For the past few months, my colleague, Katie Safrey, and I have been drowning deeply immersed in launching and running some exciting (and successful) social media programs for our clients. We have finally surfaced to take a breath, and thought we would share a few downright practical tips from the Twitter trenches.

Note: These tips apply to both B2B and B2C Twitter programs. There is little difference, in our opinion. Why? It’s all about talking to the INDIVIDUAL! That individual (1) is making the decision, (2) is recommending (3) is talking about your company, products, or services.

Remember: Companies don’t buy, recommend or talk about products. People do!

So, for starters, we are fanatical big on research, preparation and launch plans before executing a program, and this, believe it or not, goes for Twitter too.

The following prep work has made it really easy and smooth for us to launch successful and sustainable Twitter programs for our clients, and keep us all focused:

• Define your goals and objectives
• Research your target audience and target market
• Define the boundary of your conversation
• Create a launch plan to include all components of setting up a Twitter handle
• Research and create a list of “first 50” people to follow before the account launches
• Create an “editorial calendar” to use as a source of themes and tweets so you can begin with valuable tweets
• Create a Twitter Usage Policy
• Define who is going to be tweeting on behalf of your company
• Determine beforehand metrics for measuring the success of the campaign (more to follow on this in an upcoming post!)

We are also big on setting real expectations for our clients. While everyone is excited that there is finally a “free” and easy marketing channel, here’s what we remind them:

• Twitter is not a magic formula that will bring awareness, branding or leads overnight
• It takes time and consistent effort for you to build a true, valuable following
• Start by setting a goal of a minimum of 5 tweets per day
• You must engage with other users to build your following (Re-tweets, follow Fridays and conversation go a long way!)
• You need to be committed with a long-term steady time investment
• Yes, its takes time and resources to consistently tweet; make sure these resources are in place before launching the program
• Valuable content is key to your success
• Don’t concentrate on quantity, but quality of your followers

And keep in mind, Twitter is not an end unto itself, but compliments and works well in tandem with your other marketing and social media efforts.

We would love to know if this is helpful to you – or let us know your experience. Leave your comments or shoot us a DM on Twitter: @yasminbendror or @ksafrey

You can also pre-schedule tweets that can be mixed in with your real-time tweets. For example, scheduling informative content to be posted periodically throughout the day that will provide value and be interesting to your followers. Nice feature.

There’s a cool stats/analytics tab to track click-throughs on your links and to monitor which messages perform best with your followers (you need to use their ow.ly URL shortener).

The interface is very user-friendly. The @replies, RT, DM and other convenient feature buttons are very accessible. It just takes a few minutes of playing around to familiarize yourself with it and you and your other designated tweeters can be up and tweeting in no time.

Read the HootSuite blog for lots of tips and new features and follow them on Twitter @hootsuite, of course !

Hugh McLeod's GapingVoid.com

There are so many folks coming out of the woodwork these days that claim to be social media experts. It’s hard to know who’s a snake oil salesman and who really has the good stuff. For the most part, a social media expert needs to be more than someone who’s anointed themselves with the title. Here are five quick tips that will help you sniff out a good partner to help you achieve your objectives in social media:

1. Practice what they preach. Anyone trying to advise you on social media engagement for your company should be living it and breathing it on a daily basis – for their own agency, for their own brand, and for their clients. It should not be a separate practice, or a single individual in the company that understands the stuff, it should be part of the DNA of how the organization thinks, works and operates.

2. Knowing how to use a hammer doesn’t mean that you can build a house. Okay, so they have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but is there a strategy behind their efforts? Are there measurable business results? Can they qualify the outcome of their efforts? It’s not enough to understand the mechanics of social media tools, you need to have a vision, a strategy, execution and ongoing engagement that aligns with the organization’s business goals.

3. It’s your car, you need to learn how to drive it. Any social media expert worth their salt knows that someone from within the company/brand needs to be the dominant voice for authentic and credible engagement. Social media requires expertise to help organizations craft a strategy, understand the mediums and execute a successful launch. However, they need to be grooming you and training your company to take the wheel for the long term. If not, they’ll get to bill you by the hour for a long time (fun for them, not for you) and your customers will lose interest in talking to your ‘handlers’ instead of the real deal.

4. Check out the merchandise/squeeze the produce. Can your expert produce the goods and show you successful examples of their work? Don’t just take their word for it, ask to speak with clients, check out the communities, get some qualitative and quantitative data on the ROI of their campaigns.

5.  Eating brie and drinking champagne does not mean you can speak French. At the end of the day, even if your social media agency/expert passes the litmus tests of #1-4, #5 is the deal breaker. An expert in social media for power moms may not be a fit for the next cloud computing player. Your social media expert must also understand your target audience and your industry. If they don’t come from that arena, they’ll probably need a serious education before they can go from lactating moms to chatting up IT geeks.

There are some very talented, and very intelligent folks in this arena. But, there are also quite a few selling smoke and mirrors. Just like you would for any major investment, you need to do your research and your due dilligence to make sure you’re getting the good stuff.

So, David Martin, Vice President, Primary Research at Nielsen Online – a research company that delivers audience and Internet measurement metrics – released some interesting data last week on his blog on Twitter, its retention rate, and predictions on where Twitter will be if retention rates don’t improve.

You can read the report for yourself, but basically, its says that more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month and therefore the site’s growth rate is limited.

After he received a ton of feedback and comments, David issued updates to his study and research which included 30 other applications and websites that feed into Twitter. The results didn’t change.

This is great, interesting data – if its correct – but, so what?? For me, it’s not the intrinsic issue. I feel marketers are so stuck on predictions: Where will Twitter be in the next year? Is Twitter just a fad? Does it have staying power?

Marketers are waiting for “someone” to officially give the stamp of ROI approval on Twitter, but in the meantime are not taking action, and are missing out on opportunities NOW to strengthen customer and partner relationships.

I believe that companies that are agile and have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon with a good strategy and Twitter team are getting great results that compliment their overall marketing and sales strategy. Companies like @Jetblue, @DunkinDonuts, @woot, @zappos, @WholeFoods, @SouthwestAir are just a few that come to mind. Follow them to see what they’re doing on Twitter…

Twitter is not the quintessential or all-important element of your marketing outreach. Its only one piece. But its a powerful communication piece.

If Twitter does dwindle out, so be it. But right now, times are tough, and we need many different channels to reach out to our customers and partners, to talk and connect with them.

So I believe its about acting now and making the difference.

PS: I personally think that a large amount of the Twitter retention problem is about content – and I’ve said this from the beginning – tweets needs to provide value and need to be compelling. I “unfollow” tweeters who tweet about having coffee, watching a great sunset, or getting kids from school. This just does not motivate me to continue to follow them, it doesn’t provide me with anything of value. I think if tweeters get that, less users would drop out.

I thought it was a great gathering: The keynote speaker was Ray Kerins, VP Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. The panel that followed was moderated by Melanie Milstein, author of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution with Dave Armon, President PR Newswire, David Sacks, Founder of Yammer, Paul Gennaro, Chief Communication Officer, AECOM, Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications Manager, JetBlue, and Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson

The forum then broke out into roundtable sessions moderated by professionals in PR and Marketing who are involved and active in social media and real-time communications.

It was exciting to actually meet and talk to all of these good people that are the front-runners in embracing and using social media and real-time communications to strengthen their brand and connect and communicate with their customers.

I must say, it was mostly in a B2C context, but the forum tried to cover B2B as well.

Everyone was fired up; the room was abuzz with talk, questions, and networking. All the social media buzzwords you could find were flying around: Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, tweeting, video, RSS, IM, email, wikis and on and on…

I felt that people could not get enough information. Everybody was thirsty to learn more.

The questions seemed to be unanimous and ubiquitous:
How do I start?
What does it take from a tactical point of view? One person or a team of 10?
What are the risks?
What are the benefits?
Can I calculate ROI?
How do I get executive management on board?
How do I manage a crisis?
What is a fast response? Two days, two hours, 2 minutes or 2 seconds?
How do I control what’s out there?
How do I manage and aggregate all the different platforms for RTC?
What about traditional media?
How do I get buzz going for a small company that’s not a JetBlue or J&J?

Some questions were tackled and answered, some were not, some got an honest “we don’t know the answer to that yet”.

My key takeaways – and I hope this helps all of us – were:
- Start by discovering what conversations are going on in the social media space like Twitter, YouTube and blogs
- Monitor these everyday by getting RSS feeds through Google RSS or Google Alerts
- Make sure you understand and define your goals and what your communications strategy is
- Don’t be afraid to dip your toe into this fast-flowing social media river.
- Conversations are happening about your company anyway, so get involved
- Depending on your corporation or business, you should decide how to become part of these conversations and who should be answering
- Key: BE HONEST, BE TRANSPARENT
- Employees are spokespeople for the company – they are out there using Twitter and the likes, so they should be brought up to speed
- To do this, and do this right, in a big corporation, there needs to be a mind shift from the top down. Changes in the organization need to be made. Processes need to be streamlined. The social media spokespeople need to be empowered to reply quickly
- To quote Morgan Jonston from JefBlue, “This is about humanization of the brand!”
- Be careful not to seem like the overbearing “big brother”, don’t be intimidating
- Open up, LISTEN to your customers, be committed to change
- Remember and be aware: The line is thinning between traditional media and social media – many journalists have left traditional media and are now influential bloggers/tweeters

Lots of *stuff* to take in…

I look forward to a follow up event, which, in my opinion, could be a full day event, instead of half a day.

If you’d like to hear the two main sessions they are available here.

*Please* add your comments – I would love to hear your opinion and additions!

Excuse the pun, but LinkedIn will now allow you to ‘link in’ all of your other social networks and online applications to create tentacles to your real life and your broader digital life. For example:

• Link your blog to your profile for auto-updates of your latest posts with WordPress or Blog Link by SixApart
• Post your presentations through SlideShare or Google Presentation
• Promote your readling list with Reading List by Amazon
• Map your travel to connect with your connections in other cities with MyTravel by TripIt

Plus a host of other applications…..

I also manage/co-manage two groups on LinkedIn; PRSA-NY and PRSA Technology Section. Until recently, other than posting the logo like a lapel pin on your profile, being in the group didn’t give members any benefits. Now there are many more ways to interact, including:

• Contact group members directly
• Posting questions (discussions) and comments to the group
• Adding news articles of relevance to the group

Hopefully there will be more ‘social’ elements to LinkedIn. Might I suggest a Twitter app and link to your Flickr account for starters.