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Quote –

Love this, from screenwriter Todd Alcott (http://www.toddalcott.com/). He wrote this to answer the question, “If I were a television, what would I say? What does a television want?”

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Times are changing…

This is the first time I’ve seen Twitter in Japanese mainstream advertising – and in an offline campaign, no less!  This was seen on the Hibiya subway line in Tokyo and is advertising a new type of coffee – of which a new variety is launched seemingly each week, by one of a handful of major beverage brands.

Twitter fits into this campaign as a mechanism to release information slowly.  In this case, they are telling a story (a novelette) in tweets.

Participating in these offline campaigns that you see on the train is always a little… clunky.

If you look closely you’ll see a search box on the ad – that’s telling you what you need to search for on your phone / pc to find the campaign site.  The campaign site can be found here and it wasn’t the first result for this term (at least not on google).  The twitter page itself does not show up in the 1st page of search results for this term.  The clever among you might be asking why not use QR codes and allow people to just scan the code on the train and go directly to the campaign site.  Well I found out the answer to that recently; there are regulations preventing QR codes on ads in trains.  Train operators want to discourage disruptive phone use on the train.

Have you seen any offline uses of Twitter by major brands?

Posted from 港区, Japan

Be transparent. Transparency is different to honesty. Honest is when you are asked a direct question. Transparency doesn’t require a question. It is an attitude that shows people the inside of your organisation and invites your customers to participate in the journey you are on. Enable them to collaborate with you on developments – this will engender a greater sense of ownership and loyalty.

Deal with customer service issues. Since your customers don’t have a one-dimensional view of you, you fail them when you take a one-dimensional view of them. You might consider what you are doing on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare as a marketing activity, but your customers consider it as another way to tell you about their experiences with you. Deal with it.

Don’t stop talking when bad stuff happens. You immediately lose credibility in what you are doing. Get the PR guys on board from the start. If they don’t get social media, fire them – they will do you a big disservice when you really need them to help you with the crisis that will inevitably happen.

Give something of value. Providing your fans with content that is relevant to them that they will be interested in is bread and butter. But your fans who engage regularly are your best marketing tool. Reward them with stuff they really want and will remember you for – free stuff they will like, exclusive invites to events or gigs that no one else can get and even really decent discounts on your products or the products of others.

Entertain. We very often use social media sites as an escape from the hum drum of nine-to-five. Brands that help to enrich that time by amusing or sharing the unusual and remarkable will be rewarded with repeat visits. There are but a few social media brands that I check out on a daily basis to see what’s new, interesting and amusing – as a result I am much more tolerant of the things they do wrong.

Facilitate conversation. A really powerful thing for a brand to do is to be the facilitator of conversation. You don’t always need to be in the centre – you won’t be able to economically sustain it anyway. Create forums for people to interact with each other to talk and share the things that interest them. Enable them to talk about your brand. Don’t step in to dominate the conversation; only to show you are listening, to clarify where clarification is required and to demonstrate how you are responding with action.

via socialmediatoday.com

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Source and animated version at mattmckeon.com

Twitter history, milestones, user & Tweet statistics, top 10 countries, top 20 users (most followed).

Information collected from multiple sources in April 2010. Some data may not be up to date.