Jon Samsel

Twitter is often described as a free micro-blogging and social networking service that you can use to send quick text messages or ‘tweets’ to friends and followers, no more than 140 characters long. While this may be a factually correct description, it only scratches the surface of how Twitter is being utilized as a revolutionary communications platform.

Since Twitter is hardware agnostic, you can access Twitter using hundreds of different devices. This flexibility is just one of the reasons the use of Twitter is spreading so fast. Anytime, anywhere accessibility means that users can tweet from anywhere–and they are! From the front lines of war zones, to sporting events, family vacations, the local conference event–anywhere you can see or do you can tweet about.

Recently a colleague of mine asked me about Twitter. He heard I was using it to conduct research, promote my blog, and provide assistance to others. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would anyone use Twitter? Especially a Fortune 100 company? I just don’t see how it’s useful or effective.”

I could relate to her. You see, I felt the same way only a month or so ago when I first joined Twitter. I posted a few comments, followed a few people, conducted a couple of advanced searches on topics of interest. Yawn. You mean to tell me people are tweeting about taking their children to soccer practice? Tweeting about what they are eating? Posting on topics such as gastronomical pains? Here are three sample tweets (actual Twitter posts):

• I ate donuts all weekend
• last day of skiing. I went crazy and shredded some mogul
• Lunch with the new employee. I’m officially The Man now

Why on earth would I spend my valuable time sorting through thousands of comments like these concerning the mundane happenings of so many ordinary lives?

Then I started noticing other tweets like these:

• FREE widget creation tool. http://tinyurl.com/8jplw4
• New report shows Flash is poor choice for navigation design: http://tinyurl.com/7bp2je PS: Real world testing shows search engines can’t see the keyword buckets
• Nice viral marketing campaign. Click through the site till you see the surprise ending! http://tinyurl.com/3bp1ju

Hmmm. Links to resources, collaborative research findings, online marketing case studies. I searched deeper and found tweets like these:

• Wholefoods So far, we have not identified any products that contain the implicated peanut butter. We will post more details in The Whole Story shortly
• LanceArmstrong Kicked off the LS Global Campaign today at Royal Adelaide Hospital with Premier Rann, Federal Treasurer Swann and many others. Here we go
• DellOutlet Coupons coming for select Dell Outlet laptops & desktops! Not combinable w/ other coupons. Online only. Limit 2 PCs/customer. Expire 1/19/ 09
• Zappos CES attendees: Intel party. For non-VIP entry say passwd “goat” at door
• JetBlue Winter weather in the Northeast may cause delays or cancellations. Check your flight’s status at http://www.jetblue.com/flig…

Wow! Official tweets from companies, celebrities, CEO’s and even politicians. Tweets on a wide range of topics such as crisis management, news & event coverage, product discounts, networking opportunities, and even proactive customer service! With my online marketing noggin now fully engaged, I started thinking about Twitter as a strategy for a businesses or individuals looking to build their brand, increase sales, and/or create awareness. The possibilities are endless (and exciting).

As an outreach strategy, I identified eight obvious areas of focus that any person or organization could capitalize on by using Twitter:

1. Sales & marketing
2. Reputation management
3. Social advocacy
4. Crisis management
5. Customer care / help
6. News & event coverage
7. Networking / employment
8. Research & development

And how to utilize Twitter in each of the above eight areas? Here are four simple ways to engage with the Twitter.com site:

1. Search - Use Twitter to find people, topics of interest, companies to follow, etc.
2. Follow - Use Twitter to track all those you deem worthy of following (anytime they post, it’s added to your Twitter home page
3. Post - Try contributing content (give advice, insights, tips, special offers, research links, event coverage, rebuttal to negative news, etc.) by either posting one tweet at a time, or better yet, tie in your blog posts and your other online contributions to Twitter automatically using FriendFeed or any number of feed services available online
4. Interact - Customize the design of your Twitter profile, send direct messages to people and form new relationships, interact with the official Twitter blog, connect all your devices (like your Blackberry, iPhone, etc), and more!

So what are you waiting for? The best way to see for yourself how Twitter can ‘benetweet’ your company, website, blog, product or service is to dive right in and start tweeting today.

With the rapid emergence of Web 2.0 platforms and technologies, many Fortune 500 companies are now utilizing their websites and digital media assets to create mash-ups, crowdsource, microblog, and publish data in a way that promotes, engages and influences their key constituents. They are doing this by utilizing social media applications, word of mouth communication tactics, and consumer-centric interactive experiences to mesh business goals with constituent desires. The reward for successfully navigating this next media minefield is often a stronger brand, more loyal customers, and a new type of business mindset whereby markets are conversations.

Companies who have already embraced the type of conversations enabled by digital networks seem to have several things in common. Here are 10 of them:

1. An understanding that being responsive to customers with service level agreements that know no boundaries, channel barriers or time constraints.
2. Recognition that the online experience you provide is your brand. Great first experiences, like the theoretical ripple effect of a butterfly’s wings, are the catalyst for something larger, positive, profound, and influential, that associates a company with trust.
3. Admission that honesty and transparency trumps double-talk and corporate babble-speak. In fact, it’s this real discussion (warts and all) that constituents crave.
4. Have a network of smart marketers who prompt audiences to interact because they know that will increase the likelihood that their audiences will transact.
5. Have the foresight and knowledge that customer engagement means more than launching an online discussion board, it comes organically through enabling valuable and motivating experiences at every touch point.
6. Tend to have empathetic staff who question what they do for a living and then juxtapose this against what they know their consituencies actually need from them—implementing beneficial solutions as a result.
7. An appreciation that new web analytics and measurement tools need to speak to where the visitor is going, and not merely to ‘where the puck is’
8. Acknowledgement that although user-generated content diffuses corporate governance and editorial authority in some ways, it can be leveraged to boost site credibility and improve natural search results.
9. An innate ability to harness the talents of each individual employee to share their knowledge and leverage their personal connections.
10. Realizes that effective word of mouth campaigns cannot be manufactured. They tend to be spontaneous, honest and truly viral events centered around humor, oddities, insider news, the taboo or the just plain awe-inspiring.

Whether or not you are aware of it, our world is structured into a series of shapes and patterns and sounds that trigger pleasure in us. This systematic organization is part of our intuitive nature—it allows us to structure sensory information into consciousness, thought, and language. It’s the way we humans are designed.

In the interactive world, design structure is more than just notes scribbled on a napkin or a complex flowchart depicting sequential scenes of an application in rich detail. Interactive design structure fulfills two important duties: it defines the navigational boundaries of the user experience and it is the framework that holds all the creative elements of an interactive work together.

You are now ready to make some pretty important decisions that will have a serious impact on the ability of the user to navigate your interactive application. As an interactive writer, it is your job to identify the user’s perceived range of action—keeping in mind that “what the user can do” directly corresponds with the “rules and pathways you create.”

For example, an interactive environment such as Myst [the groundbreaking first-person point of view adventure game created by Robyn and Rand Miller], which has a wide range and depth of choice, may be perceived as more interactive than a conditional branching system with limited choices. This is true, in part, because of the navigation methodology built into the system—a methodology that emphasizes the program’s “critical objective” over a “critical path” mentality. A critical objective is a centralized aim, goal, or action whereby the end user’s overall path of discovery stresses a “means to an end,” rather than fulfilling an immediate task. Key elements within such an application are revealed over time as the user navigates through the application. A critical path is a single correct path a user must follow to successfully complete an application. This is a procedural approach to completing a task.

The distinction between a critical objective and a critical path is significant. Many players confess that what they like best about playing Myst is “exploring the environment.” Finishing the game is much less important.

In her essay “The Garden of Merging Paths,” Rebecca Solnit writes, “Much recent attention to interactive media proposes that it makes the passive viewer become actively engaged. What is interesting about these products is that they map out a number of choices, but the choices are all pre-selected…that is, the user cannot do anything or go anywhere that the creator has not planned; as usual with computer programs, one must stay on the path and off the grass (by which analogy hackers do get off the path, a subversive success that keeps them in the park). We could chart the game as a series of forks in the road, in which each choice sets up another array of choices, but the sum total of choices has already been made. Thus the audience becomes the user, a figure who resembles a rat in a conceptual version of a laboratory maze. The audience-user is not literally passive; he is engaged in making choices, but the choices do not necessarily represent freedom, nor does his activity represent thinking.”

Douglas Gayeton, who has worked on high-profile projects such as Plug In (AOL), Waking Hours (Boxtop/IXL), Johnny Mnemonic (Sony ImageSoft), and Vanishing Point (MSN/Sunshine Digital), claims, “The geography of an interactive space is an illusion…it’s a directed experience. You only need to art direct (or write) what the viewer will see. If a location is too richly composed and features too many objects, the viewer will expect to be able to interact with everything. When she finds that she can’t, she will realize she’s hit a ‘wall’ in the interactive world.”

In his book The Complete Wargames Handbook, author James F. Dunnigan cautions, “Keep in mind that a computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. Unlike people (some people, anyway), you can’t just tell a computer what you want done and expect your request to be carried out. Computers require explicit instructions. These are called computer programs, or computer software. The terms ‘program’ and ‘software’ are often used interchangeably.”