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.

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