Image via CrunchBase

There’s a lot of ways to slice and dice the implementation of social technologies – especially when you’re talking about strategies for websites. Recommendations are a dime a dozen and some will cost you just as much. On the other hand, doing it wrong can cost you a heck of a lot more.

Jeremiah Owyang took a look at some of the approaches from some big brands during a recent keynote at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. 

What I tell clients is pretty simple. Spend the time to figure out where your customers are and plan your approach around how to interact. The good news is that a lot of the technology that helps you interact online is improving rapidly. With Facebook’s newer integration choices, federated commenting capabilities and real-time Twitter streams, there’s a bevy of options — an a-la-carte for online interactions if you will

And as Owyang points out toward the end, make sure you have some plans to sustain all this stuff. I’d say be vigilant about mapping your resources to the specific outcomes you’re trying to achieve. That’ll force you to look at the skill sets of your employees and match things up effectively. And overcompensate and pad things a bit..you’ll need the extra horsepower because your customers are scaling a lot faster than you are.

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

"The tweeting car was one of two Ford Fiestas that left Dearborn, Michigan today bound for the Silicon Valley DIY festival. The cars are linked via Caravan Track, a cloud-based app designed by University of Michigan students, and other experimental applications.

“We believe this is the first time vehicles will be socially connected through the Internet during a cross-country trip,” T.J. Giuli, a Ford research engineer, said. The apps, he added, “really explore new boundaries in the use of digital tools to expand social links.”

And what better way to try it out than an embedded pearl of wisdom from the DalaiLama.

The Tribune had an article recently highlighting how brands are wrapping Twitter into customer service activities.

AT&T chimed in here

“AT&T not only maintains a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but employs a full “blogger relations” team and utilizes YouTube.
“These are not PR people, they are real customer care managers who spend their days helping people via social media,” Roskopf said. “Posting on Facebook or tweeting will get you a fast response..”

And here’s one of the ways the ‘no frills’ bunch frames it.

“Twitter and Facebook are a great way to have your voices heard and a great way to voice a concern,” said Christi Day, an emerging media strategy specialist at Southwest Airlines. “I would say it is a large part of our customer communication strategy.”
The Dallas-based airline has two employees devoted to its Twitter page, and a team of three who monitor its Facebook fan page.

Every time I see these types of pieces, I think  of the handful of first-hand experiences I’ve had.

Not surprisingly, Comcast was the first real experience, followed by State Farm insurance and most recently Esurance. Most notably was the set of scenarios with State Farm.

My parents were flat out turned down for a new roof after it was destroyed by the hurricane a few years back. Of course I started venting a tad on Twitter for starters, and subsequently moved the conversation to their Facebook page.

Within a few weeks my parents were contacted by a ’special agent’ and magically the roof was replaced soon thereafter. Not trying to be big-man-on-campus by flexing my Twitter muscle, just pointing out how things have changed..whether you have 7, 7000, or 7 million followers is beside the point.  Companies now are listening. They have to. And it’s about time.

Lastly, as a sidebar that the techie in me couldn’t help but notice. Why is the Tribune still running their site on TypePad? It’s a wonder its newsroom can turn a profit after figuring in what it takes to maintain it.

Image via CrunchBase

Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.

Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.

If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.

Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.

Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.

And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.

The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.

Below are Wilson’s five areas.

* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users

Tom Davenport raised a good point recently. He cited @comcastcares and Starbucks as examples of brands using Twitter and crowdsourcing for service and feedback but falling short on consistent communications. Davenport’s scenario reflects why some many companies are retooling systems and processes to capture more of the digital conversations happening in real-time.

But capturing those conversations is only part of the battle. You need a process for how customer information is passed through the organization.

You’re seeing the “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing syndrome” magnified so much more these days. Marketing or corporate communications might be excited about making a connection to an influencer, but it’s wasted if the details of that relationship can’t be communicated accurately and efficiently.

And even when the flow is there, there’s still business processes that need to kick in for event-driven stuff. See Davenport’s example of walking into Comcast’s store — one line of business had no idea what the other had promised. Lastly, before you deem socialCRM as the savior, like other tools, it has more to do with how your business is structured.

Brands have to make sure they have the human infrastructure to transform the way a line of business operates..only then will the supporting tools serve their real purpose – enablement.

blogs.hbr.org

I concluded that I’d rather not be reminded through social media that Starbucks doesn’t really care much about me and my preferences as a customer. What social media sometimes do is make us aware that we can communicate with just about anyone — but it doesn’t mean that the other party will actually listen or respond. I, for one, would rather work with a company that truly cares through a single communications channel — even snail mail — than one that shows its lack of caring through all the latest Web 2.0 tools.

Image of Dell Outlet

• The Blog Council | How to find new ideas for blog posts

  Good list of of things to get the blog juices flowing.
  (tags: blogging blogcouncil idea+generation web2.0)

• 10 Corporate Twitter Accounts Worth Following // PC Magazine
  Good to see Telligent client Dell get a nod with@delloutlet.
                          
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0
  Don’t fully agree with how the author delineates Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, but it’s thorough on dissecting the 2.0 essentials.

(tags: web2.0 enterprise2.0 blog ibm social+computing social+networking wiki software)

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I’m a little behind in my reading these days, but one book that jumped to the front recently is Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Joel Comm.

I received a a review copy on Monday and just started a skim last night. It was a bit fortuitous too as I’ve had a few fundamental Twitter configurations I’ve neglected for some time. I’d liken it to what a lot of you early adopters do when you skip the readme file.

One of the things I stumbled on during a quick chapter scan was a few mobile and SMS tips. I didn’t realize you could text “on georgedearing” to 40404 to turn on device updates for a user’s tweets. The same command applies for turning them off, just text “off @georgedearing” and my updates will disappear from your tweetstream.

From the looks of the Table of Contents, Twitter Power has something for everyone. If you’re a nuts and bolts kind of girl or guy, you can spend a few hours just reading what I’d describe as the Twitter “manual’ of sorts.

The book dissects the service extremely well. Even if your a Twitter A-Lister, you’ll probably pick up a few tips if you can overcome your ADD fits. Most of the hardcore analysis of the app focuses on the “Settings” in Twitter and understandably so. From configuring your background to automating the delivery of messages to your cell phone, “Settings” is where you’ll spend most of your time.

One of the more valuable nuggets, especially for new users, is some of the best practices and guidelines Joel discusses. In that vein, I pulled out an excerpt below that discusses 5 observations related to Twitter etiquette. I’ll craft  a part II of the review as I finish up, but don’t hold your breath — go pick it up.

1. Don’t spam.

Spammers don’t survive long on Twitter. They don’t build followers. Any followers they do get don’t read their tweets and the number of conversions they can generate will be so tiny that as a marketing method, you’d probably be better off printing a thousand flyers, folding them into paper airplanes and tossing them out of your office window.

The spamming itself though is done by constantly sending out tweets that say things like: “I’ve just put up a new blog post — check it out!” or “Sign up for my RSS feed!”

2. Follow Style Rules.

Twitter’s founders may have had mobile phones in mind when they designed the service, and plenty of users may be typing their updates from their handheld devices, but Twitter isn’t exactly the same as SMS messaging.
That means the language needs to look more like real words than the usual SMS-style abbreviations.

What is permissible, though, is to use symbols such as @ and=and to skip some of the grammar. The question Twitter asks might be “What are you doing now?” but you don’t have to begin your answer by saying “I am . . . ”
Sentence fragments such “About to start watching the football. Can’t wait.” are fine.

3. Give Credit For Retweets.

The tricky bit is to get other people to retweet for you. While you can ask specifically for retweets — and some people do — it’s not really good form.
If your tweets are interesting enough, people will share them with their friends and followers — and those friends and followers will come to your page to find out who you are.

4. Stick To 140 Characters.

The alternative is to show half-complete tweets and offer links for people to continue reading or break messages up so that they’re sent over several tweets.

You can see this happening sometimes on Twitter, and it rarely looks good. Readers expect the content on Twitter to be small. They expect to be able to read and absorb it in one bite. These are content snacks, not three-course meals with coffee.

Writing a thought that takes more than 140 characters and spreading it over three or four tweets is giving people more than they want. It also makes you look like you’re dominating the conversation.

5. Follow People Who Follow You.

It’s a bit like strolling through the lobby during a break at a conference. I can choose which conversations to join and which to walk past.

Ultimately, I think this is one place where eventually you have to skip the etiquette and do what works. As your follower list grows, you’ll have to start being a little bit choosier about who you follow in return — and your followers will just have to understand that you’re being selective, not rude.

And that’s really the ultimate test of tweet etiquette: how other people react and how you would react to the same kind of thing.
If you’re building followers and they’re responding to what you’re writing, you’re following the right rules.

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