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Author: Michael Litman
As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.
The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.
Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.
1) Target by occupation
Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes.
However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.
Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.
2) Target by bio
In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.
Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.
3) Target by location
Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters.
But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.
4) New sign ups
Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends!
5) Keep up on your industry
Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.
6) Competitive eavesdropping
Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.
7) Trending photos
Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search).
There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it?
John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.
If I could marry a presentation this would be it.
Isn’t this brilliant? I thought so. It’s from a few months back now but no they aren’t a client, lets get that out of the way first.
To announce and promote their customer loyalty programme Sprize, the GAP store in Vancouver, BC completely flipped everything upside down and adhering to their tagline rather nicely of turning shopping on its head. This I like. So all of the mannequins, displays and signs were flipped, as well as some cars and a hot dog stand outside of the store. Brilliant.
It seems to me like a clever customer retention tool and keeping those existing customers happy. I think its only open in Canada at the moment but they can sign up for a free Sprize account at participating Gap stores for an opportunity to collect SprizeMoney. Put simply, if you buy a shirt at £25 and within 45 days it goes down in price then you get credited to your account the difference. Now thats something I’d sign up to for sure. Isn’t it annoying when you buy something full price for it to be discounted some weeks later?
This is smart because the idea / hope is that people will return to GAP more often to see what they can get for their Sprizemoney and undoubtedly pick up a few more purchases than they had intended. Potentially increasing footfall and volume of purchases.
Since there’s no cost to signup its pretty much no risk for the customer. Thus, Gap will be making a return customer out of any new customer, while keeping loyal customers happy.
Nice.
via chrisrutz.de
It puts all the discussions about 6 Music in to perspective just how little they are squabbling over. You have to look pretty hard to find them on the infographic in the first place.
Watch this.
via thenextweb.com
* 133,000,000 million blogs
* 35% of Journalists are now Bloggers
* 48% of Bloggers are in the US
* 66% of bloggers are males
* 1/4 earn $100k+ a year
* Aside from “personal musings”, technology bloggers are the most prominent
* 75% of bloggers are college graduates
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. In the age that we live in today, privacy is dead. The more we share, the richer the picture people can build up about us.
We live in an always on, entirely open, information rich, platform agnostic super high way of facts, however trivial or indeed factual.
This won’t be the case for everyone and will differ wildly for industries/disciplines (my brother, the accountant is probably one of the exceptions) but for the bunch of us living the dream in this whole online pr/ digital advertising / social media type life..
We can see where they are on Foursquare, who they are with on tagged photos on Facebook, what they had for lunch on Twitter (yawn), who they work for on LinkedIn, what music they listen to on MySpace, Spotify or Last.fm, what videos they watch on YouTube and find out about a friends purchases on Blippy.
This is all public information. We are openly allowing the dissemination of this information out there in to the ether. And this somewhat frightening thought doesn’t bother me at all. Should it?
But what brought this thinking along was when my boss @helenium and her boss @ewarwoowar added me as a friend on Facebook yesterday. Facebook is a funny one because I didn’t accept my mother as a friend. I want some private space somewhere on the Internet! So this did bother me for a short while, I’ll be honest. The one place I can allow myself some privacy on was being infiltrated. But then I thought what have I got to worry about and accepted. Self censorship is all the rage these days.
The crux of my argument (to myself) rested on the fact that if i didn’t accept their friend request I would obviously have something to hide and they wouldn’t be able to trust me. So in that respect, privacy is dead and the levels of transparency proffered is directly linked to trust. Because I’d have something to hide if I didn’t open my profile up to them. I don’t have anything to hide bar from some unsavoury drunken pictures when out and about but that’s me outside of work, it’s a different story entirely. And that I believe is respected with a really good work life balance at Dare. I think they kinda want you to have a personality and a life rather than the other way around.
We’ve seen that there are cases that this data can be used to show that we need to be wary what exactly it is we’re telling everyone, pleaserobme.com is a perfect example. It’s fine to check in to a bar but if you A) give out your home address and B) check in and out of it, someone can know when you’ve left home for work in the morning and be lying in wait. A sinister and terrifying thought but one that is valid nonetheless. Don’t get me started on checking in to tube stations..
If you are googling someone who you just want to find out a bit more about and nothing comes up, wouldn’t you be more concerned than seeing a few drunken photos of them on a weekend? I know what I think. Being private is now being hidden. Privacy is dead.
So what does this all mean and where are we heading?
Well, social media has opened us up to the world. For better or worse we now know or have the ability to know the very last minute detail about the people we work with and the same applies for people we might be hiring. We’d probably check them out online before even the first interview takes place and know quite personal facts about them before that very first hello.
Fascinating.
An example: A friend told me recently about someone they were looking at hiring, so a couple of weeks before the initial interview was pencilled in they started keeping more of an eye on their online profiles. Over time, the friend said that they felt that they had built an accurate enough picture of the individual by how they talk and carry themselves with others online that they didn’t pursue employment with the individual. Again, fascinating, but this time a pitfall of being openly transparent.
Again, fascinating, but this time a pitfall of being openly transparent. Being more open is good but be careful.
I could go on. But I won’t.
Trust is linked to Transparency. Discuss.
Sweet visualisation.
So here’s a pop up that I didn’t automatically close. Guinness just have that knack of doing stuff which catches your eye and this was no exception.
A video and a call to action. That was it. But it did the trick.
Funnily enough when I actually went to click through to see where it would take me, it went nowhere.
Love this sort of stuff. Satisfies the creative and production sides of me.
Angus Kneale of The Mill NYC, the cast and crew give us an insight into the creation of the advert, which was filmed in New York and involved state of the art technology notably the Spydercam.
Epic stuff.
You may have already seen the new rollercoaster Barclaycard ad, pretty neat isn’t it? Well here’s some behind the scenes feastings for you to enjoy. The Spydercam is quite fantastic, as is the backing track.
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