Tuesday, February 16, 2010

REVIEW: What I learned from MICKEY MOUSE: Disney Social Media Moms Conference (PART 3): Twitter is a Blogger's Best Friend

Can Twitter be used as a high powered marketing tool?

Guy Kawasaki says YES!

I love Twitter. Plain and simple. When I first decided to use Twitter, I did not have a clue what I was doing or why I was even on it. But after a few days, I was hooked. I found out about things that I did not know. I met people from around the country. I started following my favorite companies and winning contests. And I found tons of FREE stuff that I did not know existed. Love. Yes, it was love alright - love of the access that Twitter brought me to a whole new world.

So on day two of the Disney Social Media Moms Conference, we moms had the pleasure of going to breakfast at Disney's Epcot Center to get a lesson in how to use Twitter as a marketing tool from Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a venture capitalist, author, ex-Apple marketing guru, and co-founder of Alltop, a site that aggregates all the top stories from sites across the Internet. So for one hour we got to hear from one of the tech world’s best known bloggers about how he uses twitter to market himself and his businesses.

Guy did not really do a presentation. He just sat at his computer and chatted with us without a script about his use of Twitter. Guy was funny, engaging, direct and blunt. Here are a few of his insights:



1. Twitter can be used to gage what people are saying about you. Just put in your name and you have immediate access to if people are liking, loving, hating, or ignoring you today.

2. Twitter can be used to connect with people, provide technical support, or sell products.

3. Guy used @DellOutlet as a great example of Dell using Twitter to get rid of excess inventory. @DellOutlet has 1.5 million followers and Dell can send out one tweet and items have the potential of selling immediately.

4. Guy used @Kogibbq as another example of using Twitter to sell. @Kogibbq is a small street vendor that sends out tweets to tell followers where their trucks will be. After sending out a tweet, this small street vendor will have 50-100 people waiting for them when they arrive to buy their products. Sweet!

5. Guy used @ComcastCares as an example of Comcast using Twitter to improve their customer service. @ComcastCares searches Twitter for mentions of the Comcast name and makes contact with customers when they tweet about problems with their Comcast service.

6. Guy stated that the real power of Twitter to sell is in its advance search features (http://search.twitter.com/advanced). If you are looking for a product, you can use the NEAR and ZIPCODE features to find that product near your home or business. I did not know that these advance features existed in Twitter. I will definitely be using them from now on.

7. Guy uses Twitterhawk and Twitterfeed to automate his Twitter marketing process. Twitterhawk.com will periodically search twitter for you and either auto-reply or generate a list of matches. Twitterfeed.com will automate the sending of tweets. Guy retweets his blog posts four times per day for maximum clicks. These tools automate the process for him. I also retweet my posts on FREEISMYLIFE mutiiple times per day on Twitter. It is nice to know that there are tools that can automate the process.

8. Guy uses Objectivemarker.com as a central campaign management tool for social marketing. Guy is financially connected to this website. He told us we can use the code WISEGUY to get 3 months of this service for free - Now you know I like the word FREE!

9. If you are a mom blogger, you can send Guy a tweet at @GuyKawasaki and he will add your blog to his Alltop list for moms: http://moms.alltop.com/ I already sent Guy my tweet to get FREEISMYLIFE added to this list. After all, who among us does not want more readers for our blogs?



There is still lots more to tell about this exciting conference. So stay tuned for my next blog post in this series "What I learned from MICKEY MOUSE (PART 4): It Pays to Volunteer".

Read my trip disclosure here

2 comments:

  1. Great recap of Guy's discussion with us... You were right about him. He was so much fun and he convinced me to set up a Twitter account.

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  2. Gah! I started writing a comment and lost it somehow. Oops. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is a wonderful summary of Guy's presentation. Hopefully it'll help others that aren't quite sure how to use Twitter.

    Btw, thanks so much for participating in the blog spring cleaning. I've read all your comments and am trying to catch up. It's surprising to me just how time-consuming writing those challenge posts is!

    Hopefully we'll get to meet at a future event!

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