While some of my posts lately have been very philosophical or spiritual in nature, this one is highly tactical. While the popular micro-blogging platform Twitter was wildly popular in 2007 and early 2008, its inability to scale has caused many social media strategists to wonder if they should pursue other options. Here???s where it gets tricky. Micro-blogging is one tool of many, and it's generally not the most critical tool used in a brand's social media strategy. But if you're primary micro-blogging tool suddenly failed (taking all of your "followers" with it), you kind of have a problem.All of the other alternatives to Twitter, while generally reliable, (Friendfeed, Pownce, Plurk, Facebook???s newsfeed, Brightkite) are largely unproven and have fewer users. And there's one huge advantage to micro-blogging: immediacy. There???s been much talk about ???death of distance??? in marketing and social media podcasts lately. The phrase has been thrown around since three or four years ago, but in the micro-blogging medium, it becomes even more true. Remember the story about the kid from UC-Berkeley that send a one-word Twitter: "arrested"? A micro-blog also broke the news of the last Chinese earthquake.So, if you???re going to have a reliable micro-blogging strategy, you must:1. Pick A Rationale - Why are you using micro-blogs? Pick one of the following business objectives you???re trying to pursue. Put one person in charge of it. If you really feel like you have to engage multiple strategies using this single tool, then maybe it's time to look at your overall toolset. Here are a few examples of how brands are leveraging micro-blogs to meet real, everyday business objectives:a. Conversational Monitoring (Southwest Airlines) b. Provide Immediate Customer Service (Comcast)c. Create Brand Awareness (Mighty Leaf Tea) [disclosure: my client]d. Thought Leadership (Sun Microsystems)e. News Updates (Barack Obama)f. Find Good Hires (Intel) - I'm a little unsure about this last one, since Intel only has 35 followers, and I'm betting they're all recruiters...2. Diversify Your Platforms - Multiple services, same avatar. It's not very time-consuming to have a marketing intern replicate your brand's Twitter presence on five or ten other micro-blog platforms. Take the time to figure out how to get them all synced together, so that you can syndicate one message to all of the services at once. If it works for video (using TubeMogul), surely your intern can figure out how to link the Plurk and Friendfeed accounts. As our friends at Apple learned last Friday, having a single point of failure is "shitty"; don't be left looking "shitty" if and when Twitter ups and dies (like the whale depicted above - the Fail Whale, the icon that Twitter posts when a network overload occurs, has become synonymous with failures relating to problems with scale.If you can, have an intern make a .CSV list of your micro-blog followers, complete with their blogs (if they have them). Update this every 2-3 months. You never know when you'll need it for outreach. ;)3. Write Fast Escalation Paths - A reliable micro-blog strategy means nothing without an escalation path that routes issues sourced or conversations created from micro-blogs into the operational services of your company. Do you have a plan for who will react (and how) if a customer touches your turf on Twitter? Pounds your ass on Plurk? F's you up on Friendfeed? Get the picture? Get a plan. For example, "If it's a customer-service issue, we'll IM it to Janice in Customer Service, but if it's a marketing thing, we'll IM it to Jim." Reaction time is key here; you're shooting for 1-2 hours, tops.4. (In Big Orgs) De-Duplicate Your Micro-blog Strategy - Sun Microsystems actually has a public-facing wiki that details who uses micro-blogs within the organization, and what they write about. Just as you wouldn't have two people in your organization blogging about the exact same thing, don't bother having two people micro-blogging about the same thing.Of course, you can follow my (occasionally profane) micro-blog messages on Twitter, Brightkite or Friendfeed. To have me come to do a workshop on microblog strategy, reach out to me via my bio page.
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