Twitter founders interviewed at All Things D event in Carlsbad yesterday. a great 10 minutes interview with Walt Maoosberg and Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal. There are lots of nuggets about where Twitter is headed and how they have hit over 30 Million monthly users. It is moving beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream very rapidly. They get asked some tough questions.

Sit thru the 10 second commercial. The 10 minute video is really good. it is all the highlights from the interview from the WSJ team.

Twitter is moving even more mainstream as we see it included in commercials.The mention of Twitter in this recent Sprint Advertisement is mildly brilliant and quite funny if you happen to use Twitter “233K people just twittered on twitter….. and 26% of you have no idea what that means”. The joke here is that people that are on Twitter get it and it is like being part of the hip group.

Hat Tip to the people at Sprint for this one. Well Done.

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.

I can say with certainty that Twitter is aiming for the mainstream. They are trying to move past the early adopters and heavy tech users. Why do I say this? Well just a few hours ago Twitter has started to “educate” their users with word definitions for words such as “Widget”. They started showing these word definitions on the home page of users profiles with short “Simple Simon” types of descriptions.

A widget in the simplest of terms is a self contained mini-data delivery device for web site content. They allow content to be distributed to multiple sites in a compact size. In the case of Twitter it allows your latest tweets to be displayed on your website or blog by simply cutting and pasting a code snippet.

Here is an example of a live twitter widget. Put one on your site and users will see your latest tweets as well as number of followers.

Here is a short video interview where Jeremiah Owyang who is an analyst at Forrester Research asked me “what is a widget” about 18 months ago. We talk a bit about facebook, but the concepts fully apply.

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.

I was recently asked to present about Twitter for a digital marketing series of webinars by the cool people over at BrightTalk. They had 8 great presenters over the course of the day today talking about digital marketing, branding and measurement. So if you want to get your head around Twitter and the opportunities and benefits quickly in about 45 minutes; you can watch the replay of the webinar presentation that I did. Enjoy the recorded presentation and share it with your peers.