As an independent contractor doing social media strategy, I find myself spending a lot of time explaining and training social media strategy, online community building, and web strategy. As an educator of sorts, I dedicate a large part of my professional life trying to find real-world worthy definitions and applications of Twitter, an incredibly intangible tool to wrap a traditional mindset around. If you’re not doing, you’re not getting it, and that makes you completely normal. Here are some ways that I instruct my clients to start thinking about Twitter. Take this information like a template slide in a presentation—transform the content to make it your own.

3 Ways to Twitter

The strategies that I outline below are applied specifically to traditional media as an industry (primarily because I might find myself pitching a local news media outlet and these thoughts have been circulating through my head for months), but any type of business can easily substitute a few words and make the applications transform to apply their own industry. With each strategy simply substitute your business, brand, or industry for “News” and you’ll be thinking in the right direction.

1. Break News

Twitter is the most viral way to break news. In order to break news in a way that the Twitter community will embrace, however, you have step outside the comfort zone of press releases and news articles. Of course you can use sites like Twitterfeed to automatically update your Twitter account with the latest press releases, news articles, and blog posts from your website, but if that’s all you’re doing no one will pay attention to you.

Here are two examples of ways that local new stations getting it WRONG:

CBS 11 News Dallas

What they’re doing wrong:

1. All of their Twitter posts are links to their own online articles. This screams that don’t understand Twitter and that they’re trying to push their own agenda.
2. They’re following 13 people. Do they care about their audience? Are they trying to engage with them? They’re not demonstrating either.
3. Take a closer look at who they are following. The majority are other news outlets. What about the real people in the Dallas community?

CBS 10 News San Diego

What they’re doing wrong:

1. They haven’t updated in over 2 months. The message I get is that they tried out a fad to further their own agenda, they didn’t quite get it, and they gave up.
2. They’re not following anyone. None! I’m left wondering if they really care about supporting the community they supposedly serve.
3. I have no idea who is actually behind the account. How I can possibly relate to 10news as 10news? [That should be a rhetorical question]

So who gets it RIGHT? Check out KPBS News in San Diego:

What they’re doing right:

1. They’re following 832 people.
2. The people they’re following are actually real people, members of the San Diego community. Check out all those Twitter avatars for proof.
3. They’re not just breaking their own news stories, but they’re talking about the big news in general, job openings, and they’re actually engaging with other Twitter users.

To get it right, breaking news on Twitter almost needs to be accidental, and the traditional notions around news need to be broken down (this applies to everyone). Are you stuck in a spontaneous traffic jam? Did someone do something incredibly ridiculous at Pride? Did rain start pouring down from the sky? Did you just feel an earthquake? Did your favorite sports team just pull off an amazing victory? These are all examples of news that you can tweet about. The difference between this man-on-the-street type of news and an official article, however, is that these situations are all experiences that you are having in the moment and other people will be able to relate them, respond to your observations, and possibly reshare your tweets with their friends. The best way to break news in this fashion is to just be yourself and start thinking about broadcasting what your doing as the news (in lieu of what you might really think is news).

2. Make News

Innovation and creative social media strategy make news. When what you’re doing on Twitter makes the news, you make the news. Here are just a few pretty amazing examples:

Comcast – Comcast is trying to reshape public opinion about their brand, and they’re using the ComcastCares Twitter account to do just that. Their Twitter behavior is being talked about everywhere, including the New York Times. A recent USAToday article chronicled their efforts by saying…

Frank Eliason, a customer service manager for Comcast, spends his day communicating with Twitterers about the company — hoping to resolve issues. Comcast isn’t on Twitter to turn around the firm’s customer service perception issues but simply to “build better relationships with our customers,” he says.

Zappos.com – Zappos is simply the most recognizable brand on Twitter. They are revolutionary, forward-thinking, responsive, and genuinely interested in interacting with their customer community. Their efforts are rewarded by a plethora of mainstream media attention, including the USAToday and NYTimes pieces mentioned above. Zappos has positioned themselves as the case study for how a business should use Twitter.

Me (Jennifer Van Grove) – I made the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune because of my efforts to use Twitter to connect the local community. It’s a passion of mine to connect like-minded and intelligent people. That passion inspired me to try and make the San Diego Tweetups great events for everyone in San Diego to come together and connect face-to-face.

3. Change News

The idea is simple and obvious; make transformation through change and do it openly and publicly. For traditional media it’s embracing two simple and complex notions:  1. people want to consume their news in a myriad of ways and helping them get the news they want where they want it is tantamount, and 2. people also want to talk to, hear from, and engage with other real people, which means a rehearsed, scripted, and coached on air personality only works on air, not online or in person. Social media, and Twitter especially, provide a recognizable personality (or brand) the opportunity to lose the script, be human, reply to questions, and ultimately create community. If you can act on the following steps, you can increase your chances of breaking news and making news as well.

1. Step 1 – get on Twitter, talk about being on Twitter, and use Twitter everyday to merge the personal and professional. What your eating for lunch matters just as much as the next big story your about to break because it shows depth, makes you human, dynamic, and easy to relate to.
2. Step 2: recognizable personalities, such as radio DJs, reporters, and anchors, should make an effort to create less than polished online content. This includes blogging, micro-blogging (Twitter), vlogging (video blogging), and mo-blogging (mobile blogging). Someone with a recognizable personal brand is missing a huge opportunity if they’re not using their brand as a means to create and build community. Don’t just be a face, be a person (with flaws), a trusted resource, and an acquittance.
3. Step 3: take whatever cool experiences you may have in the course of your daily work activities and broadcast them using all those mediums I mentioned in step 2. Are you interviewing someone really high profile? Are you taking a road trip to a interesting locale? Twitter what your doing (via SMS shortcode 40404), take pictures with your phone (try Twitpic for sending images to Twitter), create short videos with your camera phone or laptop cam (try Qik, 12seconds.tv or Seesmic), and do it all in a digitally savvy way so that anyone following you on Twitter can be there with you, in the moment, sharing the experience with you.
4. Step 4: engage, engage, engage. If someone follows you, follow them back (as long as they’re a real person). If someone replies (via the @), reply back. If someone direct messages you (DM), direct message them back.
5. Step 5: Take everything that you’re doing in steps 1 – 4 and use your traditional marketing and PR efforts to talk about what you’re doing. You’ve got a website, a newsletter, press releases etc, take advantage of those mainstream means of communicating all this change.

I used two CBS local news outlets as what-not-to-do examples above, but CBS is doing a few things right on a national level. Check out Katie Couric’s YouTube video on Digg and the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions,. It’s a pretty powerful, real-world example of each step I just outlined.

Now What?

Hopefully I’ve inspired you to rethink how you can use Twitter for your business or personal brand, but if you need help getting started you can always follow me on twitter, email me at info [at] jennifervangrove [dot] come, or leave a comment below. Of course, any and all comments on the subject matter of this post are more than encouraged.

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