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

NameThatGrid.com is a reality Formula 1 game site. Sports fans can enter into the excitement of the qualifying sessions for each F1 race. The game invites you to predict who you think will take the Pole position and the second and third places on the grid at each Grand Prix. The site runs a new competition for each GP.

Our brief was to design and build the site and to generate traffic through the use of the social networks and forums. Take a look at the Twitter page we set-up. Twitter.com/namethatteam

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.

NameThatGrid.com is a reality Formula 1 game site. Sports fans can enter into the excitement of the qualifying sessions for each F1 race. The game invites you to predict who you think will take the Pole position and the second and third places on the grid at each Grand Prix. The site runs a new competition for each GP.

NameThatTeam.com is a new reality football game, and sister site to NameThatGrid.com.
The first competition to go live invites footie fans to name their all-time favourite 11 players to have graced the Premiership.
The start of the 2009/10 Premiership is just around the corner and each week NameThatTeam.com will run a competition to name the starting 11 of one of the teams. Get it right and you could be in line for a nice cash prize!

We have designed the site to be as easy as possible to use with the drag and drop team selection feature proving extremely popular.

NameThatGrid.com

Our client asked us to create a visual based “reality, not fantasy sports game”. This is a free to enter game, and you could win a Nintendo Wii. We will be running games for the client for the forthcoming German and Hungarian Grand Prix.

We are also working on a reality football game, more news of that later this week.

Please take a look at the site and let us know what you think.

daniel-a

stephan-g

tom-w

walter-b

wolf-k

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?