GENTS TO EMULATE: The Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) radio/podcast duo, who not only bring humor to world football but also retweet FOLLOWERS in ways that bring a genuine sense of community to their Twitter stream.
It’s in the Twitter Cards
One of the more interesting developments in Twitter’s evolution away from its 140-character limitation is the creation of Twitter Cards. These hidden bits of content can be expanded with a single click and provide far more context and interaction than a tweet alone. Aside from photos and videos, marketers can embed lead capture and sales forms that streamline the tweet-to-conversion process far more easily than directing traffic to a landing page.4
With the pace of Twitter’s evolution, no one can predict whether Twitter Cards are built to last. For now, however, they are the perfect example of Converged Media—Paid Media (an ad unit) that can drive engagement (via Owned Media) and sharing (Earned Media).
SNAPSHOT: TWITTER
YEAR FOUNDED: March 2006. The first tweet came from cofounder Jack Dorsey (@jack) and said simply “inviting coworkers.”5
PROPRIETARY FOLLOWERS but also SEEKERS and AMPLIFIERS.
AUDIENCES: Also can be used to drive SUBSCRIBER and FAN growth.
EFFORT REQUIRED: Low to moderate depending on content and customer service volume.
WHO OWNS THE DATA: Users own their content, but grant Twitter an unlimited license to use it. FOLLOWERS are yours, but not directly portable to other channels.
ACTIVE USERS (WORLD): Est. 288 million monthly active users (and over 485 million accounts worldwide as of end of 2012).6
TWEETS PER DAY: Over 400 million as of March 2013.7
SKILLS REQUIRED: Copywriting, common sense, and a broadcast mentality.
GATEKEEPERS: Twitter and its users.
STRENGTHS: Instant, worldwide distribution of content to FOLLOWERS and SEEKERS via twitter.com and searching indexed tweets.
Low effort and zero cost required to create 140-character tweets.
Huge channel adoption by AMPLIFIERS (particularly ADVOCATES and INFLUENCERS) in every industry.
Twitter handle (e.g., @jkrohrs) has become a “social nametag” for everyone from television personalities to industry experts.
New features make link, video, and audio content more robust—really expanding Twitter’s capabilities well beyond 140 characters.
New advertising options like “Twitter cards” provide brands Converged Media options by including lead generation, email capture, and other valuable elements into their tweets.
CHALLENGES: Forum for venting about bad brand, product, or customer service experiences means that negative stories can go viral before you have an opportunity to contain them.
Consumers increasingly using the channel as a means to ask questions, vet customer service issues, and otherwise engage companies in ways that demand responses from across the entire organization. This increases need for cross-functional team management of Twitter.
Very public hacks and takeovers of corporate Twitter accounts illustrate need for companies to guard account access.
1. Mike Isaac, “Under CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter Is Growing Up,” Wired, January 30, 2012, www.wired.com/business/2012/01/twitter-costolo-allthingsd/.
2. Jay Baer, “Are Consumer Expectations for Social Media Customer Service Realistic,” The Social Habit, October 2012, http://socialhabit.com/uncategorized/customer-service-expectations/.
3. Teisha Seabrook, “The World’s Fastest Responding Brands on Twitter,” SocialBakers, www.socialbakers.com/blog/1748-the-world-s-fastest-responding-brands-on-twitter.
4. “Capture User Interest with the Lead Generation Card,” Twitter Advertising, May 22, 2013, https://blog.twitter.com/2013/capture-user-interest-lead-generation-card.
5. “Twitter Came to Life Five Years Ago This Week; Creator Jack Dorsey Remembers,” L.A. Times, March 13, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/03/twitter-came-to-life-five-years-ago-this-week-founder-jack-dorsey-shares-history.
6. “Twitter Now the Fastest Growing Social Platform in the World,” GlobalWebIndex, January 28, 2013, www.globalwebindex.net/twitter-now-the-fastest-growing-social-platform-in-the-world/.
7. Hayley Tsukayama, “Twitter Turns 7: Users Send over 400 Million Tweets per Day,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-21/business/37889387_1_tweets-jack-dorsey-twitter.
Chapter 12
Blogs: A Website by Another Name
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.
—John Steinbeck
Blogs. Bloggy, blog, blogs. The word itself doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it’s what you get with a portmanteau derived from the term web log.a Perhaps the name is what kept businesses from embracing blogs earlier as a quick, low-cost means of instant Web publishing.