While I attended Pubcon last week, I had a chance to catch the “Twitter Landscape – Hot Topics and Trends” panel. It was one of the first Twitter panels in a very heavy Twitter lineup. The session had some great speakers (including 10e20 bossman Chris Winfield) and ended up with a really big turnout!  I took some notes from the session and wanted to share them on the blog. Here you go!

First up was Warren Witlock, who wrote the book “Twitter Revolution.”  His presentation was titled “the Secret to Selling Stuff on Twitter.”  Yet he let us in on a secret: The key to selling stuff on Twitter is to not try to sell stuff on Twitter.  There are a few easy steps to doing well with Twitter. They are:

Step 1: Listen

The key is to listen and read what people are saying.  While Twitter might not be around in 5 years, the effect of the revolution will be.  We will be communicating differently and those that listen will prosper.

Step 2: Love

Let someone know you care  Don’t be too promotional – the message needs to be genuine for it to be effective.

At the end of the day, social media can grow 100x what it is today.  It is worth the time to put in the effort and do it right.

Warren said that PeopleBrowsr was a good tool to use and you should probably check it out.

Next up was Dan Zarrella from HubSpot.  Dan wrote an article about the Science of Retweets and this presentation is about that article.  He started by dropping some retweet knowledge.  3% of all tweets are retweets and over 60% of retweets have links in them. The URL shorteners can have a big affect on the “retweetability.’ From what he has seen, Bit.ly works the best.

The top keyword for retweets is “you,” followed closely by “Please” and “Retweet” as 2^nd and 3^rd respectively.  The least retweetable words are descriptions of what people are doing.  Smarter comments and saying something new tend to get retweeted a bit more.  Nouns are also great for retweets, as tweets about things are highly shareable.  Obviously, news is also a great topic for retweets.

For more information, you can download his entire report.

Next up was Chris Winfield (Disclaimer – this is my boss) from the one and only 10e20. For him, Twitter is about asking questions.  To Chris it is just a tool for communication.  What exactly is “pulling a Winfield”?  It is using questions as tools to help accomplish tasks. Twitter wrote a blog post for him.  Twitter did a presentation for him at SES Toronto (275 answers in 90 minutes!).  Twitter questions can do a lot of things and are quite powerful.  Current example – he used a question about Pubcon to find out who would be at the conference, then made a Twitter list with the answers to track his Pubcon friends.

Don’t just make it all about business; help build your relationships.  Chris shared a great story about how USA Today did a full story on Michael Dorausch because of Twitter.

Some tips for asking questions on Twitter:

• Use mystery for your tweets
• Ask qualified questions that people can answer
• Don’t make it all about business
• Respond to answers – make it a two-way communication

How can asking questions help your business?

• Conduct polls to learn more about customers, or send people to polls on your site (PollDaddy and Twtpoll are some nice tools)
• Poll the masses — 10e20 accomplished some important tasks based off of suggestions
• Actually converse with your audience.  By monitoring his conversations, Chris landed a large Fortune 100 client.

Next was Kate Morris, freelance search marketer from Austin, Texas.  Kate took a look at the landscape as a whole.  A lot of things have changed over the past few months.  RIM is developing a Native Blackberry Twitter app – businesses are getting involved and embracing this communication.  Twitter is changing the way people build things.  Motorola is making a phone that has instant access to Twitter and Facebook. .

What does this mean to you?  To sum it up, three things:  Marketing, Brand Development & Word of Mouth Influence.  Twitter is huge for these, and these are so important to your business.  Also, customer service is really important and that is where the power of Twitter is really prevalent.

Overall, this was a well rounded panel that got a great response from the audience and had a solid Q and A to follow.  Great job all!

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