Best Buy Goes All Twitter Crazy With @Twelpforce

Tech Crunch, July 21, 2009 — This is an interesting one: consumer electronics retailer Best Buy is encouraging hundreds of employees to handle online customer service and company promotions via Twitter, even airing commercials not mentioning their own website but merely the URL of the profile they created on the micro-sharing service (two spots embedded below). The new service, dubbed Twelpforce, was debuted over the weekend but so far hasn’t garnered a lot of online buzz, let alone followers on Twitter (currently at around 1350). I’m sure that will change soon enough.

Twitter Generates $48 Million of Media Coverage in a Month†

But Can It Maintain Its Sizzle?

Advertising Age, July 20, 2009 — Twitter's been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what's all that chatter worth?

According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days. (That's half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing its biggest product launch of the year, Bing.)

Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers

Times Online, July 14, 2009 — Just over a fortnight ago, Matthew Robson had never worked in banking. This was mainly because he was 15 years and 7 months old and attending a comprehensive school in South London.

Today he is the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City. Fund managers, CEOs and analysts are poring over his report, How Teenagers Consume Media, which he wrote last week while on work experience at Morgan Stanley

Time to Write Twitter’s Tombstone?

Too hot to be cool.

eMarketer, June 17, 2009 — Twitter made the June 15, 2009, cover of TIME magazine.

In a lead article, the publication predicted the microblogging site, consisting of tiny 140-character messages, would have a huge impact on businesses:

Beware Social Media Marketing Myths

MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook are all the rage, but for most business owners there are better ways to stay close to customers

BusinessWeek, May 26, 2009 — Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a suggestion for preparing a Hot Pockets frozen entrée: "Take out of package. Place directly in toilet." Gaffigan is not a big fan of Hot Pockets. He doesn't like exercise, either. But he loves bacon. "Without bacon, no one would even know what a water chestnut is," he says. Gaffigan's also a fan of social networking sites.

You'll see him on Facebook, Twitter, and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. He keeps fans up to date on his concerts, albums, TV appearances—and naps. In short, he's a social networking success story. For a one-man band like Gaffigan, who probably has a decent amount of free time between eating bacon and being on stage, social networks and blogs have proved effective vehicles for marketing his business and... continue reading

Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium, Report Likens Twitter To TiVo: More Hype Than Re

MediaPost Publications, May 20, 2009 — Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will.

Kodak Develops as Modern Brand With Digital Shift†

CMO Hayzlett Takes on Active Social-Media Approach to Marketing

Advertising Age, April 27, 2009 — Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett has more than 2,500 friends on Facebook and more than 3,200 followers on Twitter. He recently presided over the first-annual Streamy Awards for web TV, sponsored by Kodak, and both blogs and tweets about Kodak's coming involvement in the May 10 episode of "Celebrity Apprentice."

A new style of CMO has arrived.

Putting Twitter’s World to Use

Collectively, Twitter’s messages are a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and revealing public opinion.

New York Times, April 14, 2009 — The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?

It’s a reasonable question. Twitter unleashes the diarist in its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times last month to read posts tapped out with cellphones and computers.

Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane.

But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood.

Amazon's Silent Mistake in the Face of a Social-Media Firestorm†

Incident Demonstrates -- Again -- the Need to Monitor Your Brand 24/7

Advertising Age, April 13, 2009 — "Amazon: the Internet company that doesn't understand the Internet" is my favorite of thousands of tweets on the subject of Amazon's sudden censorship of gay- or lesbian-themed books. The episode proved that even a well-liked, household-name company can pay a high price for not monitoring its brand in social media.

Over the weekend, thousands of people on Twitter, in blogs, on Facebook and in forums angrily noted that gay- and/or lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson and scores of others had been suddenly removed from Amazon listings and search results.

How Marketers Tap Facebook and Twitter, Apps and Widgets†

Digital Marketing Guide: The Social Web

Advertising Age, March 30, 2009 — Isn't the entire web social these days?

To an extent, yes. If 2008 was the year everyone — and their grandmas — joined a social network, then 2009 is the year those networks' social graphs spread their tentacles beyond their borders to other sites across the web. Already it's common for many sites, including major news sources and entertainment properties, to have commenting and sharing features. So we admit the social web is a pervasive concept. But there are several interesting newer developments at Twitter and Facebook, as well as in the widget space and the app world.