One of my goals this summer was to get more involved with Twitter and see how companies are using it. While I was researching the post about how a Wine Retailer is Using Twitter to reach a whole new audience I came across Rae Hoffman’s post titled “An Actual “Non Big Brand” Twitter Case Study”

Rae’s case study is about a  a BlackBerry related website called BBGeeks . BBGeeks has had a Twitter account for around eight months now and has grown from zero to over 500 followers in that time. For a web site targeting a very niche market, this is pretty impressive.

So how did BBGeeks do it: By implementing these nine steps:

1. One of the BBGeeks.com staff was assigned to become the voice of @bbgeeks on Twitter.

This is such an overlooked step, whether it is blogging or twittering. By making one person responsible for the content, not only do you have ownership of the content, but the site gets a consistent voice and message.

2. We decided that our goal should be for him to become a BlackBerry trouble shooter (.i.e. help people) first, promotional evangelist (i.e. drop links) for BBGeeks.com second.
3. The employee running @bbgeeks (to be clear, he is not dedicated to Twitter and spends about 30 minutes a day on it) was encouraged to also post off topic here and there and to join in the conversation with our followers and people we were following even if it wasn’t always BlackBerry related (i.e. we wanted him to get involved).
4. We participated in a group effort to post and cross promote guides on Twitter related tools and created a guide to TwitterBerry (the Twitter application for BlackBerry users).

This is a common theme amongst social social marketers. By being engaged in the community and helping people you can grown your brand without being too salesey.

5. We pimped the background with a more Twitter friendly design.

The design makes BBGeeks stand out from all the other BlackBerry accounts and help differentiate them to the user.

6. We decided not to have our posts auto tweet and instead decided to take the same approach with dropping links into Twitter that we did years ago with link requests – make it obvious that we were taking the time to do it personally.

Nothing turns people off faster than obvious spam. By taking a slower approach, BBGeeks was showing that were committed to the long run and were not looking to “crash and burn” BlackBerry users

7. Thanks to a tip from @graywolf, we learned about Summize (which was later bought by Twitter) and used it to find BlackBerry users (we’d search for “BlackBerry”, “8330? etc.). We’d follow those users and hope that they’d visit our Twitter homepage, see what a great resource we were, and follow us back. And even if they didn’t follow us back on first glance, we hoped we would catch their BlackBerry related questions by following them and earn their following if we could help solve it with an @reply.

Successful marketing is being pro-active. By reaching out to BlackBerry Twitter users, BBGeeks was able to offer them something that (customer support) that makes them different.

8. Completely of his own idea, the employee running @bbgeeks started doing small giveaways here and there of branded T-shirts and stickers to followers

It is amazing what people will do for a free t-shirt and it is another inexpensive way to interact with your community

9. We run occasional “twitter only” discounts at our software and accessories store

By concentrating on solving problems and building trust within the Twitter BlackBerry community, the members would be more responsive to a Twitter sales message rather being hit by sales posts every day.

What were the Results?

• BBGeeks now have 500+ people who want to hear what they have to say listening on Twitter – and they may not have found the site had it not been for that Twitter account and efforts.
• They receive several hundred visits to their site each month from Twitter
• BBGeeks is able to get instant feedback from our followers by using informal Twitter polls and keep our site going in the direction our readers want it to continue heading.
• They get tons of content ideas from the various questions and problems they see their followers experiencing.
• They were able to get into exclusive press conferences during their CTIA conference coverage and have also received promotion of things like their podcast as a result of people responding to guest requests on Twitter.

So that is two small companies Bin Ends and BBGeeks who are successfully using Twitter to promote and grow their business. What other successful Twitter stories have you heard?

Twitter uses are used top conveying their message in 140 characters  or less. Well now Blippr has taken the Twitter concept and applied it to reviews of book, games, music and movies.

No longer do you have to sift through lengthy reviews to find out what someone thought about the Dark Night move. Paring a review down to 160 characters and a rating really forces reviewers to get to the essential appeal or flaw of the movie being reviewed. For instance, do you really need to know anything more about The Dark Night than “Heath Ledger… Man, he was so different than Nicholson. Not cruel and funny, but disturbing and terrifying. A great movie, great story. Can’t miss it.”.

What I like about Blippr is that it will forward your Blipps to Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed (although the fact that it allows 20 characters more than Twitter means that overly-lengthy reviews will be shortened when they are translated into Tweets). In keeping with SMS culture, the four ratings are emoticons: =D, =), =|, or =(.

Also, similar to Twitter you can follow what your friends are Blipping, and update your “media status” of what you are reading, watching, playing, or listening to.

I admit it took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. I could not see why anyone was interested in what I was doing right now. I still struggle with the voyeuristic aspects of Twitter but a couple of new applications are helping me overcome my reluctance to using it.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about Twitter is a social network that lets you tell your friends what you are doing at any given time. It also lets you see what everyone else is up to. It’s a kind of worldwide bulletin board of tiny messages that form a huge mosaic of everyday activity.

My earlier reluctance to use Twitter was based on three things. Why would anyone care what I was doing, how do you track and monitor what other people are saying and how could a business use this. Some applications and experimentation have at least given me a better understanding of how Twitter can be useful from social media marketing perspective.

One of the usability issues I had with Twitter was how to monitor the ongoing conversations without having to keep logging into twitter. You can do this via your SMS on your phone but that could get really expensive as the number of your friends (followers in Tweet Speak) increases.

Then I heard about Twhirl . Twhirl is a desktop client for Twitter similar to IM that allows you to post short 140-character updates about what you are doing, as well as following your twitter friends and read all their updates, replies anyone sends to you, and direct messages to your account. You can also answer to another user by replying or sending him/her a private direct message. It is free and works on both the MAC and PC.

Then I heard about EasyTweets. EasyTweets is a new web-based tool that reminds me a bit of a traditional blogging platform, but is designed to manage your Twitter accounts. What I like about EasyTweets is that you can manage multiple Twitter accounts in one place, you can Schedule Tweets whenever you want  and you can RSS feeds and have them auto posted to your Twitter account. This last feature is great because not everyone why followers you on Twitter will read your blog. With EasyTweets all your followers are automatically notified that you have updated your blog.

So how can a company or brand use Twitter? Well Twitter has this search function called Twitter Search that allows you to see what people are saying about your company or brand in real-time.

“In the past, companies would hire a market research firm to understand their audience,” says Mike Hudack, CEO of Blip.tv, a New York-based video website in a recent USA Today interview. “Now we use Twitter to get the fastest, most honest research any company ever heard — the good, bad and ugly — and it doesn’t cost a cent.”

More and more companies like Zappos, Whole Foods and Comcast are using Twitter as a way to communicate with customers. Frank Eliason, a customer service manager for Comcast, spends his day communicating with Twitterers about the company — hoping to resolve issues. Comcast isn’t on Twitter to turn around the firm’s customer service perception issues but simply to “build better relationships with our customers,” he says.

Whole Foods, which started using Twitter in June, just wants to hear what people are saying about the company. “It’s amazing how many people say, ‘I’m off to Whole Foods for lunch,’ ” says Slayton Carter, Whole Foods’ online community development coordinator.

Zappos tested a new site, zeta.zappos.com, recently on Twitter, “and we were able to make some improvements based on the comments,” says Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Twitter has a lot more potential than I thought six months ago and I only see the service growing as more applications are built for it. If you are interested in following me on twitter you can follow me her.