16 ways to use Twitter as a B2B marketing tool

I saw a documentary a decade or so ago about a group protesting logging in BC; they were fairly activist, and intended to chain themselves to the loggers' equipment. They'd been at it for months or years. Of course, the RCMP had to step in and at least play the role of mediator. They could have used pepper spray, but the officer in charge engaged in a long conversation over several days with the protesters. In time, they came to respect him greatly. At one point, before their began their civil disobedience, the officer was invited into an aboriginal-style prayer circle, and he held hands with the protesters as they prayed or whatever. Then, they chained themselves to the equipment, and, without incident, he cut their handcuffs or chains and arrested them one by one. No one showed any remorse. It was almost like theatre.

What happened in my view is that the officer became an honest broker. The logging company knew that violence would lead to national news coverage and, perhaps, government investigations into the extent of the logging activity; they appreciated the honest-broker officer. The protesters of course wanted government oversight and national media coverage, but were too decent to engage in violence. They appreciated the honest-broker officer.

How many times in our life are we respected by two opposing sides at once?

In my view, this is the core of Twitter. The tech aspect of it is secondary; it removes almost all friction from the media-social relationship and, absent costumes, reveals people and their relationships as they are. Are you generous? Are you insecure? Are you genuine? It's difficult to maintain a serious presence on Twitter without revealing these things.

We live in an age where culture and "soft" skills are rising in importance, as other previously important aspects of life become commodified. Southwest Airlines claims that it owes it success to its culture; to a less centralized system of management in which employees help one another; it's not necessarily due to superior yield management software or aggressive purchasing teams or more powerful advertising.

The generation coming to prominence is exceptionally distrustful of media, seeing almost all traditional forms of media as akin to a type of door-to-door electricity-contract salesman. Just in time, hard innovation has enabled the development of social media tools that permit a more genuine type of communication, in which those who are fake are loosers.

All that said, let me explain how I see Twitter as a B2B marketing tool.

16 ways to use Twitter as a B2B marketing tool

1. The obvious -- obtain followers and build generous, genuine relationships with (many of) them. 
2. Answer questions -- either with 140-character answers, or by directing followers to your content or other content that provides the answer.
3. Make news or express thought leadership -- again, either in a text tweet, or by linking to your content.
4. Be re-tweeted and go viral! If you say something really powerful to 200 people, it can conceivably reach 200,000 in two or three hours if people fine it valuable enough to re-tweet (re-post to their own list of followers.) 
5. Follow and be followed by other social organizations. For example, if a car manufacturer is able to win genuine respect from an environmental group, which itself is respected and followed by tens of thousands of people, a re-tweet by the environmental group lends tremendous cachet back to the for-profit organization.
6. Troll the Twittersphere for rumblings about your organization. Mitigate a negative movement by correcting misinformation in its earliest stages.
7. Lend a more human character to your organization. Enterprise accounts should probably focus on business, but there's no reason not to tweet or re-tweet about worthwhile community initiatives or events or cultural significance. Promote stuff that's cool. Be a person.
8. Promote your team; use the lists feature to create lists of teams within your organization. Followers of a corporate account are free to then follow some or all members of these lists.
9. Develop and show your knowledge of the space you operate in by aggregating external thought leadership and tweeting straight links or short commentary and links -- i.e., peruse your industry's periodicals and other forms of thought leadership and tweet what's top to your followers. As a side effect, this creates an excellent repository of industry content for internal and external review.
10. Show that you're dynamic simply by using social media correctly.
11. Create a community around what you do and own the space. Be at the centre of discussion. Own the cool-kids table so your competitors do not ... or be collaborative with them. Whatever. 
12. Recruit -- I think the best way to do this, especially for a Big Four firm such as mine, would have dozens of the recently graduated adopt accounts like @JohnSmithatBigFourFirm; these accounts could be promoted at targetted campuses, and the account holders could also naturally connect with any friends/profs they have at these campuses. The accounts then serve as excellent links directly and deeply into a firm, dispelling much of the Big Scary Glass Building feelings, as I had at 23. Standards would be needed, but above all, it would have to feel and be genuine.
13. Aggregate all of your news and other sources of knowledge into Twitter. Instead of visiting 12 websites a day/week to glean headlines, run a Twitter stream down the margin of your desktop (available in Vista, or as an iGoogle plugin) to passively stay abreast of the world, without actually "surfing the web" like our grandparents did ;-).
14. Provide advance warning of events: be it the upcoming release of interesting content by the firm, an media placement, a speaking engagement or an actual event where live human people gather their warm bodies under a single roof (this still happens!)
15. Live-tweet events (where "live" is a verb); I'm not entirely sold on this. It would be weird for an account that tweets twice a day to suddenly tweet 25 times in an hour. It could work with advance warning. Perhaps 12 tweets an hour; and perhaps some linking to blog-style substantive commentary from an event.
16. Be like Conan O'Brien, who followed nobody and had perhaps a half million followers when he announced that he would follow one person. She is a 19 year old girl in Michigan whose followers increased from a few dozen to 28,000 at last count. She seems very kind and decent; she's getting married and "running for the cure" and Conan has in some ways changed her life by drawing thousands of followers and, in turn, millions of people to her. What he did is a bit silly; and that's what he does. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you have the weight, throw it at someone who perhaps could use it. At the least it's a nice gesture; at best it looks good enya.

Please comment with 17 and more ...

Minimalism overtakes technology (again)

This is a good post on the evolution of technology to meet the abilities of non-techy users. The author -- Rob -- argues that the "http://" in URLs renders the entire URL system to be Greek to the majority of web surfers. I agree that this might apply to grandmothers, but I find it hard to believe that the majority of society cannot learn something like this. The proof: six of Ask.com's top 10 searches last year were for other websites; sites like Facebook, Craigslist and -- unbelievably -- Google. People actually use Ask.com to search for Google. (Which I gather feels like walking from your front door to a bus stop to take a bus to your house to drive to work.)

I cannot believe Rob's thesis because people do adapt, and are not stupid in the majority. Cars are pretty hard to drive if you've never done it; but they're so useful that hundreds of millions of people operate them and negotiate highway systems daily. Cars are not a "take me to cake and pie" technology; they're hard to use than that. I suppose the argument in favour of Rob is that, if the voice-command car existed, only a few people would bother learning how to steer and navigate.

It's an interesting concept on a higher level. Rob also writes"in the iPhone OS, the concept of the file is essentially gone. It’s been replaced by 'apps and their stuff.'" Well, it does make sense that digital cameras present you with the photos you took, rather than a folder filled with applications and jpegs. It also makes sense that CD players in the early 1980s simply played music tracks, not files and root data. Toaster ovens don't cook by watts; they cook by a number from one to six.

When technology ceases to have "http://"'s and file folders, and starts having meaningless numbers from one to six, etc., it becomes an appliance. And any walk through a Sears store will tell you that people who don't care about how a thing works will drop thousands of dollars on appliances. They buy the result -- the cooked chicken or the collection of photographs, etc.

YouTube and recorded music

For most of my life, it has been a high crime to record a live performance by a musician. Independent of this, in the last three years, YouTube has been filled with music that is ordinarily for sale -- both studio recordings and amateur concert videos.

But one artist at least, Joanna Newsom, has ended up with an interesting approach to these two issues. I don't know whether it is her intention, but there seems to be very few or no studio versions of her songs on YouTube, but loads of videos of her in intimate theatres, halls, etc.

I think this is the right strategy. You can no longer prevent music from being shared -- whether online or sneaker-P2P. But if you let all your fans post cell-phone videos of your songs, this is fantastic publicity that cannot replace the quality of a studio recording.

PS -- check out Sawdust and Diamonds.

Saving the music album -- the studio mix tape

Bat out of Hell. Srg. Pepper. Led Zeppelin IV. The Wall.

Musicians have made a few excellent albums. But by and large the music industry has delivered a fifty-year swindle to music consumers and their comeuppance has clearly, um, come. By swindle, I simply mean when a band produces one or two excellent singles, and places them on an album with 10 or filler tracks. For literally decades, this was how it was done -- a $3 song was packaged with ten 10 cent songs and sold for $18. Magic value.

Today, these $3 songs are all on sale for $1 at iTunes. So you only buy an album if has the stature of a classic album, like The Wall, or if you just like to own physical media for some reason. The most creative response to this in my view has been to sell albums at the cash in places like Starbucks; Sheryl Crow sort of goes with the Starbucks image and if you're spending $7 on two lattes, maybe you'll spend another $15 on a CD for your car. The other approach, made famous by Radiohead, has been to sell the album on a pay-what-you-can basis; this is not a bad approach either. Certainly, if you imagine bands receiving just $1 or $2 per CD sold, then by delivering albums direct (less production and any marketing costs) it wouldn't be hard to match or beat that; heck, sell the whole album for $1.50 and then sell a bonus video for $1 -- you're already ahead.

But I thought today that there is another approach that tackles the core flaw in retail music. Perhaps the meaning of the album needs to be revisited. Instead of an album being the coherent narrative of, say, five guys in a beach house over a month, let it incorporate more than one solo artist. What I'm proposing is part way between a compilation CD and a classic album. Imagine if Sheryl Crow, Taylor Swift and ... I don't know ... KELLY CLARKSON, got together and released an album with 12 songs -- four each. There would be little or no overlap in vocals, but substantial cooperation in theme, lyrics, production, etc., so the coherence of a classic album emerges.

The album would be released with a title reflecting its narrative, not their brands -- something like Sand in the Sunscreen; -- I have no idea. But with a coherent theme and narrative there is a coherent audience; such an approach captures not only the built in audience for each artist, but also a new audience for their narrative. There's also the benefit of being so big that the publicity outweighs what it otherwise would -- a $5 million lottery prize receives an average number of purchased tickets, but a $25 million lottery prize might receive an extra $10 million worth of tickets, so that $5 million = $5 million, but $25 million = $35 million.

Or, in this case, 1+1+1 = 5.

Finally, taking such an approach and labelling it as a series -- something similar to the "unplugged" series in the 1990s -- produces an additional benefit in that consumers would come to expect the all killer, no filler quality of the product.

Note: this is my first post actually written for the Kindred Crowd blog; the previous ones were just the tech-related posts written for my personal blog.

When did bit.ly become del.icio.us?

Seriously. Props for recognizing a social media angle to what I think was just a silly side industry dominated by tiny URL until twitter got big.

Now, delicious is a personal repository and bit.ly is 2/3 tool and 1/3 social.

EDIT -- I seem to have mistaken their "history" feature for a non-existent "what's hot" feature (seemed unlikely that all that was hot was mine). Anyway, is there more value in holding their perpetual poll of websites close to their chest, or in sharing?

Taglocity -- making MSOutlook more like Gmail

I prefer Gmail because it's quicker and less bloated. But Outlook will definitely be with us for some time, and while it is, Taglocity offers a product that closes the gap a little.

I'm running Taglocity 3.0 professional edition (free trial; soon to revert to standard edition), after using the 2.0 for about eight months.

In a nutshell, Taglocity radically enhances an existing Outlook feature called "Categories." (Categories = tags). For some time, Outlook has allowed you to categorize emails, but it was clunky.

Here's how I set up and use Taglocity, after installing it:

1. Assuming you currently store your Outlook email in folders, open a folder and select all emails. Now, use the Taglocity Pane (atop your main Outlook page) to assign a tag to all items in this folder. You can just use the name of the folder, but I believe in following these conventions:
   
   
   
   
   a) don't pluralize ("report" not "reports") or capitalize, except
   
   b) capitalize acronyms ("PR", not "pr"), and
   
   c) add a hypen after tags that would otherwise form words or parts of words; e.g., "PR-" and "Toronto-". This will pay off later if you run a search for "professional". [Granted, it will fail if your email includes something like, "Toronto-based accountant"].
   
   
   
   
   
2. Go through all your folders and repeat this
3. Open your Tag Bar window (click "Tag Bar") clean up your tags. Through right-clicking you can consolidate similar tags.
4. Now, within your Tag Bar window, move the tags around into groups and then assign a colour to each group (e.g., industries are blue; administration is green; personal is yellow)
5. Still within the Tag Bar window, add a half dozen of your most popular tags to the actual Tag Bar. This bar sits atop Outlook's main page, and makes it easier to assign tags to emails.
6. Now, go back and see where you can assign more than one existing tag to an email. E.g., you have an email about a flight on Air Canada and another about consulting services to Air Canada. Tag both "air-canada" but tag one "flight" and another "consulting" or something.
7. When you've done all this, put all of your email in an "archive" folder and delete your other folders. One caveat, for repetitive projects, I prefer to use folders to tags. E.g., I write a monthly newsletter and I store material for it throughout each month; I will tag this material with the name of the newsletter, but I also store it in a folder called "May 2009" or whatever.

Yes, all of this takes some time. You may not follow all these steps for the email you received in the past. But the process demonstrates how to use Taglocity for email as you receive it. When an email arrives, once it's dealt with as a work task, you can click twice and deal with it as clutter.

Finding anything is simply about narrowing down the options -- triangulating. If, in six months, you need details about that Air Canada flight, you can use Outlook's search box to run a keyword search "category:air-canada, category:flight". Even if this produces 100 emails, you can easily scroll to the rough period of the flight. And you can combine the search with "from:dave"-type commands.

If the size of your company permits it, you can benefit from a network effect by making all of your tags public; i.e., the tags you assign to an email will travel with the email when an email is forwarded or replied to. If you invest the time to create a taxonomy for your firm, email conversations will only have to be tagged once, rather than by each recipient.

Sounds complicated, but in fact the top benefits I've experienced from using this are:

1. if you equate a tag to a folder, you can put one email in two or more "folders" at the same time, so it's easier to find regardless of how your brain is working when you need the email. E.g., you might spend a year storing email first by industry (or client) and then by service performed, and then decide you want to store by service performed first and then by industry/client within those folders. With tags, you just do both.
2. it's ridiculously quick to tag and drag emails to a single folder than to drag up and down Outlook and through nested folders.
3. though command-line searches are not popular, in fact we have all become used to them through Google; they're quite quick when you get used to them. have you ever watched someone painfully spend two or three minutes trying to find a simple email? if you can narrow the problem down by two or three tags (and perhaps a rough date), it shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen seconds to find a needle in a 10,000 email haystack.

In time, people will no doubt have personal taxonomies. You'll add 100 tags to Gmail and you'll use them for all work documents, personal documents, calendar items, emails, photos and videos, and basically any discrete piece of content you store.

The Kitchen PC -- Asus

It's not quite a fridgebook, but life is incremental.

Asus Kitchen PC.

(Does anyone else remember Commodore 64's being pushed for the capacity to organize recipes?)