Does Twitter Make Your Business "Cool"?

Scobleizer posted a piece on the tale of two motorbike racers. One is atop the rankings, but the other has a better brand and embraces the idea of engaging people via Twitter. He even puts his Twitter page on his cycle. So who gets the fan love? Not the top ranked racer.

So Scoble poses the question: does adding Twitter to a brand make it cooler?


He thinks it does:


1. It sends a signal to the world that you want to hear from your customers.
2. It sends a signal to the world that you’ll use the latest technology to communicate with them. Many of whom are no longer using email.
3. It lets you feature your customers. The pictures on Lorenzo's bike are his fans on Twitter. Win-win.
4. It gives your team a way to communicate in one stream all the photos and stuff.
5. It lets you bridge audiences around the world. Look at how he mixes Spanish and English together on Tweets.

SEO Your Press Release

I sent out a press release a couple weeks ago and a blogger friend of mine shot back a note and suggested an alternative headline that he thought would have been more direct. "Yes," I replied, "but the search engines would have yawned at that one."

Press releases are now written for an online audience of news searchers, rather than just for journalists. Each press release needs to be crafted with the headline and body written to attract attention and click-throughs.

Here's a good article on it from BusinessWired.

"When you are talking about search engines and your press release, optimizing headlines means incorporating your most important keywords. Keywords being the words or phrases you’d like to rank well for in search engines. This is not a simple task, as your headline should also be compelling to your target audience and convey the content of the release.

Since search engines heavily factor page titles when determining rankings, optimizing the headline is the single most important task within press release optimization."

Finding the Right Blog

In my PR biz of publicizing mobile software developers, I discovered early on the high value of finding and developing relationships with bloggers who have a high-level interest in mobile tech. They're not journalists in the traditional sense, but the good ones have a niche following of people who would be a good audience for my clients.

Sometimes, the most popular blogs are really difficult to crack. They hear from PR people all the time -- and what makes me different than all those others? I need to do more than keep sending product news to them. I have to be a resource for them. I need to follow what they're interested in writing about, and engage them in dialogue about it even if it has absolutely nothing to do with any of my clients. If they response and find me a "wise ol' owl" who is fun and useful to talk to, I may have made a new friend in the blogger business and can become a trusted source.

How do you find good blogs? Start by searching your topic keyword(s) at Google Blog Search and Technorati. You may also want to add BlogPulse to that list for fun. Build a list of blogs, then look at each one to see if they have their own favorite blogs listed out for you!

Microblogs, such as Twitter, can be researched at TweetScan and Topsy. BlackBerry users can have Twitter hits on their keywords sent to their mobiles using an app called Twitterlerts.

If you want to follow what's being said about your company or brand in the social media sphere, try searching at SocialMention which will also pick up news from Twitter and blogs.