Southern Regional Event Summary
March 2010 - Twitter
At the first Southern Regional Event for 2010 we were joined by two speakers who shared their valuable experience and learnings on Twitter - a subject for which the rule book has not yet been written.
Anthony Gardiner, Web Content Administrator, NZ Army, kicked things off with a Twitter 101, explaining how Twitter operates as a service, not a website, describing it as “the world’s biggest water cooler conversation”.
Anthony discussed how Twitter excels as a search engine for opinions, as a customer service platform, for seeding information to bloggers, and for spreading breaking news fast. He also explained how it could be used to great effect for promotions - highlighting promotional campaigns such as Levis’ ispylevis, and Air New Zealand’s airpoints fairy.
He also shared insight into the do’s and don’ts of Twitter etiquette, including no Twitter-spamming, no automated Tweeting (with the exception of auto-following people using particular key words of special interest to you) and the courtesy of acknowledging all feedback, negative as well as positive, and following people who follow you.
Duncan Blair, Head of Brand and Communications at Orcon, gave the sound advice that if you are going to use Twitter, you need to engage early, often and honestly. He explained how Orcon tweets in 5 distinct categories: Customer Support, Sharing (interesting web content and technology tit-bits), Informal Market Research, Personality and Participation (including lame jokes and inanity) and Promotional (Duncan’s advice: this should be less than 1% of tweets, if you’re going to do it, do it delicately).
He also laid out that there are no secrets or shortcuts to Twitter success – you need to be willing to commit to it (he dedicates up to 30% of his time to social media), and be interesting, relevant and have personality. But when used to its best effect, Twitter can be used to turn crisis into opportunity - addressing negative comments, and creating advocates instead.
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