Land Rover last week became the first national brand to execute a national Twitter campaign in a bid to promote its newest models' debuts at the New York Auto Show.

While brands as diverse as Southwest Airlines and Smirnoff vodka have been tweeting and accumulating followers for months, Land Rover attempted to use the burgeoning social-media platform in a more ambitious way, seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding.

While it's too early to know what sort of return Land Rover will receive for its efforts, "it cost us virtually nothing," said Keith Rhodes, VP and account director at WPP-owned direct-marketing firm Wunderman, which orchestrated the effort.
Mr. Rhodes said he was particularly encouraged by the Twitter-fueled traffic to a blog post he wrote about Land Rover's initiative. Posts on his site typically draw about 30 views; this one grabbed more than 200,000 views.

Land Rover is not likely to remain the only national marketer doing this for long, said James Eliason, CEO of Twittad, the Des Moines-based "social-media affinity network" Wunderman tapped to boost Land Rover's launch.

Mr. Eliason said the next national effort using Twittad's roster of 4,500 Tweeters, whom it pays to post on topics and brand their profile pages, with nearly 5 million followers, will be for Elations, a glucosamine-enhanced beverage from the makers of Sunny Delight targeted at women over 40.

Twitter machine
All told, the Land Rover effort was Twittered to more than 300,000 followers, Mr. Eliason said. Twittad used 15 different Tweeters with at least 5,000 followers, although the majority had between 2,000 and 4,000 followers.

Most won't get rich doing this anytime soon. One paid Tweeter, willconley777, wrote on his blog that he was paid $2.50 for letting Land Rover sponsor his profile page for seven days. Mr. Conley has 1,160 followers. Still, for those few Twitter users with huge reach, real money might one day be possible. The most-followed Land Rover campaign participant, queenoftheclick, boasts nearly 25,000 followers and was paid an amount "in the hundreds" for her participation, Mr. Eliason said.

Other larger-scale marketers are also eyeing Twittad, which is in talks with Sears.

The appeal to marketers is obvious: It's a cheap way to reach people through their trusted contacts. And Twittad's technology is able to sort its users by geography, demographics and interests, which can both lead to more targeted appeals and, perhaps, prevent Twitter users from feeling under siege by advertisers, a major concern.

"We were worried it would be considered spam, but we didn't get a single complaint [about Land Rover]," Mr. Eliason said. "What that tells me is that our connectors have influence."

Less clear is whether the model is sustainable. Mr. Eliason, who launched Twittad eight months ago, said he expects it to break even by the end of its first year. He said he has contacted Twitter about a revenue-sharing agreement but has yet to hear back.

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In an interesting light, Pizza Hut is hunting for a college student to spend the summer months as a member of the PR team in charge of tweeting about new developments at the restaurant chain. I wish when I was in college looking for an internship something like this existed.

The company is advertising for students to apply for the 10-12 week long "twinternship," based in its headquarters in Dallas.

Duties include:

• Collect and share insights and experiences while working for Pizza Hut through social and interactive media: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, New and emerging media
• Twintern will be given unprecedented access to marketing meetings, brainstorm sessions, ad shoots and special events
• Monitor social media for pop culture news, off-the-wall stories or anything else quirky and fun that he or she thinks would be of interest to loyal Pizza Hut fans.
• Chronicle experience through video; edit and post to selected media
• Conduct media outreach for PR programs
• Assist with execution of national PR programs

With Twitter-use growing exponentially in 2009, brands are trying to work out how to best use the service to promote themselves, and monitor what is being said about them online.

Earlier this month Amazon experienced the power of the Twittersphere when rumours spread far and wide that it had adopted an anti-gay policy by removing thousands of books from its main search and best-seller rankings.

It emerged that there was no such policy and that the problem had been caused by a classification error, but not before hundreds of thousands of mentions of the term "amazonfail" had spread across the World Wide Web.

To apply for the twinternship

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon - from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.



Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.



The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

Keep an eye out for the March U.S. Twitter data, which should be available later this week. An early peek at the data suggests it’s going to be another HUGE month for the increasingly popular site. Follow comScore on Twitter and be the first to find out how the site did! You can also follow comScore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni on Twitter to hear his thoughts and insights on the digital media industry at large.

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Facebook’s recent move to make Facebook pages similar to user profiles (in-terms of interactivity) is drawing attention from mainstream publishers and marketers at top brands. New publishing features on Facebook are being used by brands like Coca-Cola, and publishers such as Fortune Magazine and The New York Times, in an effort to become part of the new Facebook stream. The pages will also serve as landing pages for brands on Facebook, which they can promote and measure traffic to using Facebook Advertising.

Here's 5 Tips for marketers utilizing these new pages.

#1 Post updates frequently: Twitter rules now apply, and frequency of status updates must be high in order to stand out with your fans in the Facebook stream. In fact, given the scale of Facebook, it’s likely that we will see the best Twitter brands: Jet Blue, Ford, Comcast, Home Depot, Zappos and their handlers making a strong play for Facebook mind-share. In order to compete, posts must be frequent and interesting.

#2 Take advantage of Facebook's Advertising: Now that you can interact with current and prospective customers on Facebook, bring people to your page. Team your page effort on Facebook with a small Facebook advertising campaign. While the Twitter community shuns ads, Facebook users are used to them. If they can add value and interest them in comming over to the new Facebook page - you win.

#3 Watch Coca-Cola: While brands like Jet Blue and Ford have mastered Twitter, Coca-Cola has mastered Facebook. Watch how they improve their brand page with the new features. They'll give you a good idea where you should take your page and what you should be doing to grow its following.

#4 Use Video: You can't use video with Twitter (Outside of posting a link to it). Use Facebook as a new portal for videos. Nielsen’s recent report on social networks noted that Facebook users spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on the site per-month; the highest average time per-person amongst the 75 most popular brands online. Utilize the time they are engaging with the site to get branded content in front of them.

#5 Get your employees involved in word-of-mouth marketing of the page: Before you start promoting the page, make sure you have your employees as fans. Encourage them to dive into the conversations and add to the thriving community.

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Twitter’s popularity has skyrocketed in the recent months. Usage statistics states that most people who use Twitter interact with the application via the web rather than a third-party client such as TweetDeck or twitterfeed.

Twitter’s web interface is simple and intuitive but lacks a few features that can make it much better. In this article, you’ll read about 10 excellent user interface features that can enhance the Twitter web experience.

1. Enable grouping of friends and followers

Figure 1 shows tabs that you can use to quickly see tweets in a particular group.

Twitter’s increasing popularity has gotten many people on board and using the web application. With the growing number of active users comes the need for following more people.

The ability to create groups (or categories) of Twitter users that you follow can reduce the noise in your Twitter feed and can help you immediately see updates from particular groups of users.

For example, having a group for "co-workers" or "local tweeters" can help you quickly see what your co-workers are saying or find up-to-the-minute information on local events such as traffic accidents.

2. Auto Complete in Tweets

Figure 2 shows an auto complete dialog box appears when you type the @ symbol.

Auto complete is an interaction design pattern that involves displaying a list of suggestions as the user types in text. Auto complete can speed up the process of sending a tweet directed to a particular user using the @username format.

It will also help in times where you’re having trouble spelling someone’s username.

Another application of the auto complete feature is for suggesting #hashtags (keywords associated with a tweet) to make keyword-tagging of tweets easier.

3. Text links in tweets

With a 140 character limit, it’s often difficult to have links in a tweet without robbing yourself out of precious characters. By allowing users to tweet hyperlinked text, not only will it give them a little bit more room for including additional characters, but will also make Twitter feeds look cleaner.

4. Tweets-threading

Twitter is a great source of information and is a wonderful forum for discussing various topics. Unfortunately, the current user interface doesn’t allow you to easily view a conversation between two or more people.

Figure 3 show how threaded comments could look.

Coupled with the "reply to" feature in the current user interface, threaded tweets can give users the chance to participate in (or follow along with) conversations taking place in several Twitter feeds.

Threaded tweets can also serve as a means for people to find other Twitter users that are interested in similar subjects of conversation.

5. Allow Tweets directed to a group of people ("group tweet")

Figure 4 shows a possible syntax for tweets directed to a group of users using a double @ synax.

With companies and communities joining in on the fun, the ability to tweet to a group of Twitter users offers a convenient way of specifically targeting a set of people. For example, if you wanted to tweet to your co-workers, the syntax could be:

@@friends I'll be a little late for our lunch date, start ordering without me.

The double @ serves to differentiate a tweet directed to a single user from one that’s directed to a group of users.

6. Display meta data through hover tooltips

A tooltip is an effective graphical user interface element that allows users to view more information when they hover or click on a text or object of interest without having to leave the current web page. They enable information-gathering with fewer clicks and fewer pages to visit.

One way tooltips can be helpful is in seeing the bio information of a Twitter user when you hover over their username on your Twitter feed. If you see a username mentioned in an interesting Twitter update, simply hover over the name to see more information about the user that was mentioned.

7. Use the sidebar more effectively to display information

Figure 5 shows a "Recent @Replies" and "Popular #hashtags" section on the side bar.

Twitter can utilize the right sidebar more effectively by showing relevant information and statistics. For example, a "Most Recent Replies" section or a "Most Used #hashtags" section can be very helpful in showcasing the latest activities and the hottest topics.

8. Add a page that displays tweets mentioning your username


Twitter users (me included) like seeing their names mentioned. Currently, only @replies (tweets that begin with @username) can be seen in the @Replies page. A nice optional feature would be to have a page that lists tweets where your username is mentioned or where a particular tweet of yours is re-tweeted (example: "RT @username").

A less self-centered benefit for this feature is the opportunity to find people who are interested in what you have to say, enough that they update their own Twitter feed with a tweet of yours, or to see what types of your tweets are popular amongst people who follow you.

9. Highlight specific users, deemphasize others in feed

Figure 6 shows the first tweet as being highlighted, and the second tweet being deemphasized. The third tweet is how tweets normally look like in the current interface.

Users who follow many people run into the trouble of Twitter feed overload where there’s just too much going on and too many tweets to read. The ability to mark favorite Twitter users, as well as deemphasize users that you don’t care much about (but still want to follow for some reason), can give users better visual queues on what to pay attention to first when perusing one’s Twitter feed.

10. Add a Built-in URL shortener


With Twitter’s current user interface, hyperlinks are counted towards your 140 character count limit even if it gets reduced in length by a URL-shortening service like TinyURL.com after you hit the "Update" button.

One way to allow users to enter more text - without having to go to another website just to shorten URL’s - is to have a built-in URL-shortening feature. This would not only save user’s some time, but also eliminates the need to rely on other websites to perform an action that should really be handled within the system.

Read the story here.

As technology advances, we have found ourselves to adapt our flirting accordingly to our online lives. I remember when Facebook enabled poking and it was the next big thing. I would poke people for the hell of it not thinking it was "flirting." Luckily, The Frisky has come to the rescue and has compiled the steps to flirting online successfully. I've also included a hilarious video of a Facebook parody of ehamony.com. Now go on and get your mac on!

Miller High Life's one-second Super Bowl ads that weren't created a sales bump that definitely was.

Sales of High Life popped 8.6% during the week after the Super Bowl vs. the same period a year earlier, and they were up nearly 5% during the week before the game, according to ACNielsen.

The contrast between those numbers and the generally incremental gains the brand has been posting in recent months makes it clear that the hubbub surrounding the brewer's one-second Super Bowl ads drove the surge. Not bad, considering the ads didn't even run in many large markets -- including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles -- because NBC directed its owned and operated stations not to run them.
"One of the big things for us [in making the ads] was that we thought we could sell more beer," said High Life Brand Manager Kevin Oglesby. "We definitely sold more beer."

Miller announced plans to air the ads -- and placed a bunch of them online -- on Jan. 20. The spots' inherent critique of spending so lavishly on advertising in a recession -- "Paying $3 million for a 30-second commercial makes as much sense as putting sauerkraut on a donut," a promotional website said -- drew national notice, including coverage in USA Today and other major media outlets.

Not a jab?
Many observers naturally assumed that barb was aimed at Miller's traditional foil, Anheuser-Busch, which boasted 4 minutes and 30 seconds of ad time during the game. But Miller executives insist the ads were merely an attempt to broadcast the brand's value-oriented sensibility and not a shot at A-B or anyone else.

NBC, however, wasn't buying it. The Super Bowl network apparently viewed the ads as disparaging to advertisers willing to pay up for the game during a year when fewer were and directed its owned and operated affiliates not to run the commercials, which were set to run via spot buys all over the country. (A-B is the official malt-beverage sponsor of the Super Bowl broadcast and, as such, is the only beer advertiser allowed to make national buys during the game.)

As a result, millions of fans in major markets missed seeing the ads they'd read about beforehand. But that development doesn't seem to have hurt sales, considering the 8.6% gain in the week following the Super Bowl was among the highest the brand has registered in two years, according to Nielsen.

The one-second ad still managed to run in more than 100 markets nationwide. Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad featured the populist beer-truck driver played by actor Windell Middlebrooks quickly shouting the words "High Life."

Mr. Middlebrooks' character first appeared in 2007 spots created by High Life's former agency, Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. In those, he was seen confiscating the brand from French bistros and gourmet grocers. Crispin lost the account when it resigned the Miller business later that year, but Saatchi kept Mr. Middlebrooks and evolved the character further. In one recent spot, he barges into a ballpark luxury suite, demands to know what the score is and confiscates the beer after none of the clueless suits in the suite can tell him.

High Life sales, which fell four straight years until the introduction of the campaign, have been generally stronger since. "Clearly the campaign is a cornerstone in this turnaround," Mr. Oglesby said. "Our positioning rings even more true right now in consumers' minds."

Read the story here.