In the year 2010, it is safe to say the brands who are NOT using Twitter as a communication tool have either decided it is not for their product or they just don’t get it. It is so wonderful to see brands embracing social media, and it’s even more exciting when they embrace the culture and community. Not every brand is comfortable communicating with their community on their community terms. However, speaking to your audience in their own language and adopting their culture is very important to be able to properly get the message delivered. By doing this, brands have acquired the sense of being “tangible” and “friendly,” making the consumer comfortable to engage and participate.
Hashtags are tags used in short messages that are either a single term or multiple words concatenated. They are a very important staple within the Twitter culture.
When to Start a Branded Hashtag
1. When you have a clever tagline or question for a campaign. For example; ”Relax in bed and read a book #SlipperTime“
2. When you have a question the audience will want to answer.
When NOT to Start a Hashtag:
1. If you are trying to start a trend by creating a hashtag that will have no value in being used multiple times.
2. If the hashtag would be valuable for competitors’ brands.
When to Use Popular Hashtags:
1. When your brand can contribute to the community or be humorous. For example: “Don’t Forget The Mayo #4wordsaftersex“
2. When your brand can contribute to current and popular events.
Where to Begin
There are a few sites that analyze trending topics and hashtags.
Because hashtags within Twitter are typical meta tags, they can be collected and analyzed after a campaign. This will be really helpful in determining the success of a campaign that exists within Twitter.
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The Sting of Real-Time Product Feedback
Dec 30, 2009 by Rebecca Kelley | Reputation Management, TwitterDomino’s Pizza recently underwent a product overhaul after their pizza was ranked among the worst in a taste test (tied with Chuck E. Cheese — ouch). Their new recipe boasts a new garlic crust, 100% mozzarella cheese with a hint of provolone, and a “sauce that’s boss.” The company even set up a micro-site called PizzaTurnaround.com that showcases a blog about the new pizza, a “documentary,” and a Twitter stream along the right sidebar that displays customer feedback.
Okay, maybe that last part wasn’t such a good idea. Someone took a screenshot of the tweets that filtered in, and they weren’t all sunshiney praises about the great new recipe:
Victor’s written before about porn account avatars showing up in our site’s Twitter stream. It’s the main problem with displaying your mentions in a widget on your site — you can’t control what comes in. The Domino’s Twitter stream showcases this beautifully — some tweets just may be negative. While some of the tweets are positive, others aren’t painting the new pizza recipe in the most favorable light. But hey, that’s the trade-off of social media, right? Once you open up the lines of communication and create a two-way dialog, you lose a bit of control over what’s being said about your brand.
How did Domino’s handle the feedback? Well, see for yourself:
Hmmm, there seems to be a suspiciously high amount of positive comments about the #newpizza. What happened to the negative remarks? Did the feedback turn good on its own? Are people just coming around on the new recipe?
Not really. It seems as if Domino’s is starting to hand-pick the good tweets and weed out the bad ones. Check out search results for the hashtag #newpizza:
If you compare the real-time search results to the Twitter stream displayed on Domino’s micro-site, you’ll notice that a couple tweets are missing. The first one is from a woman who said that her friends started “projectile vomiting” upon trying the new pizza, while the second one calls Domino’s out for their “twitter feed failure” — presumably this user has also noticed the missing negative tweets.
This isn’t the best way to handle negative feedback, especially on the Internet. You can’t just delete a comment, alter a post or remove some tweets and think they’re gone for good and that nobody will notice (especially when, in Domino’s case, you can easily compare their stream to Twitter’s search tool). Encouraging real feedback from your users and then editing out the feedback you don’t like is a pretty strong indication that you’re not taking the feedback seriously.* You can’t run your company on the basis that everyone must love and agree with your product 100% of the time — that’s a recipe for failure (even if the sauce is boss).
In Domino’s case, they tried to have their garlic crusty pizza and eat it too. If you decide to get into social media and market your business and products on social networks, you have to acknowledge and accept the fact that you won’t be able to control what people say about you. If you can’t take the heat, you need to step away from the wood-fired pizza brick oven, so to speak. If Domino’s didn’t want to showcase negative comments about their new recipe, they shouldn’t have displayed the Twitter stream in the first place. You can’t just dive into the next big marketing trend and refuse to play by the trend’s rules. That’s not how social media works, and Domino’s showcased this pretty handily.
Postscript: Upon reading Tamar’s comment below, I agree that it was presumptuous of me to think that Domino’s isn’t taking the negative remarks seriously or considering them as feedback just because they’re filtering them out — that’s a mistake on my part. I also didn’t consider the fact that some content may be removed if it’s profane or offensive to users. However, there are still some tweets which don’t fall into either category that are being removed, and I think that’s a tactic they should reconsider.
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Ok, so you may not have the Twitter following that @apluskor @britneyspearshas, nor may you ever. But there are a few things you can do to increase that followers number in your profile.
Avatar: check, Background Design: check, Bio: check
Here be the basics. People want to know who and what they are following. If you don’t have an avatar to me, that is a big Twitter Fail. Use the two simplest ways of showing and telling potential followers what you or your business is all about. Design a Twitter background that reflects your ideas and slap on a nice picture of yourself or your company logo, mascot or colors. Also tell me about yourself in the bio line; this is a simple way to tell me more and show me where else you reside online and off.
I find it hard sometimes not to just follow someone back out of politeness; however, if I get to that profile page and none of what is listed above is included or I don’t find anything interesting in their stream then I say oh well, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and leave without following.
Private, Why?
Don’t set your tweets to private. Plain and simple. When you shield your account from the general public, you’re going to get fewer followers than if your account were publicly accessible. People like getting a sneak peek of someone before deciding whether they want to follow him/her.
Links to your Twitter Page:
Linking to your Twitter page from other social profiles like Facebook or LinkdIn will help with adding more followers. The more links to your Twitter profile out there, the more chances of someone checking you out and following you. Have a bunch of friends on Facebook? Ask them if they are on Twitter. “Oh yeah you are, well what’s your user name?” Add your Twitter URL to all of your signatures, go ahead- pimp it out! Make a comment on a blog? Why not add your Twitter name underneath the post?
Follow Reciprocators:
Reciprocators are those who will probably follow you back because they have about as many followers as they have people following them. If you come across someone who follows a large number of people and has a big following, chances are this person will follow you back once you start following him/her.
Timely Tweets:
During peak times is when you should try to tweet your best stuff. This will help maximize your retweet potential. The time of day? 4PM Friday EST. How did this number/time come about? Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella in “The Science of Retweeting” spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets. #followfriday anyone?
#FollowFriday?:
Some would say add this to the list of helpful ways to build followers. Follow and recommend people, and follow users who retweet your stuff the most. However, personally I rarely look at anything with #followfriday on it. What are your thoughts?
Tools of the Trade:
This site scans the Twitter public timeline for new twits to tweet. A few times a day they calculate individual statistics for each twittering twit within the database.
A site application that allows you to make targeted searches by categories. Great way to find specific industries, businesses and people to follow that may reciprocate.
They offer tools that allow you to tweet more efficiently with lots of automated functions like scheduling tweets, track keywords, follow those that follow you, etc.
If you follow some of these tips, I am sure you can begin to see the follower count in your Twitter profile increase. These are just a small fraction of all the possible ways to increase the number of people following you. For more tips, check out Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook — they have a huge list of the basics to the advanced for those hungry for more. Also check out Fastcompany’s post called Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted. While you’re at it, follow me @patrickwinfieldand us @10e20 
Twitter is not the first online entity to be plagued by porn spammers, as it is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of the internet. As soon as a social site becomes somewhat popular, adult outlets will try to exploit it.
I’m sure many of you had some questionable followers as soon as you joined twitter. The problem has been well reported all over the internet. At least in this case you can block the followers and/or report them (even though it is a pain that Twitter should still address themselves).
However, what you cannot seem to do at this time is to avoid these porn spammers when searching Twitter for completely non-porn related words, or setting up a feed using the Twitter search on your website.
We at 10e20 have the Twitter Feed right on the sidebar ->. All it does is pull the recent tweets from a search for 10e20, which lets you, the reader, quickly see what people are saying about us.
Well, a few days ago, unfortunately that sidebar has been filled with tweets from 4 or 5 porn accounts in a row, because they tweeted about 10e20.
After checking some of those accounts, you can see that they intertwine their tweets between links to their porn sites and tweeting legitimate news and trendy topics. This way their accounts will show up for legitimate searches, and as we found out, in your Twitter feed as well.
Currently, there is no pro-active way for us to battle this. All we can do is write a script to black list those accounts from showing up in our feed after the fact. But I was definitely surprised to find out that Twitter does not have anything in place on their end.
It’s time for Twitter to get on board and introduce an adult filter that’s turned on by default, but can be turned off if a user wishes so (much so like Google applies onto their search).
It would then be up to community to report questionable accounts as ‘adult’ or ’spam’ (various labels can be introduced) and up to admins to label them as such – so that they don’t show up in the legitimate searches.
A good example of this in action is when you search for Obama on Google. You can be sure that there probably won’t be any porn, even if Google did not have an adult filter, simply because there are many more legit websites about Obama out there. Twitter, however, doesn’t work that way. If you tweet about Obama, you will show up on the search no matter what your account says. So an adult filter seems to be a must in such a scenario.
Furthermore, labeling accounts as adult can open an additional option for users to choose if they want to be followed by an ‘adult’ account or not. So essentially all Twitter activity can be filtered if the individual user wants. Of course, if you don’t mind receiving adult content then you should have an option to turn the filter off.
What do you think? Is it time for an adult filter and why do you think nothing currently exists?
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