The highlights are embedded below:

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/consumers-interact-facebook

Since Twitter isn’t a perfect fit for every business, this article is meant to quickly guide you through two key questions and, if nothing else, get you thinking about it’s proper place in your customer service and marketing efforts.

Is it right for my business?

Twitter is all about influence, communication, and information; business is about providing a service or product in a way that makes your customers’ lives better. All businesses need influence (ex. brand perception) to succeed; the question becomes one of whether or not Twitter is a channel through which you should develop and nurture the influence, i.e. the relationship, you have with your customers.

Consider the following:

• Are current and potential customers on Twitter?
• What value can you add to your customers through your tweets?

If your customers are active on Twitter, it’s an optimal way to nurture your relationship with them through timely communication, product and news updates, promotional deals, and customer service. In particular, if you are a consumer-facing brand, it is a valuable tool to find out what people are saying about your products and their experiences with your company. Then you can directly (and publicly) address any concerns or aggregate opinions to make your products and services better, provided you’re tuned in to what they’re saying.

As a consumer, I’ve had some very valuable and poignant experiences with brands I interact with that greatly affected my perception of them. A few examples: I’ve gotten free products by checking Twitter feeds while in close proximity to retail locations, had convenient and timely customer service responses to complaints I’ve tweeted, and received valuable updates on services that greatly reduced personal inconvenience and irritation.

Many consumers find similar value in following brands they use on Twitter. If those brands had not been tuned in or actively adding value via content and promotions, my, and other consumers’ perceptions would not have been positively affected (and in some cases, perceptions may have been damaged).

How should I use it?

Assuming you can add value to your customers’ experience, you will want to carefully consider how to manage this channel of communication. As you opt into the Twitter-sphere, make sure you are using it in a way that reflects your brand well.

Consider:

• The language and communication style used in tweets
• Monitoring your feed as well as keywords that pertain to your industry and brand
• Providing content that is valuable and relevant to your followers
• How to keep customer service responses and answers to inquiries timely and consistent

Being purposeful and attentive to this growing communication channel, you can continue to build influence and positively affect your brand perception online.

More helpful resources:

• Top 10 Companies on Twitter according to CNBC
• Top Twitter tips by Forbes

Diligence: hire the right team.

Finding the right team is challenging, but very possible. The right AMA must be an optimum fit for your brand, industry, and organization. Their output and expertise must match your needs, and most importantly, you have to be able to afford them. Good agencies often come at a premium; however, the talent and expertise will outweigh any extra funds spent via future ROI.

Focus your energy on finding the agency that takes ownership of your vision and has the talent (strategic & creative) to maximize your resources while building your brand. A few key “right agency” characteristics include:

1. Has integrity and character that are apparent; i.e. “go with your gut”.
2. Takes ownership of your goals and can translate them into quality campaign strategies and creative outputs.
3. Has a proven track record of results and satisfied clients.
4. Displays cutting edge creativity to apply time-tested brand building principles.
5. Has ample capacity to serve you well; i.e. not too big, not too small.

Transparency: Be honest with them and yourself.

You decided to change or augment your marketing & advertising efforts for an explicit reason: to build your organization, to go a different direction, or as an effort to regain market share from a competitor. These reasons are healthy strings that are attached to any agency relationship you engage in, therefore, they should be articulated clearly with expectations succinctly defined.

Sharing the back story with your agency will increase their focus on your true motivations, anxieties, and goals while allowing them to decipher the best use of your resources and time to bring about appropriate results.

Plan well: don’t underspend.

Steady results take time & resources. Speaking from an agency’s perspective, there’s nothing more challenging than trying to pull a solid returns with a one-drop mailer campaign mixed with a two day 30-second spot run on the local public access channel. In many cases, you may be better off  taking your marketing budget and burning it for warmth!

On the other side of the spectrum, the same marketing dollars allocated alongside ample resources have the potential to boost results in tangible ways:

1. Allow for ample impressions and move your audience beyond the action threshold.
2. Get favorable media placement and generate better results.
3. Increase positive message retention through adequate campaign longevity and persistence.
4. Increase media rate & placement negotiating leverage.

All of the above are likely results of allocating the proper resources and can help ensure that your ROI goals are not short-circuited.

Summary

Your marketing & advertising agency contains talented people that know how to think strategically and create inspired work on your behalf. As a decision maker or manager in your organization, your challenge is to produce as many results as you can with the resources at your immediate disposal. By applying these tips, you should see a significant change for the better in your agency’s output, and accomplish your organizational objectives more efficiently and effectively.

At EMG, Ryan manages a team of creative professionals and web developers to accomplish complex goals that span the latest web technologies. His technical experience ranges full scale Content Management System integration and database architecture to dynamic development and accessibility.

Ryan launched his career as an Energy Conservation Manager for the State of Washington where he managed retro-commissioning and energy reduction projects; he has also received the distinguished LEED accreditation.

Ryan holds a BA in Business Management and Marketing from the University of Washington.

He lives in Palm Desert, CA with his wife.

One of Evan’s key qualities is his ability to bring the client’s unique vision into each individual project he produces. Evan has received Honorable Mention for The Department of Homeland Security Fire Arms Safety Training Video as well as recent recognition for his award winning web design “FUZE Chocolate for CysticFibrosis” hosted by CocaCola’s FUZE .

His past experience encompasses all facets of website development, including strategy, management (both employees and projects), financial planning, web design, programming and baseline search engine optimization (SEO).

Prior to joining EMG, Ron founded PlanJam.com, a activity planning web application that garnered reviews from some of the world’s most recognized tech voices.

Ron graduated from University of Southern California’s Business Administration program in 2006.

As an internationally recognized social media expert, Shaun has over 12 years of online marketing and search engine optimization with more than 5 years working with social media.

Shaun was also named as one of Fast Company’s “Most Influential People Online” in 2010.

Prior to joining EMG, Megan was Director of Program Development for Starwood Vacation Ownership where she built and led a team of talented print and interactive copywriters as well as a regionalized account management team. She was responsible for crafting engaging copy, while maintaining consistency with multiple brands across all applications company wide. In addition, she redefined process and oversaw streamlined program production resulting in substantial improvements to the bottom line. This role was created for Megan’s unique ability to collaborate with marketing leaders and seamlessly translate strategy into creative direction.

Megan has been a copywriter for Marriott Vacation Club International, Marketing Manager for Fripp Island Resort in Beaufort, South Carolina; and Sr. Copywriter/Account Executive for a regional advertising agency in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She has worked with brands such as Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, Sheraton, Westin, Safeway, Winn-Dixie, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Tyson Foods, Cargill Foods and Cobb-Vantress.

Megan holds a BS in Journalism, Ad/PR from the University of Arkansas. She now lives in Orlando, Florida with her husband Steve and their daughter Peyton.

With the variety of technologies being used to display web marketing assets (websites, landing pages, ads, email campaigns, etc) to customers, presentational coding best practices are becoming impossible to ignore. The web browser, operating system, and hardware landscape is an ever evolving mush of disparate technologies that will always share one unavoidable commonality: the internet.

Faced by a client or project that requires web assets, it’s up to marketing professionals to take real business objectives and translate them into a creative/technological solution that will wear well over time and provide the largest return on each marketing dollar. While non-validated code may look and function very similarly to a validated site, the devil is in the details, along with those last drops of ROI.

Establishing proper code-work as a priority in the beginning of a campaign maneuver ensures decreased scaling costs while maximizing present-effort punch.

There are at least four main areas to consider in order to achieve maximum effectiveness of your web assets in the marketplace:

1. Validate Your Code

Validated XHTML and CSS just work better. By spending the time and money to get your team up to par on XHTML/CSS validation, you guarantee that your customer’s web assets will render correctly 99.9% of the time. As one Twitter user (@Zeldman) states, “[The] Client who saves $5,000 buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25,000 on [an] SEO consultant to compensate”. Finally, validation ensures proper use of often overlooked HTML attributes and tags. The best example is the “alt” attribute of the HTML image tag; this attribute is often excluded and the result is below optimal search performance.

2. Perform Basic Search Engine Optimization

In its basic form, SEO practices include proper use of HTML meta-tags, header tags, image ALT attributes, etc. Though the ongoing practice of SEO is aimed at optimizing over a certain set of key words or phrases, a properly coded site must at least use HTML tags appropriately as a starting point for any potential long-term SEO. Baseline SEO attentiveness may be the difference between being found in a targeted search, or being lost among hundreds of pages of search clutter.

3. Ensure Graceful Degradation of Code

What happens if your user’s browser doesn’t allow Javascript or Flash? Worse yet, what happens if the in-office network hasn’t allowed updates to Internet Explorer for three years and all employees are forced to use the dreaded IE6? Graceful degradation takes into account these possibilities and provides graceful fallback solutions that still allow your customer’s website to display properly, with only minor losses of animation or functionality.

4. Use Flash Carefully

Flash’s viability as a valuable web authoring tool is under active and heavy debate. Proponents argue that it allows a richer experience with security, stability, and light-weight code while opponents criticize its lack of SEO capabilities (though certain HTML measures can be taken to avoid this issue) and mobile device unfriendliness. With the growing popularity of iPhones and iPads, web professionals are being forced to rethink the way websites are built, and unfortunately for Adobe, Flash is not penciled to be supported on either device (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/iphone-developer-policy/). Flash has its irreplaceable place as a web technology, but audience and medium should be carefully considered when choosing whether or not to include it in your online marketing efforts.

When my team is approached with a project, our first objective is to take a step back and consider the technological possibilities, scope and scale potential, and design implications. Only after careful technical mapping and planning can the creative process begin. This ensures that clients get beautiful execution throughout, that we can build upon easily as their business grows (which, of course, is the objective of all marketing…).

The scope of this discussion is limited to the code that is rendered by customer’s browsers. Though the presentation of online assets (HTML/CSS) is just one piece of a well-oiled marketing campaign or online brand presence, if done properly it will set a foundation for a stronger, more scalable campaign that serves to maximize returns on marketing dollars spent.