Knowing who you should follow and getting recommendations and insights from the network of people you follow is important in making twitter more valuable to you and your business use of twitter.

Every Friday on Twitter there is a phenomenon called “Follow Friday”. Basically people will tweet who they recommend that people should follow. Think of it as a lightweight recommendation or endorsement activity engine. This will help you to find and follow the people that you want in your network of connections.

Here are 7 Best Practices to use when engaging in Follow Friday on Twitter.

1. Use the hash tag (the pound sign # = hash tag) and include this in the body of your tweet #followfriday

2. Recommend people who you think are worthy of following and that your network would benefit from following and connecting with them.

3. Break out your #followfriday tweets by some sort of category if possible. For example I might recommend people that are great analysts, engineers, foodies, artists, software developers, branding or marketing executives by specifically stating in my tweet why you should follow them.

4. Use Follow Friday to give back value to your followers network and reward the people that you respect and whose tweets you find valuable. Make sure you include the @ before the name so that people can easily click to that users profile page.

5. One of the keys of all social networks is that you have to give to get. So give and share the brain trust of people that you think are deserving of it. It will come back to you in the form of more loyal and engaged network!

6. Watch for your network to recommend people via Follow Friday and you can discover some real gems and make connections quickly. Pay special attention to the people that you respect.

7. Don’t blindly follow everyone that is recommended. Allocate a few minutes and check out the bio and tweets from the recommended people before you decide to follow those recommendations.

Here is a sample #followfriday tweet and an effective way to communicate who you are recommending and why.

Happy Following! FYI you can follow me at @Rumford

OK It is official… The “Oprahfication” of Twitter has become a reality. Today Oprah had Twitter co-founder EV on the show as well as Ashton Kutchner (@aplusk) while Oprah did her first tweet… which as a funny side note was all in CAPS

Why does this matter if celebrities use twitter and tweet? It is only mildly interesting to follow celebrities from my perspective. However we happen to live in a celebrity obsessed culture where people want a peek behind the velvet rope and a peek into the “lifestyles of the rich and famous”… Remember that show? The proof here is that Oprah set a Twitter Follower Velocity Record: 225,000 followers in 13 hours. At this rate she will kick Ashton Kutchner’s butt in the number of twitter followers in under a few days.

The big news story is not that Oprah is on twitter. The BIG news is that Oprah has huge Gravitational pull in social networks. She has the ability to get soccer moms that are technophobes to try new stuff and push their boundaries. This is great news as twitter is a new communication channel and the value of the eco-system and network increases as more people use it.

Twitter can be a broadcast distribution channel and that is exactly Oprah’s use case. It works for her and celebs.

Here is the video with Oprah and Gal Pals tweeting it up and chatting with Ashton Kutchner

Pepsi has done what smart brands will be doing in the future. Get out of the way and let the experience happen. Anything that a brand can do that puts them in the middle of facilitation, connection, conversations and exposing people with similar interests can be a powerful brand and marketing experience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible in creating a unique branded experience that leverages the Twitter API and content for companies. The possibilities are endless. Creative ideation needs to take place to ensure that a compelling experience can be created that aligns with a brands core values and customers. We have service offerings that will create compelling experiences for brands and companies. Consumer brands and the entertainment industry needs to pay close attention.

Contact me and we can help your brand in these types of branded endeavors.

See what Pepsi had to say about what they were doing in Social Media at SXSW.

Screw the phone…  I tweet for customer service. I came across this video from Fox Chicago on how Twitter users are going to Twitter FIRST for customer service and support and completely bypassing calling traditional help channels such as phone support. The point that brands and businesses need to take away is the fact that people are going to twitter for customer service and expecting interactions ans resolution from the brands via Twitter.

Twitter for customer service and support is but one of many use cases of Twitter as a business tool. It just happens to be a piece of low hanging fruit in the twittersphere. I know that I tweeted @starbucks because I could not find out how many weight watchers points were in a mocha frappicino while I was trying to lose weight . They responded and tweeted me where I could find the information, nice! So is your company there?

What is the best interaction that you have seen via twitter for customer service or support? Please leave a comment.
This video is calling Twitter the cyber complaint window. Indeed.

I wanted to quickly give you some food for thought. The opportunities for large AND small businesses on Twitter are huge.  Watch what Scott Monty from FORD says about their experience on Twitter in this Fox Business segment. Notice he says they are not interested in advertising on social networks like Twitter; rather it is about connecting with their target demographic on social networks like Twitter. This is a trend that is here to stay: customers are EXPECTING for your company to be on Twitter and have you interact with them.

I asked Scott via Twitter for 1  benefit of Twitter for Ford. He Tweeted this response.

My favorite quote from the video clip. Scott: “It is less about a campaign and more about a commitment… It is an ongoing way of doing business that we are going to see…”

Some of the Ford Twitter Accounts: Each account serves a specific purpose as a communication channel to address different market segments.

FordTrucks

FordDriveOne

FordDriveGreen

FordCustService

FordMustang

FordRacing

Side Note: Even the anchors on Fox News are on Twitter. You can follow Fox News anchor Liz Claymen on Twitter.

There has been a disturbing Dodo minded trend that I have seen in the past few months related to automated delivery of Direct Messages (DM) on Twitter. The trend is that when you follow someone they use a third party service to auto-follow anyone that follows them (not wise). As soon as they follow you, they send you a Direct Message that usually looks like this “Thanks for following me. See you in Twitterville” or something equally pointless, annoying and non value adding. The other type of message that we see look like this where they point to you to a link  “Thanks for following me on Twitter. Make sure you read my blog at www.xzy.com” or “You gotta see this www.abc.com”.

These types of Automated Direct Messages are frustrating to the large majority of Twitter users because they add no value and these messages start to feel like more junk in my Twitter “inbox” that I need to delete.

Telling me via an automated DM to check out your blog and giving me a link feels a bit like a hard sell; and by the way I already went to your blog (while looking at your profile on twitter) before I decided to follow you. It is insulting, annoying, a poor practice and actually reflects badly on the person sending the auto DM. Many people will actually choose to unfollow anyone that sends them an auto DM (myself included). Sending these non value added Auto Direct Messages shows lack of knowledge of the eco-system and some of the informal behavioral rules that exist on Twitter.

Best Practice:  There are only rare exceptions where Automated DM could be percieved as valuable. If you are not sure if your use is the rare exception; most likely it is not.

Tip: Your first Direct Message to someone better add value as you get 1 chance to make a first impression.

Marketers like to be heard and want to “make people” pay attention. One of the really nice things about Twitter is the control is with the users; if I don’t want to hear your marketing messages, I simply unfollow or block you and you have lost the ability to communicate with me. Marketers can’t make people do anything on Twitter.

Tip: Focus on building trust, adding value and beginning a relationship first.

So let’s just hope that the non value adding Automated Direct Messages on Twitter will soon go the way of the Dodo bird and become extinct. You can follow me at www.twitter.com/rumford