Being Buff: Marketing the social economy

I attended another informative Case Study Jam Ottawa tonight and caught three presentations, two of which were most relevant to all who read this blog:

• A win from independent financial advisor Randy Little, who went out on his own with a commitment to doing things differently. Building from the ground up, Randy has built his business by reaching out to the people of Ottawa almost entirely through his Twitter account.

Hear Randy Little talk about building his business with Twitter.

• A fail from Chelsea Edgell about being hired to find an environmentally-friendly way to publish a massive, annual employee job manual and being shown the door when she suggested a wiki might be a better solution than burning 50 CDs.

Hear Chelsea Edgell talk about failing to convince her organisation to embrace collaborative tools.

Randy said that one of the reasons he was on Twitter was because the kind of people he wants to reach are on Twitter. I asked him how he knew who was on and he told me:

• he knows they’re in Ottawa because he searches for people using TweetDeck’s “Tweets Nearby” feature (Randy uses TweetDeck on his iPhone)
• he reads people’s bios and looks for clues in their tweets (i.e. do they talk about owning a house?)

Randy says he follows 2000 people so cut him some slack if you follow him – but he doesn’t follow you back.

Thanks to the Case Study Jam organisers for another good one.

Tags: Twitter, Wikis
Posted in Twitter, Wikis | 2 Comments »

Want to increase the effectiveness of your online communications simply and powerfully? Then get out there and leave comments!

I was about to blog about the content of Mashable’s post What Social Media Users Want when I decided to leave a comment – and that changed what I wanted to blog about. The story was tweeted over 2800 times, shared over 600 times, Dugg 250 times – and had 44 comments.

This confirms what I’ve been seeing elsewhere: people are blogging and commenting way less as they Tweet more.

That means there’s a huge opportunity for people willing the take the time to add thoughtful value to conversations via comments.

And services like Disqus (that I’ve just begun using) can help. Disqus tracks and displays all your comments, and replies to your comments, across the Web. And remember, your comments are indexed by Google so every one increases your Google findability – which is Web gold.

Stick to commenting in your area of expertise and build your rep as a thought leader in that area far faster than people who are just hitting “retweet”.

Do you see people blogging and commenting less due to the Twitter explosion? If so, please swim against the tide and – leave a comment!

Tags: Comments, Microblogging, Twitter
Posted in Comments, Microblogging, Twitter | No Comments »

With all the hype about Twitter I thought I’d check on what federal government departments and agencies are actually doing with it. My first stop, as always, was the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki set up by Mike Kujawski of the Centre for Excellence in Public Sector Marketing.

It lists a handful of departments and agencies on Twitter including the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS).

A quick look at the Centre’s Twitter homepage indicates they’ve started off on the right foot. Their Tweets are aimed at providing value to their target audience – not just blasting out their own messages.

They tweet about things like free Webinar’s they’re offering of interest to their audience and, most importantly, they retweet things of interest from other organisations. The retweets are the real value because, by doing so, they’re playing a role that grows in importance everyday as the volume of information swells on the net: that of curator. Curators provide great value to their target audience by doing two key things:

1) understanding their target audience’s needs

2) sifting through the mass of information to find things relevant to their audience and sharing it.

Curation takes times and resources and that’s why it’s valuable.

It will be interesting to scale the Centre’s Twitter success over the next few months by one of the key measures: retweets of their stuff.

Posted in Government, Twitter, gov | No Comments »

I just read a short, compelling piece about Palestinians being evicted from their homes in Jerusalem and Jewish settlers moving in. I found out about it in a Tweet from rabble.ca publisher, Kim Elliott, who is tweeting the tour she is currently on with some Canadian MPs and members of the women’s peace organization, Code Pink. The piece was a blog, hosted by rabble.ca and written by Vancouver East MP, Libby Davies, who is on the tour.

Twitter. Blog. Web site. One driving traffic to the next. An excellent example of effective social media integration.

Posted in Integration, Microblogging, Twitter | No Comments »

Haven’t tried Twitter yet?

Well, some guys in LA are selling Korean tacos from a truck and using Twitter as one of their marketing tools. They pull up somewhere and then send out  a Tweet telling folks where they are. (First heard about this in a Ted talk by one of Twitter’s founders Evan Williams.)

Check out  a video about the truck in this post on Chris Brogan’s blog.

Does your product and audience lend itself to this use of Twitter? Is your audience on Twitter?  Do you know? Is your product the kind that people buy on impulse?

Just askin’….

Posted in Microblogging, Twitter | No Comments »