One good case study relating to twitter

It’s said that small businesses realize about half of their customers through word of mouth. This business axiom begs a couple of questions:

• Does this hold true for your business?
• Do you have a referral strategy of some kind in place?
• Could Twitter assist in spreading the word about your products or services?

Think about it: When it comes to spreading the word with positive endorsements, Twitter is about as viral as it gets. If you can plug into what excites your followers, it effectively shortens the emotional distance between your business and customers. From there, it’s a short skip to increased sales.
From time to time I’ve had reasons to search online for good Twitter case studies – many Internet marketing bloggers probably have. Over the years I’ve come across only a few. So, I was delighted to discover that Twitter has rounded up their success stories. Among them, I found this one thought-provoking …
A Dell Outlet marketing employee discovered Twitter in 2007 and started using it to promote discount computer deals. However, she soon discovered that people were interested in much more than learning about good deals. They wanted to ask questions, and existing Dell customers wanted to share their experiences, both good and bad.
People felt good about getting such a personal response from the Dell representative. Issues were resolved; goodwill was built; and respect and partiality was earned. The reps had learned the hard way, you could say, to specifically search for Twitter members who’ve tweeted about Dell, using www.Search.Twitter.com.
Dell Outlet didn’t abandon its strategy to promote products on Twitter. In fact, they’ve had astounding success with it, attributing over $3 million in sales to its microblogging activities.
Most of people won’t earn $3 million from our Twitter followers, but for me, the Dell Outlet business case study underscores one very important point: It’s too easy to be off-target from optimum messaging when tweeting.
If you’re unclear about what your followers want to learn from you, just ask them! Isn’t this one of the best ways to use Twitter? It’s easy to conduct informal opinion surveys using Twitter. Do this with an eye to better honing your blog content, or refining your product or service mix.
The goal of every marketer is to give the people what they want, making every aspect of doing business with you irresistible. Sometimes creating that feeling has little to do with price. Sometimes you’re chosen over the competition because you seem to care more.
So, engage in conversations. Try to help prospects solve problems related to your niche. Before long you, like Dell Outlet, may realize that face time truly does build preference, and preference is a tangible commodity – one you can take to the bank!

Inspirational use of Twitter

Local homeless man uses Twitter to help other homeless
When Kerry Veazey lost his job as a machinist in 2008,

he was not all that worried about it.

There was plenty of money in the bank to sustain Veazey, 42, his wife Sabrina, 32, and son Keifer, 14. Veazey was certain he would find work. He always did.

“I never had a problem finding a job. We had money in the bank so I never went down and applied for unemployment,” he said. “I figured in a week or two I'd have a job. I was sure we were going to get something.”

But 15 months passed and the family's savings were slowly dwindling. Veazey decided to apply for unemployment, but learned he had missed the deadline.

Before he knew it, December 2009 came around and their money was running out.

“I got to looking on Craigslist and found a little trailer. The guy wanted $300. It was 41 years old and someone had gutted it out. It just basically had some beds in it. That was like our last resort. I thought at least we'll have this. But I kept thinking, we're gonna get a job, it's gonna happen,” he said.

With the last of his money, Veazey paid the rent on their mobile home for December and January.

In February, after a failed attempt to find a job in Prescott, Ariz., the Veazeys moved into the Craigslist trailer and onto his mother's

property.

That arrangement was short lived, said Veazey. He had a falling out with his mother's boyfriend and Veazey dragged the trailer to a friend's property.

The family had sold most of their belongings and put some into storage. But with no income, it wasn't long before they lost the storage unit because they couldn't pay

the bill.

Then one day the car insurance was due. All they had left to sell was their laptop, said Veazey. So as Sabrina sat down in the gutted-out trailer to erase their personal information, she noticed there was an Internet signal from somewhere that allowed them to

get online.

That gave Veazey an idea.

“I know the governor, everyone has a Twitter account, so I thought I'm going to get on there and make some noise and try to get us some help,” he said.

While he never got a response from the state's elected officials, what Veazey did find was a homeless community online.

“It was a shock to find there were that many homeless people online,” said Veazey.

“We learned more through the computer on how to find help than we did by going to places.”

The discovery couldn't have come any sooner, said Sabrina.

“I was having a hard time. I was this close to giving up,” she said, holding her fingers an inch apart. “No matter what we did, it just kept getting worse and worse. People kept telling us all the time, it will get better, but with everything we'd been doing it just kept getting worse. I had hit that breaking point. I was done.”

Veazey said he didn't know how to talk to his despondent wife to give her hope.

“Nobody would talk to us anymore. Family, friends. I talk to Sabrina all the time and it wasn't helping. I didn't know where to turn,” he said.

So he contacted a homeless woman they had met online and asked her to call Sabrina.

She did, and for two hours, said Sabrina, the woman listened as Sabrina cried.

“It must have helped,” Sabrina said, smiling. Just talking with someone in a similar situation made it easier to deal with it all, she said.

And Veazey soon discovered in addition to getting support from the online community, he could offer his own support.

He quickly became very active in wearevisible.com, a website aimed at giving a voice to America's homeless.

But Veazey didn't stop there. Despite being in dire straits himself, he began noticing homeless people around Carson City. He admits he never noticed them before, but now they were kindred spirits.

Through the ever-growing followers on his Twitter account, Veazey solicited and got a case of socks sent to him. He carries those socks with him in his vehicle and with every new homeless person he encounters he offers a handshake and clean socks.

He also started to research online the options for people in his position. His research into the VA Homeless Veteran's program landed the family housing. They moved from the gutted trailer into a David Street apartment in October.

On Tuesday, as the Veazeys discussed their situation — Kerry is still out of work, which is stressful, but they recently scored a couch for $9.99 at the Goodwill store, which made them very happy — Kerry Veazey also talked of the plight of his homeless “brothers and sisters,” a common mantra on his Twitter account where he's “Alleycat22469.”

And now Sabrina, as “bully_lover78,” and Keifer, as “keifer1122,” are tweeting. Keifer even managed to attract the attention of his idol, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. In October, Hawk sent Keifer a care package of clothes and an iPhone, which Keifer uses to post his Twitter updates.

In his travels around town, Veazey has made it a point to tell the homeless here in Carson City that there is help and compassion online.

In late October, after hearing about Homeless Awareness Day in Reno, Veazey recycled enough cans to afford printing out fliers about wearevisible.com.

He spent the day in Reno and handed out the fliers at the event.

“Once we found wearevisible.com things really changed for us,” he said. “Before, we woke up every day ready to give up. We no longer had friends or family to talk to anymore, and these guys (online) were always there to encourage us.”

“The positive words were more than just positive words,” said Sabrina. “To us it was like family. They wanted to help. They were willing to do whatever it took to help.”

Veazey is still filling out applications. He estimated he has applied for more than 60 jobs for everything from pizza delivery to machinist, but he still can't find work.

They are surviving on $500 in food stamps a month, and $307 cash from welfare. They don't panhandle, Sabrina said, because they are making it — just barely — on that.

“We have what we need right now, so that's not fair to take more,” she said.

All Veazey wants for himself is a job. His dream job is now community outreach. Though that never crossed his mind when he was a machinist, it seems to be his calling.

All he asks of the world is to understand the magnitude of the homeless situation today.

“Most people didn't see us as people after losing our jobs and home. It's time we open the eyes of people to the problem,” he said. “This is not a big city issue, it's a world problem — and problems can be solved.”

Cyberwellness Tips for Twitter

There’s an interview with William Gibson in the Wall Street Journal today where he mentions Twitter quite a bit, so I thought I’d take the excuse to dive in.
Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in a book that he wrote in the early ’80s—on a typewriter!—has a new novel out this week. In his chat with the WSJ, he says:

I’ve noticed two things. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a week and a half before they’re released to the rest of the world. [...] The other thing is the number of Twitter users asking me questions that I’m usually woefully unable to answer about formats and editions.

Actually, Gibson answers a lot of questions on Twitter. It’s remarkable to see him retweet them back out to his followers with micro-responses inline. In some sense, he’s making the WSJ superfluous: his Twitter account has become a permanent interview, unfolding day by day, question by question.
Gibson is also, in general, a big retweeter—an accelerator of novel ideas and images. Some have to do with his books; many more don’t. He’s built a super-engaged Twitter following not just by talking about his books, but by sharing the raw material that feeds them.
So if you’re interested in seeing a smart writer use Twitter to follow and accelerate the buzz around a big launch, you’ll want to follow along for the next few weeks as his tour begins.
But William Gibson is well-established. What about a journalist putting out her first book? That’s science writer Rebecca Skloot, who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—a book that’s hard to categorize and, perhaps, according to conventional wisdom, hard to sell. Skloot’s publisher wasn’t willing to pay for a book tour.
So she organized her own via Twitter and Facebook, asking followers and fans to suggest venues and arrange gigs. They did, and Skloot criss-crossed the country, tweeting her schedule as it came together in real-time along the way. Her book became a bestseller, and it’s now being made into an HBO movie. (And she’s still on tour, folks.)
So, these are two writers with very different characteristics:

• One writing fiction, with a big existing fan base;
• another writing non-fiction, just beginning to build a following.

Both are using Twitter to build and nurture their audiences. Follow both, and you’ll get a master class in modern book marketing. (The remarkable thing, of course, is that it doesn’t feel very much like marketing at all.)
More broadly, the Follow reader chat very Thursday has become a hub for conversation about the future of book publishing. It’s a good jumping-off point to find more people—not just writers but agents, editors, and booksellers—who are using Twitter effectively.
As William Gibson puts it:

After a few days on Twitter, what was most evident to me is that, if you set it up right, it’s probably the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed.

And it’s not such a leap from novelty to novel.

Interesting facts about twitter

Twitter was created mainly to stay connected with a group of friends through SMS channels. It was never meant to be used on the internet much and that was the reason for its 140 character limit.

Twitter was mostly funded through venture capitalists who funded most of the $ 50 million, Twitter is still operating on.

Twitter was founded in 2006 and for the first 3 years as a company Twitter made a total of ‘zero’ dollars in revenues.

Twitter is expected to make 1.54 billion dollars by the end of 2013 with over a billion users.

Twitter has over over 65 millions tweets everyday and that averages to 750 tweets per second.

There are over 70,000 registered applications for Twitter created mostly by people who have no connection to Twitter.

Dangers of Twitter

One of the dangers of Twitter, which I suppose is a danger of all technology, but is more public with Twitter, is that if your account is hacked, other people may think you are posting things that you aren’t. All of your followers will see the post, and if there’s a link, others may visit that site, not knowing that it’s not legitimate. Depending on the nature of the post, it could hurt your relationship with anyone who follows you – especially because they may not really know you.
Yesterday evening, I was looking at my Twitter feed, and I noticed a friend’s Twitter account had links to adult material. Since his  website is a mainstream site, I knew it wasn’t legit, so I let my friend know about it. After looking into it a bit more, I found a second danger of Twitter – more like a danger of a Twitter set up.
My friend’s account hadn’t actually been hacked. What happened was that he set up a feed on his website’s forum that posted the title of topics and a link to the topic in his Twitter feed. Since this set-up automatically posts all topics from the forum to his Twitter account, it posted the spam from the forum. People need to be wary of this type of set up, as it can give the website a bad reputation.
Twitter allows people anf companies to have a “personal” relationship with other companies, celebrities, and  people with whom they do not know. By opening a brand to Twitter, a company can put its reputation at risk if they do not closely monitor its Twitter account.