It’s interesting to see that the first brands are primarily B2C: Red Bull, Starbucks, Sony, Bravo with a couple of cross-over brands – Best Buy and Virgin America – thrown in for good measure.

But how useful will this really be for brands, and are Twitter in danger of trying to play catch up as they try to monetize the service? After all, businesses of all shapes and sizes and types have been utilising Twitter to reach out to audiences since the early days.

I’ve had many discussions with colleagues, clients and friends along the lines that Twitter is great, the interface sucks. Hence the proliferation of Twitter apps to aggregate feeds, search tweets etc etc. Will the user experience be better for the insertion of sponsored tweets?

Personally I’m sceptical. How about you?

1. Only email people who have asked to be emailed – to do otherwise is called spam
2. Segment your communications and only invite people to events who can actually attend them – it’s called knowing you electorate
3. Provide an unsubscribe function in your emails, at worst, if someone sends multiple email replies with the subject line ‘Unsubscribe’ it usually means that they want to unsubscribe from your list
4. It’s all in the name – anyone can have a googlemail account, the electorate don’t trust people who don’t have email accounts backed by their parties

How is your local candidate / MP doing? Are they Tweeting? Do they have a Facebook fan page, or are they sticking to leaflets through doors and kissing babies?

If you really want to get the latest politico tweets then check out TweetMinster.co.uk

The web is a great enabler of communication, which is a two way thing. Firstly we use websites to create awareness, interest and desire in our clients products. Then we invite the audience to interact. That might be something as simple as a ‘Buy Now’ button, it might be a user forum, or perhaps a web chat with a technical expert.

The tools exist to enable online and offline conversations between buyers, users and the vendor to take place at the same time, and this is where the future (for now) lies.

The challenge is not a technical one. The challenge is the same old story as it’s always been. Know your market, understand their pain points, and articulate your benefits and then sell on value.

Faster, smaller, brighter sales arguments always lead to the inevitable – sell on price not value.

Josh has identified 6 key groups: Creators; Critics; Collectors; Joiners; Spectators and Inactives. The key to your success in building business relationships through the social networks is to identify how you can engage with each group, and to measure the performance of your engagement.

Which type do you fall into? And more importantly, which of these groups will prove most profitable to your business?

A study of the FTSE techMARK 100 has found that eight of the top ten companies are not embracing Twitter, despite a growing number of workers using the site to communicate with business contacts and colleagues. The figures are a stark comparison to the US, where all of the top 10 technology companies listed on Nasdaq have employees using the social network.

These businesses are failing to realise the benefits of Twitter compared to other countries, according to Stephen Beynon, Managing Director, ntl:Telewest Business, who told us:

Stephen Beynon

“There is no longer any excuse for not embracing social networks to share news, recruit employees, and even monitor and respond to users who are praising or criticising them. Twitter has been successfully used as a network building tool by businesses such as Mozilla and Sun Microsystems, so there is a template that British businesses can apply to make it work for them. The risk in not using Twitter is that these companies will fall behind transatlantic competitors.”

Whatever industry your company is in, you need to build a social media marketing plan that embraces existing and new social networks and empowers your team to engage in conversations with your audiences on their terms, not yours.

But right at the end there’s a twist!

What makes this advert stand out, is that it wasn’t created by the Nivea agency, but by a team of students from Chosun University in South Korea.

This is a perfect example of the ultimate viral video, it’s totally on message – smooth skin when you use Nivea – it’s getting lots of attention, and oh, one final thing, it’s been produced by fans of the product. Priceless.

This url shorthand has entered into our lexicon and marketers need to be aware of it. Especially the guys at Mars Confectionery.

In the US, Mars are currently running a campaign to launch a new chocolate bar called Fling. The advert has the usual enticement to eat the bar, using phrases such as “Pleasure yourself” and “Naughty, but not that naughty” and a call to action encouraging the public to check out the website.

The problem that the team at Mars didn’t see coming is that we are so sophisticated at using the web, that we make the assumption that a new product called Fling will have a url to match, in this case, ‘fling.com’. But, those loyal customers end up at a porn site!

Of course, we should all be thinking of the right url ‘flingchocolate.com‘

All joking aside, what this demonstrates is that in an ever more complex world, you need to be able to keep things simple. Have you thought about how your brand, new or old, works across a wide range of online platforms? At mktgDIGITAL we have developed a ‘Social Media Checklist’ to help each of our clients gain control of their online presence, whether they need one or not!

How do you protect your brand?

MediaWeek in the US likened it to the darling of yesterday’s news – Second Life. Remember that? How many of us logged on, only to get stuck in the first phase not working out how to get dressed or even walk without going through the nearest tree trunk?

The point is well made, because Second Life and Twitter are very similar in that they both employ appaling user interfaces. Hence the proliferation of third party applications like TweetDeck and Tweetlater that go to make the Twitter experience just that bit easier.

David Martin and his team have created a couple of excellent graphs that show the retention rates of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.

What is clear is that Twitter has some way to go to play catch up. Again, whats the difference between Twitter, MySpace and Facebook? Well, on MySpace and Facebook you can do everything that you think you might want to, all from the one page. Whereas with Twitter, you need to use third party applications again.

So, perhaps Twitter is not the next Second Life, but until it improves it’s own user experience via the interface, I think it will struggle to really penetrate the online masses.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter has proven to be an excellent communications media, it just takes a bit more work than most people are prepared to give it.

I would love to hear your views.

In my view, ROI can take many forms, here are just a few:
1. Sales leads
2. Confirmed orders
3. Branding
4. Research

There has been a lot written recently about Twitter for business, and can you make money from it. But most of that content focuses on Twitter driving physical transactions, for example, selling an eBook, or signing up to a new service. But Twitter, like all the other social networks that you care to mention, can do so much more for you and your business.

I know that it’s extremely unlikely that I will ever get a client through ecademy, let’s face it, there are not any channel marketing directors from technology companies on there. But that’s not why I use ecademy, for me it’s a virtual water cooler, I get to meet like minded individuals, discuss ideas and theories through the PMs or the blogs, and then get back to the non-virtual world of reality, refreshed and recharged.

Twitter can do the same. For me, it’s neat that I have a few followers, but again that’s not the real point. Twitter is a great research tool. One of our sites content is driven purely from Twitter, we find new site traffic via Twitter, and those Tweeters suggest and recommend new content that they want to see. That particular site led to us closing a very nice piece of business recently. We made no cold calls, no credentials pitch, no hard selling, our new client saw what were doing and immediately knew that they wanted to work with us. So, did Twitter deliver an order, a lead, some branding, or some research? Well, in this example I think it did all four things.

But what’s important for us, is not necessarily important for you, or anyone else. What is important is to understand what makes your business tick, and what a new client looks like, sounds like and acts like. Then you can make the decision as to whether Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook et al are the right types of communications channels for your business. If they are, then great, if not, go look for something else that will deliver you the right customers.

You don’t have to be on Twitter to be in business. You do have to be wherever your clients and prospects are.

UK usage of video websites has increased by a massive 40.7% of the 12 months from March 2008 to February 2009. Or, to put it in a more realistic way, 12 months ago 1 in 50 internet users visited a video site in a month, now it’s one in 35.

It’s not surprising that YoutTube occupies the number one slot. With BBC iPlayer growing faster than any other service and now occupying the number two position.

The rest of the list is made up of the usual suspects, however there are a couple of niche sites: MegaVideo and Vuze, that perhaps would not have tripped of people tongues if you asked them to name a major video site.

Top 10 Video websites, based on market share of UK Internet visits to a Hitwise
custom category of Video websites, February 2009:

1. YouTube 62.9%

2. BBC iPlayer 11.2%

3. Google Video 2.0%

4. MegaVideo 1.5%

5. MSN Video 1.4%

6. Google Video UK 1.3%

7. Channel 4 TV 1.3%

8. MetaCafe 1.2%

9. Vuze 1.2%

10. Daily Motion 1.1%

Of course, the BBC and Channel 4 sites do not accept user generated content, but all the rest do which is great news if video is one of your communications channels.