Twitter has a new section on their website offering information on how businesses are using twitter for marketing and customer service.

This Twitter & Social Media Marketing Guide includes recommended books, Twitter definitions, and case studies of businesses using Twitter for marketing:

When people working in the Empire State Building twittered that they were craving ice cream delivery, New York local chain Tasti D Lite was there to listen and meet their need. When electronics buyers look for good deals, the Dell Outlet Twitter account helps them save money with exclusive coupons. When Houston’s coffee drinkers decide where to get their daily dose, many choose Coffee Groundz, which lets them order via Twitter.

The guide addresses topics such as “So how do businesses use Twitter?” and “Twitter Best Practices”.

Read more of the Twitter Social Media Marketing Guide on Twitter here:

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101

Read Twitter Marketing Case Studies here: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/case_dell

Google Wave Marketing? Wait a Minute, What is Google Wave?

Coming late 2009, Google Wave is a mashup of communications tools provided by Google to make it easier for people to work and communicate online. (Read more about Google Wave)

What Could Google Wave Change for Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketers? 

• Google Wave could further fragment online audiences and limit the number and growth of today’s large social networks.
• Dave Coursey of PC World says “Google Wave as a mash-up of chat, e-mail, and document sharing, it’s really something else: Google Wave could be the Twitter that everyone really wants. Maybe it’s the Facebook, too.”
• Brands and social media marketers will need to dive deeper into authentic conversations in niches, to invite customers into personal and sometimes real-time conversations, collaborations, product testing & development.
• Along with Google Profiles, Google Search and Gmail, Google Wave will provide Google an even deeper look into our digital lives. Privacy advocates may not like it but marketers will love the ability to run very tightly focused Adwords campaigns in Wave.
• iPhone, Blackberry and Android mobile phone app developers and mobile marketers will likely concoct and use collaborative Wave-technology-based, multi-editor, real-time events in rich media and interactive apps as means to build customer loyalty and brand exposure, to get instant product testing feedback, to enable live user participation in webisodes and online reality, augmented reality events and products.

What do you think?

Google Wave is a mash-up of online communications tools to make it easier for people to work and communicate online. It’s a web application and computing platform designed to bring together social networking, IM, email and wiki — all with a collaborative focus and all working in real time.

 The folks at Google describe Google Wave as:

 “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web,”

“what email would look like if it were invented today”. 

Dave Coursey of PC World says “Google Wave as a mash-up of chat, e-mail, and document sharing, it’s really something else: Google Wave could be the Twitter that everyone really wants. Maybe it’s the Facebook, too.”

 Many Bloggers say Google Wave is more like creating a bunch of independent online social networks that are based on a marriage of email and instant messaging.

Writing a Wave is similar to typing text into Gmail, Google Docs, or a blog. A Wave acts like an instant message, except that other Wave participants see each character as it’s typed. A Wave is equal parts conversation and document, allowing people to communicate and work together quickly at any time with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

 Watch the Google Wave “first look” video from early 2009

How do I sign up for Google Wave? You have to wait til late 2009 when it’s launched.

1. Rich Media: Faster downloads, greater memory and processing speed will enable increased use of rich media advertising to iPhone users. Since the new iPhone announcement in March, some agencies have already experienced a 20% increase in iPhone advertising inquiries.
2. Geo-targeted Ads: the new Safari browser will have location-based technology, allowing marketers to develop geo-targeted ads for iPhone users (assuming the user gives permission to the website to see his/her location). Marketers will be able to serve ads that offer promotions based on a user’s proximity to a store or event. Watch for interactivity that allows users to be led by their phone’s map and new digital compass feature directly to points of sale, events or special deals around town.
3. Mobile Video: A better camera (hooray!) plus new video editing and recording features will allow iPhone users to upload video clips directly to YouTube, share via sms or email. Watch for marketing ideas revolving around encouraging users to record a video of themselves or others and submitting it to enter a contest, to build relationship with a brand, to receive a discounts.
4. Auto Fill: The new auto-fill fuction will remember user’s passwords, name, email much like we are presently used to with desktop browsers. Auto-fill will potentially increase conversion rates and make it easier for iPhone users to sign on to membership areas, subscribe to email newsletters and enter contests.

What do you think? Will the new iPhone 3GS help usher in the new mobile video era and spark a revolution in iPhone advertising & marketing?

Growing numbers of individuals, small businesses, corporations and non profit organizations are jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon. Those who will find the most success will take the time to consider how they can use Twitter to their strategic advantage. Here’s a few suggestions how to make the most of Twitter for your marketing & PR:

Marketing & Advertising

Follow customers & future potential customers. Integrate your online and offline marketing &
advertising messages with your Tweets. Provide links to promotions, microsites, videos,
advertisements.

Reputation Management

Follow experts, industry leaders, news & media. Develop a reputation as an authority in your industry or niche. Open dialogue with others in your or related industries.

Events

Follow individuals or groups interested in your events. Provide event notifications, reminders,
twitter-based event discounts, updates, photos, videos, articles. Tweet live from events. Encourage attendees to tweet during and after about the event. Dialogue live with attendees.

Promotions

Follow customers & future potential customers, offering twitter-user-only deals and promotions as incentives to follow you on Twitter. Provide links to online deals or twitter coupons, discount codes
time-based promotions. Interact with your followers & aim reach a large audience through word of mouth & viral retweeting.

Crisis & Issues Management

Monitor your brand, products, name(s), and issues related to your business or organization. Provide relevant information to address customer needs such as company info, tips, frequently asked questions. Dialogue with followers about the issues, encourage them to get involved and to retweet your posts.

PR & Customer Relations

Follow customers, future potential customers. Create content directly related and relevant to your target audience. Engage customers by asking them questions. Answer questions. Build positive sentiment about your brand.

What do you think?: How have you used or seen Twitter used to help achieve (or hinder) an organizations marketing & PR goals?

photo: kimba

TwtQpon lets you create coupons for promoting your products or services and then post them in your Twitter feed as part of your. If you have products or services you want to promote to your Twitter followers, consider offering a small discount or incentive in the form of a coupon and take advantage of the viral / retweeting features of Twitter.  TwtQpon says: ” Enhance your social media marketing by offering discounted coupons to the Twitter-sphere!”

See a sample Twitter coupon here: http://twtqpon.com/cbm8zk

WordTwit is a WordPress plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Twitter account as a tweet. It allows all your Twitter contacts to keep up to date with your blog postings. One cool feature of WordTwit is that you can assign your own shortened url instead of using tinyurl.com or bit.ly or others. This way you get to build your own brand instead of someone else’s. In our case TwitterMarketingAgency.com is way too long of a domain to use, so instead we use http://www.stirbuzz.com. It’s not the shortest domain around, but it serves our needs of building our parent company’s “stir” brand. We are just kicking the tires on this baby, so will let you know how it goes.

It has all of the features you’d come to expect from a Twitter client. Most importantly it allows you to manage and post to multiple Twitter accounts.
After you log in you’ll find four main buttons: Tweets, Replies, Messages, and Favorites.

Each tab shows you 20 results at a time, but you can see more with a single click.
You can do a lot with this Twitter app including viewing reply chains, see links directly in the browser, retweet messages, turn links in the browser into short URLS and more. The only thing that this app doesn’t do is let you browse the web and shorten a URL.

This is our favourite Twitter client for iphone. Try it today. Here’s a summary of features and recent updates in the latest version:
*  Handle multiple twitter accounts.
* Browse your friends &  followers.
* Post new tweets, retweet.
* Reply directly to tweets &  send direct messages.
* Follow and unfollow people.
* View your timeline, replies, direct messages &  favorites.
* Mark tweets as favorites.
* Navigate reply chains.
* Post links with automatic link shrinking via bit.ly.
* Upload pictures to twitpic.com.
* Save your favorite searches.
* Inline web browser.
* Update your twitter location.
* View twitter trends and perform custom searches.
* Implements the full twitter API.
* Uses secure connection (https).
* Go to User shortcut
* Nearby search
* Themes and adjustable font size
* Bookmarklet support

New in Version 1.2

* Instapaper integration
* Optional landscape keyboard
* Image compression control (for uploads)
* Nearby radius control
* Cached avatars
* Drafts persist across relaunches
* Resend tweet on network error
* Refined UI and reply-chain navigation
* Swipe shortcuts
* Disable “Accounts” back button
* Public timeline
* Block / Unblock users
* Control # tweets loaded on launch
* Remember scroll position on launch and reload
* Improved “load newer”
* Link to TwitPic.com in inline picture viewer
* Faster favoriting
* Handle $AAPL style stock links (to stocktwits.com)
* Send DM text to email
* Japanese localization

HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter & social media experience from one easy-to-use interface.

Creating an account is easy. Enter your Twitter username and password, and add a profile for each Twitter account you wish to manage. Got more than one tweeter per profile? Add multiple editors.

Then get going! Post live or pre-schedule tweets. Check stats and analytics right from the dashboard. Search Twitter for keyword information. Reply @ and Direct Message the folks in your conversation. Do all this and more from one fantastic interface.

Need help setting up Hootsuite for your business, organization or personal Twitter or social media accounts?Interested in outsourcing some or all of your business or organization’s Twitter posting using Hootsuite?

The Hootsuite experts here at Twitter Marketing agency are here and available to help. We provide in-person, phone, skype and video Hootsuite, Twitter & social media marketing training and conferencing. We’ve worked a wide variety of businesses ranging from with small businesses setting up their social media accounts and providing Hootsuite training to providing Hootsuite-based social media strategy, implementation, posting, engagement and Twitter / Facebook contests for large international businesses.

Click here to contact us today for a free Hootsuite and/or social media consultation. Feel free to ask us whatever is on your mind and we’ll be happy to help however we can.

We offer a free 30 minute social media consultation with one of our social media marketing experts so contact us today to schedule a phone or skype (or in person in Vancouver BC Canada) appointment today. Our Hootsuite and social media consultation services are start at only $150 after your initial consultation call.

Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social mediums individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

Ping.fm was created with the intent of making it as easy as possible to post updates to multiple social networking sites simultaneously. The idea came about when creators were updating status messages with micro-blogging sites Twitter and Tumblr. The idea of posting the exact same information in two places seemed a bit tedious, so Ping.fm was born.

(from wikipedia.org)

PingFM says this about their services:

We post your messages wherever you want!
That’s right, we support over 40 social networking sites and we’re adding more all the time.
Between our straight forward posting methods and advanced custom triggers, we make it easy for you to post your messages exactly where you want them to go.