I’m looking forward to embarking on a new adventure as a corporate tweeter. As such, I’ve taken a good deal of time accumulating best practices for corporate accounts. Many of these are the same as I would recommend for anyone operating a business Twitter account for themselves:

1. Have a mission/message in mind before you post your first tweet.
2. Your message should also consider your target audience.
3. Twitter directories are a good way to gain some followers initially, but there is no get followers quick solution.
4. Be selective in following. There is no need to follow everyone who follows you.
5. Be careful of your language. This is even more important for corporations than for individuals.
6. Your posts are 100% public. Remember that bad news travels faster than good news and anything your shareholders wouldn’t like will travel out of the Twitterverse and onto TV screens and into newspapers.
7. Corporations need to select a voice. It’s best if one person, or a couple of people, man the account, for consistency, and to be sure there’s no redundancy. Most corporations invoke the royal ‘we.’  Other more customer-service oriented Twitter accounts have used an individual speaking from the first person.
8. A regular stream of content is important to any Twitter feed to maintain followers. Appropriate corporate topics include:

• • respond to follower/customer inquiries
  • retweet satisfied customer tweets
  • link to updated/interesting information on corporate websites/blogs
  • retweet updates from affiliated Twitter accounts
  • Twitter contests
  • advance notice of corporate news
  • Twitter discount codes
  • stimulate Twitter discussions with product-related questions
  • product-related trivia
  • run online surveys
  • photos of corporate events

Have some other ideas? Please share in the comments!

Bird art by Triax Mills.

My mom just sent me this photo she dug up of my 13th birthday. You’ll see I’m proudly displaying my new ‘boom’ box. (hah.) Not too long after receiving this, I joined, much to my dad’s chagrin, the Columbia House Record & Tape Club. Remember that?

The deal was always similar – you get a dozen albums or so up front for a penny (or nothing) and buy some number at Club Price in the future to fulfill your agreement. The Club Price was expensive, and then there was shipping and handling. And of course, like other mail order clubs, there was the required rejection card or else you automatically got the monthly selection and a bill to go with it.

I joined when cassettes were the prevailing format, although you could opt to get a vinyl LP if you wanted. VHS movies snuck in at some point, then DVDs became available. They eventually added a frequent buyer program. Reflecting back, it was an amazing transition of direct marketing and music sales.

Now, it’s http://www.columbiahouse.com/ and they’re focusing on DVDs.

I don’t remember all of the tapes in my first order, but some of them were:

• Duran Duran – Rio
• Styx – Kilroy Was Here
• Van Halen – 1984
• Eddie Murphy S/T (the parents did not like that one)
• Def Leppard – Pyromania
• Michael Jackson – Thriller
• Wierd Al Yankovic in 3-D
• Men At Work – Business as Usual

Here’s good old Dick Clark’s commercial for Columbia House on YouTube for you:

Did you ever belong to the Columbia House Record & Tape Club? Did you fill in the gold box or tape a penny to an order form? Do you remember your first 12 albums you ordered?

It’s almost here, and the Internet is aflurry with Superbowl predictions. About the ads. And the advertisers are all happy to be talked about. In previous years there was huge secrecy about what each ad was going to be about, but this year, if you want to see the ad ahead of time, watch it! Watch it again! Show it to your friends!

I love the buzz, I always watch the game, partly for the ads, and partly because it would be un-American not to. Go Steelers! Enjoy the ads!

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/brendan-collins/do-right-thing/super-bowl-commercials-roundup

Update: this is now running in English in America.

We’ve been combing through some old front pages of the Post here at the office, in preparation for an exhibit that will be open to the public around Inauguration time. Keep your eyes open for that. It’s been mesmerizing to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

1) Advertising on the front page was in vogue decades ago, and many papers have brought it back.

2) The twitter, or short quotable thought, was also quite popular ages back. News was more personal and personable.

3) The Post was more locally focused. The news came back to how Washingtonians were effected. And that’s the newest ‘change’ in how the paper is operating. More local focus.

For your enjoyment, here’s a vintage front page. The big news of this day: the atomic bomb changes war and science. And, in local news, Major Bong is hit.

I really enjoyed the DC Ad Club’s luncheon speakers today, Brad Beckstrom of ApolloBravo Mobile Marketing and Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP of Ogilvy’s Digital Influence group, author of “Personality Not Included” and Word of Mouth Marketing and Social Media expert.

Rohit talked about word of mouth marketing and how it can be integrated into your advertising, marketing or PR. His philosophy was interesting, and I was impressed to see that Guy Kawasaki wrote a foreword for his book. So I bought one of the signed copies he had there. Reading it now.

Brad filled us in on some recent stats from the CTIA (cellphone industry association) that are pretty astounding. Overall, I was impressed to know that cellphone ownership in the USA has now surpassed that of home PCs and web access. Plus, while more and more people have phones, the number of minutes Americans spend making phone calls has stayed pretty static. But the number of text messages (SMS) has grown exponentially. Of course these SMS messages can be used by companies to contribute to word of mouth campaigns.

Besides the book, I took away one big idea: word of mouth marketing is not something you can buy. But you can push it with advertising you buy or create, whether it’s guerilla marketing, or print, radio, TV advertising or SMS messages with three little words: “tell a friend.”

Here we have two angles of video proliferation, and how you can use video to market somewhere other than a plain old television commercial.

One is Truveo.com, a new indexing platform coming out of AOL, which is bringing in YouTube videos and videos from other sources and allowing you to search them all in one place. Their next step will be monetizing that discovery.

More interesting is NBC Universal, which to me falls along the line of stuff that we’ve seen in those post-apocalyptic movies, where you step up to a counter at your local grocery store and a screen knows you’re you and knows what movies you like and immediately starts advertising that a movie that you want to see is about to start in one hour at a theater one block away.

This is getting much closer to reality, and as an advertiser, sounds very cool! NBC Universal has screens in taxis, at gas pumps, in grocery stores, in sports arenas, in maternity wards, and in commuter trains.

You can (should) customize your message for the medium, and they’re working very closely with creative teams to do so. It’s quite impressive, it’s hyper-local, and it’s getting a lot of results. Their next step is unified metrics so they can really track their results reliably across vendors.

For more: Truveo.com
NBC Universal packages are available through NBC representatives.