“Businesses learn lessons in Twitter technology” (via KCStar.com)

By DIANE STAFFORD

When the Enterprise Center of Johnson County announced a “Twitter Bootcamp,” the seminar room capacity of two dozen was reached immediately.
The waiting list filled a second seminar set for later this month. And that waiting list precipitated a third seminar for May.

Representatives from large and small area businesses, eager to figure out how the social networking phenomenon can help their businesses, got an intro-to-tweeting lesson Thursday in the first of the three bootcamps.

Derek Gathright, Steven Chau and Darby Frey, three Web developers and software engineers, explained the Twittersphere, in which users are sending concise messages to each other’s cell phones, PDAs and desktops.

Twitter.com started out three years ago with some techies and other “early adopters” sending quick updates to one another — in answer to the signature question “What are you doing?”

Now, it has morphed into an advertising, marketing and public relations tool with perhaps 8 million users (though precise numbers aren’t known).

Southwest Airlines and JetBlue use Twitter. “It’s especially good at quieting angry customers,” Frey said. And Gathright described how Twitter helped him connect with lost luggage in Las Vegas.

Zicam, maker of a cold remedy, uses Twitter. Let someone send a message to a friend that says, “I’m sick,” and she may get a tweet in response that says, “Have you heard of Zicam?” along with an offer to download a coupon.

The seminar presenters said a couple of Kansas City companies have skilled Twitter users. They singled out Justin Gardner at AMC Theatres and Zena Weist at Embarq. They are among a relatively new class of worker known as the social media manager or interactive brand strategy manager.

Sprint Nextel also uses Twitter to scout out and help squash consumer complaints, the presenters said.

As a still-young medium for business, Twitter is being shaped by the preferences of its early adopters. For example, Chau said, the chief executive of Zappos, an online shoe vendor, tweets to share his views of the world, a technique that humanizes the company and builds a fan base.

Dell, the computer company, has a variety of Twitter accounts to reach users and prospective buyers. Gathright said the company had sales of more than $1 million in 2007-2008 generated through sale alerts sent on Twitter.

The three presenters said one of the clearest values of Twitter — as opposed to Facebook.com — is that a sender doesn’t have to be invited in or approved as a “friend” to receive a message.

That broader access has allowed CNN, for example, to account for comparatively high-volume Twitter traffic in news bulletin tweets.

But using Twitter isn’t a no-brainer, they said. They cited an effort by Skittles, the candy, to do a Twitter marketing push. Tweet traffic, presumably among young users, quickly became dotted with profanity and other less desirable stuff.

“With Twitter, you get instant feedback from users,” Gathright said, noting that can be good or bad. “You reach a much broader, random audience than using the more private e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms or blogging.”

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Had the pleasure of making the breakfast meeting for the Kansas City Social Media Club this morning. A lot of familiar places in the social community were there. It has become apparent there are a lot of hard working people taking on a lot of adventurous projects in the area. It is fun meeting and conversing with people that have the same passion for emerging technologies and are working on them in their own unique way. There is talk of setting up an informal panel moving forward to keep the flow of ideas going. There is also going to be an online resource that is going to have more usability and access to information. Thanks to everyone who came out this morning. Below is a video of everyone talking via Jeff.

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