Search Marketing Sage

The keynote of the morning, Craig Newmark, Founder, craigslist and moderator Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor & Executive Editor Online, The Wall Street Journal kept the morning rolling with some humor and advice. The main topic was how micro-blogging powers communities, and the benefits for business, government and society. However, some time was spent talking about Newmark’s interesting Twitter feed and his interest for white pigeons.  Check out his Twitter stream to see what I’m talking about…

“Social media by its nature gets people to work together.” You need management buy in, however.  And, “you need someone at the top to say free the nerds.”

Recently featured in Wired magazine, Craig Newmark is known for customer service.  He said customer service is public service if done in good conscience. Social media helps us accomplish customer service with direct feedback.  Newmark thinks we all need our own publishing channels.  So go ahead and get a blog or Twitter account to share your thoughts and spread insights.

When speaking about the government, the White House blog and Twitter account came up.  Newmark said the White House is being way more open and honest with these channels than expected.  As the White House is doing, brands should be on Twitter for another method of contact.  A suggestion from him was to listen to feedback and then do something about it, which is the history of craigslist from day one.  With the success of craigslist, I think it would be silly to not listen to this advice.

By now, you may have heard the news broke yesterday that Bing and Google will list Tweets from Twitter.  Newmark thinks this is mostly a good thing, but the bad side is that those tweets will be part of a person’s permanent record.  So now, more than ever, think about what you tweet.

According to a recent AdAge article, Twitter may be evolving and picking up some characteristics from e-mail marketing along the way.  Zephrin Lasker suggests that if Twitter takes into consideration what made e-mail marketing successful, the microblogging service may prove its $100 million investment and give marketers what they really want: real results.

Image by FG@flickr.com via Flickr

Like e-mail campaigns, it’s critical to find the right people to share your message with on Twitter.  With the creation of Twitter lists, it may become easier to target those you’d like to follow.  The goal being, those same people will follow you back — and they will if they think your messages are valid.

Tools like TweepML exists that allow users to find people that tweet about their favorite topics and follow them in bulk.  The integration of Twitter lists will take a similar technology and embed it within Twitter itself.  For exploration and learning, these lists could prove to be very useful.  For marketers, it means reaching an entire audience with a few clicks.