Search Marketing Sage

The next session I attended on Monday was “Experts on PR and Twitter”. I was eager to hear how PR experts are using Twitter today. Some good points overall.

Sean Jackson

First up was Sean Jackson of Ecordia on building PR authority on Twitter. Sean covered the four things you need to be successful in PR — regardless of the medium:

• Clarify
• Monitor
• Engage
• Advocate

Clarify

Twitter does have some limitations. For instance, 10% of people on Twitter account for 90% of all tweets. 78% of the conversations are conversational in nature or babble. Finally, 29% of businesses use Twitter to find business-related info, although it ranked tenth on a list of media used by businesses.

Our first afternoon session was “Killer Twitter Apps, Services and API Trends”. This was a really fascinating session, and I truly couldn’t take notes fast enough. Several apps developers presented on this panel and commented on what is going on now with Twitter and what is coming soon.

Brian Breslin

Brian Breslin was the first speaker and covered some of his favorite Twitter apps. Within WordPress, he uses:

• TweetSuite
• Twitter Tools
• Disqus

He uses TwitBin and PowerTwitter as well. He recommended TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop for desktop tweeting. He also uses Twittercounter.com and Klout for measuring data and influence. SocialToo.com to weed out automated follows and TwitterMass.com allows you to find others similar to you and follow their followers.

Dan Zarrella

Next up was Dan Zarrella who covered retweet API trends. He said that Twitter is slowly rolling out a retweet option in the web interface (Project Retweet).

The next session of the day was Capitalizing on Twitter and the Microblogging Revolution. The session covered everything from case studies to tools.

Jon Henshaw

First up was Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools. Jon’s first question: Who are you on Twitter? Are you going to be a brand, an expert, what? What works best is being a real person. Set up a real profile… take the time to set it up.

With your initial engagement:

• Follow target groups
• Unfollow gently and randomly
• Maintain your ratio of followers to following
• Contribute and stay on topic
• Retweet for max ego boost (boosts ego for others — enables reciprocity)
• Find topics using Twitter search

Pubcon Vegas kicked off this morning with a keynote from Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh. Tony’s presentation was entitled “Delivering Happiness”.

Tony started out by running a pizza shop in college, and he met Zappos’ CFO back in college after the CFO, one of their best customers, was found selling Tony’s pizza by the slice on the side! Tony founded LinkExchange and ran it from 1996-98, and he eventually sold it to Microsoft for $265M. Why did he sell? He said that when the company got larger, the culture was lost. It was one thing they hadn’t considered much, and it suffered. After selling LinkExchange, he invested in several companies, one being Zappos.

Zappos has 1400 employees and is headquartered in Las Vegas. They consider themselves “powered by service” and see themselves as a service company that happens to sell clothing, shoes, etc. About 75% of their daily sales are from repeat customers. Last year they did $1B in gross sales. They rely on word of mouth marketing and focus marketing budget on making service better.

The first session I attended today was a panel of Twitter experts covering the latest information about how Twitter is being used and new developments and advice for how businesses can use Twitter.

Warren Whitlock

First up was Warren Whitlock who, while he had a “minimalized” presentation featuring mostly simple graphics, communicated a strong message about really focusing on listening and communicating with those that communicate with you. Warren is the author of the book Twitter Revolution.

Dan Zarrella

Next up was Dan Zarrella of Hubspot. Dan recently did some in depth research regarding how tweets get retweeted. Dan emphasized that retweets can help get you more followers, so there are some important things to know to get your tweets retweeted: