In the last days I have been considering the various evolutions of Twitter and I had some time to monitor the changes that those brought not only to companies that need to update their clients, but also to people and how they tend to use those features to save time and also to use them to get the best for their Branding Efforts.

Twitter introduced the List feature that is important in a way to categorize your friends for themes or any way you want it. like every person we own something that distinguish ourself from others (like a brand) and this idea can be categorized by people. Lists means that you can can put followers in more than a basket in a way to monitor their stream in the most effective way possible. For the ones of you that haven’t tried it at the moment, you can create public or private lists that I have to say are really important also for Public Relations and Brand Management.

On the Personal Branding monitoring, when you look the list that people put you in you can see a lot about the reputation that you have for them, and how your actions managed to create your personal brand. Looking for example I can see that some people insert (I feel honored about) in lists like Marketing and SEO (that is what I do for a living) and also in categories more personal like Suggested or Friends, this mean to me that I’m considered in a good way on my professional and personal side.

This is anyway only the surface of the Brand Monitoring, because we can use the same system of PageRank to understand the real value of our mention on that list. If you are insert on a list named SEO from a person that does SEO full time (and that is listed in other SEO lists), means that your effort in becoming a SEO are well spent, because he knows your value that is proven by his knowledge. The same happens for every other type of category that you want to be insert into, you have to monitor not only the lists you are into, but also the lists that the people list you are inside.

On Personal Relations, I will bring a personal example, I have a private list on twitter, and it’s called “Best Buddies” and this is a list of people that I worked or studied together, that I shared a lot with and I talk to them regularly, doesn’t matter if they are pro or not, they are people that i can call friends. Why this list is private? Simple for PR reasons. I don’t want that people look in this list and feel bad because they are not inside, some of them can take it as a personal thing, even if they know the reason. This is in my opinion a good opportunity to use private lists, so that you can monitor the people close to you and that you share things with and in the same way not make anyone feel bad.

As can be seen there is a lot that can be done with the right use of lists (and also ranking products that can be developed), there is just to understand what the goals are and which are the people that in your opinion are worth to follow to persuade your branding goal.

1 Comment »

There is no doubt that Mobile Marketing is growing and that the new technologies are giving to business some new possibilities, giving the possibility to every user to share ideas and opinions with others via a deeply linked internet environment.
In those days I had the possibility to play after some time this iPhone App called “Flight Control” available here on iTunes. This application is very famous and became viral for its innovative gameplay and possibility to challenge friends.

FireMint, the company that created this game managed to make a lot of revenue from this game, but most important managed to embed in the further versions of the game some more features that managed to keep up the user interest in this application, and recently by integrating social media in a way to challenge other people.

Social Application
This application today is able to share the users’s score on a web site and display them on a ladder where you can see how, who nearby your position, are doing with the same game. This is important because you can meet new people with the same interest on the game, challenge them in an ability contest, and see if your actual friends are playing with that. Other important feature that the company created is to merge those results with a Facebook application, where users can link their Facebook profile to their Flight Control profile and manage to create a stronger link between your actual friends. By making a deeper connections and reference between the real person profile (Facebook) and the gaming person profile (Flight Control), the company manages to ignite a deeper psychological aspect of friendship, because it make discover to friends more affinities between them, creating in this way the possibility to create a deeper link. This means also creating the bases for a great buzz marketing and word of mouth dynamic.

Corporate Responsibility
This application inside one of the last versions insert a new map, that is the Australian Outbacks, and they managed to use this update in a way to create a perception of Corporate Responsibility for the brand. On their Blog post it’s written on how they decided to implement the map with the idea of helping the Royal Flying Doctor Service. This map not only gives a new type of game to the user, but gives him consciousness of some reality that in other ways e would never have found.

This game and company made some great marketing experiences in a way to create an addicting product that creates a great word of mouth and also create a thematic responsible corporate image. This application is pure marketing at the web level.

No Comments »