Great post on the rise of CEO/CMOs using Twitter:

Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

Quick! What are people saying right now about your brand? Impossible to know, you say? Nah, not at all. Enter Sideline, “a Twitter app that lets you monitor and search what people are saying about your product in real time”.

Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name. 

Engage Customers Better 

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand – but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

I found this fascinating quote today:

There’s an interesting topic being discussed over on Web-Strategist.  Once again, Jeremiah Owyang challenges us to think of a new paradigm that could change the way companies relate and react to their customers.  Ultimately, I disagree with what he says although I think he’s onto something:  communities of customers, when banded together will have greater power in product development to the extent that companies will have to adjust their product strategies to meet these demands.DIGITAL STREET JOURNAL

You should read the whole article.

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal is reporting that SalesForce Inc. will offer a CRM application for the popular microblogging service Twitter. 

I must admit being pleasantly surprised by this new application. SalesForce Inc. is helping corporations harness the real power of social networks – namely the Twitter community. Comcast has been a model in providing solutions to customer problems via Twitter, and is one of the first customers of SalesForce Inc’s new app.

It basically seems to be a way to easily track conversations on Twitter, and is not the only app to provide tracking, but could be the most expensive. Pricing is ”$995 a month for five agents and five business partners, and support for 250 customers.”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about the possibilities for Twitter if it were to create it’s own CRM/brand management tool on his Web Strategist blog.

Read the full BizJournals.com article about SalesForce Inc’s new Twitter CRM app here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/othercities/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/03/23/daily4.html?

The concept of employees/etc. promoting themselves as a personal brand has been a much-debated topic in social media networks for months. As an independent consultant, I’ve vacillated between the value of each individual in an organization developing a thriving personal brand, all the way to the other end of the spectrum – not encouraging individuals to build their personal brand on their company’s dime, when especially in this economy, no job is entirely secure and the person may get pulled out of the company, taking valueable brand collateral with them.

I happen to love the attention I get from personal brands. There’s nothing like feeling that you’ve been singled out to be chatted up by a Tony Hsieh – CEO of Zappos.com, or Gavy Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv, or any of the many personal brands who are active on social networks.

That’s just one upside…and for me, it’s all personal.

Well, actually, as smart companies know, it’s not all personal. Good one-on-one interaction is good business.

It makes it easy for consumers to choose that company’s products and service offerings. So much beauty in social networking – companies engage in online conversations and customer communities to boost business! Who doesn’t love to feel like they’re getting personally heard from a company representative? It’s so Mom & Pop, but with much better, faster service due to the internet.

So what’s the downside? 

The sole person behind a personal brand simply cannot maintain the same level of personal interaction a team who is representing a company can. So, one day a ‘lone cowboy’ personal brand may interact heavily with customers and prospects. The next day, business obligations may prevent any interaction at all. 

For some customers, this is just enough for them to loudly proclaim to their social network that Company X sucks because Personal Brand at Company X ignored their pleas for product support, or whatever. You get the idea.

From a customer standpoint, personal brands can potentially cause more brand damage than good for the company. Customers demand attention when they want it, and don’t give a flying flip about anything else that may be more pressing to personal brand respresentative. Upset customers vent all over the internet. The reputation management fallout is a lot more expensive for companies than simply hiring a team to help manage their brand online.

This is all just common sense. Companies, if one of your star employees is looking to become a star on the internet, seriously consider whether it’s in your company’s best interests to support that during work hours. If you decide that your business will thrive by having one shining star out of your employees represent it, definitely develop a contingency plan – a Social Media Brand Management Plan B, if you will, in the unfortunate event of that employee’s exit from the company.

Considering the precarious nature of managing your brand via Social Media in the first place, what should your Social Media Brand Management Plan B entail? Here’s a few, for starters:

• Immediate team brand deployment to regain control of conversations regarding your brand. 
• Company branded Twitter, Facebook, etc, social network accounts.
• Full access to conversations and contacts made by your previous social media star

2009 started out with a blast in the Social Media Tweetup scene in Salt Lake City (heavy emphasis on Social). 

The Sundance marketing team collaborated with us to create an amazing Sundance/Salt Lake City Tweetup featuring Ondi Timoner, who was awarded the Grand Jury prize a few days after our Tweetup at the Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, We Live in Public.

We met in the lovely Beehive Tea Room in downtown Salt Lake City. Not only did we have Twitter users attend this event, but we also welcomed a few who have never used Twitter, but wanted to join the group to meet a Sundance director. Ondi Timoner, Josh Harris, and crew joined our Tweetup in between showings and graciously spent some time telling us about the documentary, and Tweeting their experience. 

 

Director Ondi Timoner (@onditimoner) and Josh Harris

 

Tweetup attendees listening to Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris talking about We Live in Public

 Here’s a partial list of the Salt Lake City Sundance Tweetup:
@rmiriam12
@kittygutz
@roxycross
@ThomAllen
@carysnowden
@ambeestar
@taranaki
@latent_image
@highpointe
@ghennipher
@kevinDwhite
@littleidea
Danica Cross
Krista Smith

Many thanks to Sundance Film Festival, Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris for coming to our Tweetup! We all had a great time! And congratulations to Ondi Timoner for winning the 2009 Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary We Live In Public.

Suntweet Charity Tweetup January 22, 2009

One thing I love about Social Media is the power it has to support a good cause. The #suntweet charity Twetup event definitely supported a great cause, and raised over $600 for Serenity. We also UStreamed the event and even made the front page! 

 

#Suntweet panelists prepping to talk about social media.

@ghennipher with fellow #suntweet panelist Jesse Stay (@jesse)

We all had a great time with the Tweetups during the month of January. I’m really proud to have had a part in supporting an important charity – Serenity, and to support a budding documentarian, Ondi Timoner.

If you’re an organization in Utah that would like to be part of our SLC Tweetups, please contact me. Your customers are actively using social media and talking about your brand via social media. Theres no better venue to reach this audience than through social media – online and offline. I would love to connect you with this wonderful group of social media users and help you design a strategy to provide real value to your customers during these difficult economic times.

The Salt Lake City Tweetup group welcomes the Sundance Film Festival to Utah. To show our support, we’ve organized a Tweetup featuring Sundance’s official Tweeters and Sundance Filmmakers.

If you live in Utah and use Twitter, please join us for this Tweetup event to network and meet some great Sundance representatives in person. We’re also welcoming a mystery guest speaker. You can expect to meet a new media filmmaker or a filmmaker that has used Social Media extensively in their film’s promotion, or perhaps an actor at the Fest who is a prominent Twitter user. You’ll be surprised and have a lot of fun chatting with our mystery guest!

Laptops, mobile phones and cameras encouraged – it’s a Tweetup! Feel free to tweet the event. We don’t mind at all! See you there!

Date: Tuesday January 20, 2009 at 7:00pm
Location: Beehive Tearoom (Festival Cafe)
Address: 12 W Broadway, Salt Lake City, 84101