Category: Social Media

Best Practices — Effective Use of Twitter

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What is it?

In this entry, I am going to discuss two organizations: McKinsey Quarterly and Brooklyn Museum.  These two organizations are very different in many ways.  But they share one commonality in that they both use Twitter very effectively in gathering customer intelligence and strengthening customer relationships.  McKinsey Quarterly’s Twitter username is @McKQuarterly; and Brooklyn Museum is simply @brooklynmuseum.

Why is it a good idea?

Many companies use Twitter or other microblogging tools to bring customers more timely updates about the business.  This is what I call a “broadcast” model.  While it is useful in its own right, McKinsey Quarterly and Brooklyn Museum went beyond that by practicing the following:

(1) Attach links to tweets so that users can choose to drill deeper into a topic if they are interested.  Not only does this offer a higher level of interactivity to satisfy user needs, but with proper tracking it also provides useful insight on what interests customers.

(2) Use @replies functionality to build a dialogue with customers.  For those who are not quite familiar with Twitter, one can add @username into one’s tweet to reply to a user or to refer to a specific user.  Both Brooklyn Museum and McKinsey Quarterly closely monitor user comments and use @replies to respond to those comments in a timely fashion.  This approach makes users feel appreciated, which encourages future participation and builds loyalty.

(3) The third tactic that I would like to discuss is used by McKinsey Quarterly.  They have turned their twitter account and their large number of followers (7645 as of right now and it’s not hard to imagine the high relevance of these followers)  into a marketing research machine.  Earlier this year, for example, McKinsey Quarterly published an article on Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.  Then using Twitter, they asked their followers what organizations get the most out of Web 2.0.  Combined with a special hashtag (#web2.0work), they were able to track responses from users.  The company then updated the original article based on the ideas they received from the Twitter community (of course they posted a tweet about that update too).  Does it get much better than free marketing research?

Simulation in Second Life

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A student of mine shared this article on CNN.com with me: “Can second Life Help Teach Doctors to Treat Patients?”  It is an interesting illustration of the potential best use of Second Life, at least in the short-term.  While the original idea of Second Life was to create a virtual world where individuals can take on the role of an alter ego, the true business appeal of Second Life really lies in its capability to bring computer objects to life.  Within the 3D environment, individuals can reenact real-world scenarios in a semi-real setting, a departure from the 2D dominated Internet.  Thus, what is most useful about Second Life is not really the hundreds of thousands of users in the network, in contrary to other social networks such as Facebook.  Rather, it is the ability to simulate real-world scenarios that may be difficult or expensive to take place in reality.  Such applications include product development and demonstration; customer collaboration; teleconferencing; education and other types of simulation; and team work across geographic areas.  While businesses have entered Second Life a few years ago to build a “presence” in Second Life for marketing purposes, I envision continued use of Second Life to focus more in these other business areas and applications.

Study on Second Life and Corporate Innovation

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Together with Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, my research team is conducting a study on corporate innovation as reflected by companies’ participation in the virtual world Second Life.  In particular, we are interested in why corporations engage in cutting-edge innovations such as Second Life, despite the risks involved, and the benefits that are received through such ventures.  If your company has conducted any activities in Second Life, we would like to invite you to participate in a survey that constitutes part of the research project.  The survey will take only 10-15 minutes to complete, and we would be pleased to share the results of our research with you after the project’s completion in the form of an executive summary.  Please note that although Linden Lab has been working with us on facilitating the data collection process, we are not working with any commercial interests, and we will not share any data that can be tracked back to individuals or firms unless you first provide written permission to do so.

If you are interested in participating, please click on this survey link to launch the survey.  If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to contact us through the Contact Yuping form or via email to wjudge@odu.edu.  Thank you!