interested in this distributed messaging microblogging platform:


Making The Sale from Arik Jones on Vimeo.

Just came across this site tweetVOLUME that allows you to quickly create a comparison chart graph of word/phrase occurrences in Twitter. The sample i have included in this post present a graph of the amount of times some major newspapers are mentioned in Twitter. I am guessing that 'new york times' is popular because there are various new york times twitters, which although i believe were not created by NYTs are a great branding exercised.

Back in April, i blogged about another 'monitoring' service Twitterment that i thought was interesting and as services like Twitter among other continue to get traction companies/individuals are going to definitely be more interested in tracking what people are twittering about.

tweetVOLUME is quite simple and lacks some key features for real usability; like for example being able to drill down on the charts to see the underlying data, being able to join multiple terms (e.g. Wall Street Journal or WSJ) and it doesn't tell me what the time frames of the data is that i am looking at (last day, last month, forever?)- but overall a fun little tool.

Aside from just being fun, i do like the fact that it is a destination site that doesn't require logins or plugins and you can easily share your chart with a simple e-mail this chart feature which send out a contextual URL link.

I was in Portland all day today and at the end of my day at the airport i got an e-mail from Jeremiah about a new Twitter base service. Twitter allows 'micro-blogging' with text-based posts, up to 140 characters long. Yeah i know you were wondering how long it would be before i posted the word 'twitter'- in this post i give you 17 derivatives of the world 'twitter' to get it out of my system.

The subject of the e-mail was Twitterment a new Twitter search service that allows you to search what people are 'twittering' and analyze what terms people are twittering about. The Twitterforum has a detailed post on the functionality that is available but besides searching and graphing on one term it allows for comparing two terms like 'vista' compared to 'leopard'.

Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public time line API . The Twitter API only retrieves "public" data. Twits from a protected user who is not a friend (a permissioning term) with the requesting user API would not show up.

On their site, Akshay Java one of the Twitterment authors writes:
"What makes microbloging content really valuable from an analytics point of view, is the granularity at which users are starting to provide information. This is an exciting new area is Social Media analysis and there is lot more we can learn from this. Right now are working on a sentiment analysis module and a social search feature."

Just this afternoon i was meeting with a customer and i brought up the rise of Twitter as another social media output and how many companies will soon need to monitor (and then when they begin to see impact on their business -measure) these new 'microbloging' services. Twitter is not the only one out there for example Jaiku is another.

There are already over 50 applications/services that use the Twitter API to provide different types of functionality.

and yes i have a Twitter account...but no i haven't 'twittered' yet.