Twitter love stories

I’ve had dating and love on the brain of late … unfortunately not because of some romantic happenings in my life (boo hoo hoo). No I’ve been thinking about the digital space and dating.

Online dating is seemingly becoming more and more prolific, especially for my generation of late 20s to 30 somethings. It’s now practically the normal way to meet people. So then I started pondering if this is the same in other cultures? What is dating like in other cultures and how is the digital age aiding/hindering this?

Having lived in Japan, I know that dating over there is a whole different ball game. I mean they don’t even really have the words I love you and when I tried to just hug a friend I thought he might die of embarrassment.

In Japan, what they do have which I know about is something called – Konpa (don’t know how you spell this, but that’s the idea). Konpa is where two couples go out and essentially have a double date, in the hope that at least two of them will pull. It’s a lot more regimented that British let’s-get-drunk-and-slober-on-each-other styles. They also have the firmly held belief that women over 30 are ‘Obachan’. Translation – grandmothers. Nice. I wonder how hard the dating game is for these ladies, and ultimately are they using the online space to break down traditional boundaries?

Secondly, I was wondering if anyone has met anyone online via Twitter. ‘Oooh we were thousands of miles apart, but we met on twitter and fell in love in 140 words’.

Both of these cases are very interesting stories in my book. Book… book?

Hmm so far, not so good Woolworths

Further to my last post about Woolies, it seems that despite them embracing social media, what they are delivering is still quite an old school approach.

Users of the Woolworths site have been encouraged to post suggestions on the ‘Your Questions’ section of the site.  They almost always seem to recieve the   robotic answer ‘I’m afraid it’s too early to say whether we will be stocking these’ – so far.  Hmm not very satisfying for the person who has posted and not a very encouraging approach.

A current theme in social media for brands, is quite rightly, about social media being just that – social: a conversation, a two-way conversation, requiring input from both sides and valuable input.  So far, it seems either a badly planned or missed opportunity for Woolworths.  The audience could quite easily switch off from being these Über-exuberant Woolies fans (didn’t we used to call them brand advocates. Or aren’t they simply word-of-mouth champions?).

In my opinion brands need to get involved and own their social media space, but only where there is a strategy in place to start with.  It needs planning.  Not just doing.  There are many ways a brand can approach social media, but a half-hearted attempt at any of them is worse than doing nothing at all.

For example, Woolworths could have chosen to take the approach that they would use the site for stimulus for discussion, but that they would not actually take part in that discussion.  Not until they were ready. Unfortunately, by creating a question and answer page, they have also created the expectation of reactive listening.  You expect you will get an answer and a satisfactory one at that.

I really liked Fallon’s blog post about Twitter which makes a similar point about Twitter and having a clear, well-planned strategy in place, before brands engage.

http://www.woolworthsblog.co.uk/your-questions/

Twitter as a social PR tool

I won’t apologise about my theme of blogging about twitter.  As a fast growing communications medium, it’s fascinating.  Also as a relatively new user I’m just getting to understand the benefits and I want to share them.

I’ve just spotted a great use of twitter as a PR tool (and a great way to build your network of followers).  The BBC are opening up Erik Huggers – Editor of Digital – to an audience of twitter followers, for a Q & A session.  A real conversation with your consumers I hear you say?  Good work BBC I say.

Perhaps not the most exciting senario for twitterers but how far could this be extended?  Music brands opening up their celebs to a real time conversation?  Or Honda engineers talking in realtime in a Q&A session for fans?

It’s not genius but well done BBC for embracing social media.

Who to follow on twitter?

Found this interesting list of the top twitterers.  Could be a good place to start if you are new to twitter and want to find some interesting people to follow: http://www.twitterholic.com/.

Now, the only thing missing is some info about what kind of things they are twittering about e.g. digital, news, techy etc.  I’m sure it must exist out there?

Twitter….what’s the @bl**dy point?!

I have to admit, I did nearly give up with Twitter.  I thought it was a geek world full of self-indulgent Facebook feeds.  But what kept me going, was not only characteristic sheer pigheadedness but also the fact that it’s full of early adopters (yes geeks) who tend to be the type of people who talk about the industry stuff I want to know first.  And the more I’ve started using it the more benefits I can see.

So I’m sold….can I take you to the Twitter-side?

1.    It’s not Facebook status feeds – Twitter is not full of self-indulgent Facebook-esque feeds.  It’s all about knowledge sharing – so for you that means industry and brand knowledge building.

2.    Keeps you ahead of the competition – by following the leading commentators and ordinary folk alike people are actively sharing industry information and news before it hits the regular media in nice dinky bite size pieces and links. Which makes you look clever  in front of your clients and colleagues when you share a nice ‘new’ idea.

3.    Networking – you don’t have to be mates with someone to stalk them now!  Twitter allows you to follow who you like and it’s up to them if they want to follow you back or just ignore your noise – but quite often people will return the favour and engage in dialogue.

4.    Profile raising – if enough people start following you and your ramblings, you can go from zero to hero and you’ll be a keynote speaker at FOWA in no time.

5.    Easier than you thought  – If you down load a Twitter firefox add on – it makes it really simple and quick to up-date and follow feeds.  No more logging into a distracting web page all the time. Try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081

What more can twitter do for your brand?

6.    Brands can engage in a real two-way conversation with their customers – brands have the potential to listen to the buzz about their brand in the Twitter-sphere, simply by searching for their keywords and thus actively and instantly respond to their consumers and react instantly.

7.    Build a reputation for your brand by following potential customers and journalists that write about your space.

8.    Lead generation.

One question though that still remains as to how do I know who is interesting and worth following?  Time is money and all that and I don’t want to listen to people waffling all day (I have Facebook for that).  I’m currently trialling MrTweet…so watch this space on my thoughts. http://mrtweet.net/

But so far for me it has been a bit of random luck finding people. One simple way Twitter could make spreading the word much faster is by making it easier to search for people and for categories.  So far it’s been a bit of a treasure hunt.  Although I hear there might be progress http://blog.twitter.com/2008/07/finding-perfect-match.html.

So to get you started – here’s some Twitter voices we are following who we think have something good to say about digital or do digital good:
@BBCdigital
@BarrackObama
@russelldavies
@kevinrose
@BrandRepublic

You got any better twitterers to share?