Last week I paid a trip to my local hardware store in the Mission area of San Francisco. It’s crammed tight full of all the trinkets you need to aid you on the path to home improvement. Lo and behold, an amiable young Latino assistant guided me straight to the pump adapter I needed. Purchase made, I headed out.

Later, whilst checking my receipt, I noticed some interesting text tacked on to the bottom: ‘Follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/colehardware‘. Intrigued, I explored further, and discovered some interesting applications of Twitter from this local hardware chain:

Hot or not?
Report on what’s big this year:

@egebhardt Hi. Thanks for sharing us as a source for canning supplies. Appreciate it! Canning is really popular this year! Rick (Read Tweet)

Why do this? Show you are an expert in your area by sharing sales information – we all love to think we’re part of the latest trends.

Promote latest offers
Let shoppers know of deals and other goodies that could entice them:

Get a great Cole Hdwe canvas shopping tote free with a $25 purchase. Show this tweet at checkout or use coupon in Hardware Hotline. Rick (Read Tweet)

My personal feeling is if you do this too often, you’ll come across looking all salesy. Cole seem to get the balance right by just dropping these offers in occasionally.

Site updates
If you have new features/web content you want to draw attention to, why not publicize through Twitter:

Check out our new Profile page! Photos of our staff, stores and more! Had it created for just 100 bucks. Interested in who? Let me know. (Read Tweet)

Again, not the most riveting content to completely fill a Twitter channel, but useful information on occasion.

Promote promoters
Thank your evangelists and those who sing your praises. Use Twitter to keep the glow warm:

@nancybroden Hi Nancy! Thanks for the tweets about our recycling, and for spreading the work. Appreciate it! Rick (Read Tweet)

Twitter is a great tool for knowing who your supporters are, and engaging them in conversation. Use tools like Twitter to build up relations with your strongest advocates. You can also use these groups for testing new products or obtaining market intelligence.

Be personal
As you can see, all the above posts are signed off ‘Rick’. This imbues the channel with a personal feel. It’s Rick from Cole Hardware who is speaking, not a faceless monolith.

Promote your social networking
Cole has done a great job of promoting Twitter (and Facebook too) through its offline shopping experience. In this case an ad on the bottom of the receipt alerted me to its Twitter channel. If you are putting effort into Tweeting, don’t hide under a bushel. Look at the points where you talk to customers (and other constituents) and let them know they can converse with you through Twitter and other channels.

Even though Cole Hardware have only recently ventured onto Twitter, they already seem to have a strong grasp of how they can use the medium to add value to their customers’ experience. I look forward to watching this channel evolve and to see how Twitter becomes more pervasive in our lives.

So, Twitter recently announced that it is going to roll the popular retweeting service (a way of forwarding Tweets around originally developed by Twitter users, not the company) into the core Twitter application and its API.

Great news for all us Twitter nerds out there, but rather than issuing a press release for this announcement, Twitter decided to use its blog. You can find the full post here including this neat little image explaining the feature:

So much less stuffy than a press release – it even reads like it’s been written by a human. Bizarre.

Coincidentally, this week at SES San Jose, Beth Murphy, Sr. Director of Marketing & Communications at Digg stated that the popular news aggregator uses a blog for all their press releases. For instance, when they announced their new ad platform, the blog was the medium of choice, and once again, rather than a dense page of text, they showed as well as telling:

Is the idea of the blog announcement restricted to the uber-trendy social media apps who live to break the mold?

Not quite.

The mighty Google has been using its blogs for major announcements for some time. You could say this isn’t surprising given that they own the Blogger platform. You can see the announcement for Google Chrome OS here. This release is a bit more sedate than the earlier release for the Google Chrome Browser which included a nifty cartoon:

A key advantage to using a blog for posting releases is that the medium is perfectly suited to attract other bloggers. Blog releases can have trackbacks, pings and RSS feeds: the nifty gadgets that hold the blogosphere together. In addition, you also have the option to sew a bunch of social features into the pages, allowing visitors to instantly pass the news on via Twitter, Facebook or other social networks du jour.

So, all well and good, but do the press like it? After all, without getting into a debate on the demise of the traditional print media, that’s still the coverage most execs and PR managers are looking for. In some ways a blog post can work better than a press release: there’s still a certain cachet around information that appears on a blog. Getting back to that straightforward Google Chrome OS release, the BBC kicked off an opinion piece on the matter with this sentence:

It’s a few hours since Google used its company blog to announce its entry into the operating systems market, and already opinion is strongly divided.

Somehow, the fact that it appeared on a blog has more weight and authenticity than the humble press release (maybe a question of voice?) and gets woven into the story.

Tips on using a blog to release announcements

• Use relevant images (and other media) as much as possible to get your point across
• Consider whether or not you want comments to enabled for these posts (interestingly, all the above announcements have comments disabled)
• Remember search engine optimization: make sure you prominently mention target keywords
• If you have a page that lists all the press releases on your site, make sure you add blog releases here too
• Publicize the RSS feed: a great way for interested parties to keep up with your releases
• Make the content easy to distribute by adding ‘share’ links to popular social networks
• In addition to posting to the blog, push the content across the traditional news wires too

So, the next time you have a release to put out, why not think about telling a more imaginative story on your blog?

IBM runs a summer intern program for MBA students and this year David McCoy had an assignment to look into open source viral marketing.

As part of his project, he looked into which are the key networks used by developers, and this is what he found:

(click image for full size version)

About 2 years ago, I was working in a lab populated almost entirely by developers and ran a straw poll among 50 or so of the team to see which sites they frequent most regularly (for work purposes – I didn’t care about their more nefarious browsing habits).

The list I came back with was almost identical, with Slashdot, The ServerSide and DevX being popular choices.

So if you do market to this community and ‘want to fish where the fish are’, pay close attention to these sites.

In what seems like a lifetime ago (about 4 years past), I worked search marketing on the agency side. As an account manager, I spent many a meeting reassuring hyperactive marketing execs that great Google rankings (well, this also included Yahoo and Microsoft back then) were just around the proverbial corner. With search, the grunt work happened up-front and once the content was put in place and scooped up by the mighty indexing engines, the rankings and associated traffic would largely drizzle down like snow in pre-war Narnia. You just had to wait for the reward.

This didn’t always reflect the way the campaigns were sold, mainly for the following reasons:

• The demand to offer short term results
• The desire of the agency to garner a long term maintenance contract
• The lack of a crystal ball to tell us exactly when the results would come in

The same can be true of marketing-led social media campaigns.

Like a merry-go-round that you continually tug with the same force while it slowly gathers momentum, social media campaigns can often need more than a year of development and careful nurturing before they come to fruition. You build a platform, seed content and promote the hell out of it, but meanwhile have to appease the executive whilst you act, measure, and patiently wait. Whether you’re setting up a blog, forum, social network, Twitter profile, YouTube channel or whatever, if you’re not one of the legendary few to achieve instant cult status, be prepared for the toil.

Then, after months or more, if you got your planning and strategy right upfront, the crowd gathers and the chatter grows. Now you have a successful social media campaign on your hands and you have graphs pointing in the right direction to show the powers-that-be.

How long does the glow hold?

Depending on the nature of the campaign, you may find yourself having to do little more to keep those page views coming. Not that I’d recommend it, but you can put a social network out to pasture and (almost in spite of yourselves) still see information grazers stumble by. In 2002 we froze an academic/business community we had spent two years building and it still continued to out-rank our corporate site on Google for our core target keywords for at least six years after.

So where’s the issue?

With all the attendant hype around social media at the moment, this activity is often bolted on to that lead generation machine within the marketing department that’s charged with building the sales pipeline. I’ve heard rightful skepticism within field marketing departments that claims over-hyped social media is heavily lubed in snake oil. I can definitely see where this point of view comes from. Marketing circles are abuzz with talk of how you’ll achieve greater results than ever before by using social media. The statement is expressed in the present, rather than future tense. I’ve seen networks shut down because of this.

Greatest treasures lie in the murkiest depths

On those grounds, should social media be foresaken? You can probably guess my response, but I think not. Social media marketing campaigns are at their most effective when they are stripped of the constraints of short-term lead generation. Most efforts work on creating Awareness and Thought Leadership:

(Note there are social media activities that go beyond the point of sale, but these are often driven by other departments, such as support.)

As you can see above, there is little crossover between social media and lead generation across the sales cycle. So measuring success based on lead generation metrics will show few results. Just like the PR function which is measured on metrics other than the prospects it brings to the pipe, so social media campaigns need to develop their own yardsticks – whether it be the added visibility or the kind of engagement metrics online news sites are measured against. This will feed the sales pipe, but indirectly, just like PR. Now for the icing on the cake: few other marketing initiatives show such on-going returns. With social media you’re often building an asset that will show little depreciation over time.

More tortoise than hare

Try and keep social media campaigns away from the demands of lead generation. Have goals but make sure the top brass aren’t expecting to see results in the same quarter. Chances are, they’ll be paltry. But keep in it for the long haul and assuming all the pieces come together, manifold results will head your way.