Image: twittamentary.com

I first saw Twittamentary in Beijing at a Girls in Tech China event in May 2010, and the film has evolved considerably since then. Tan is currently on a ‘beta screening’ tour in the US and UK. Twittamentary itself was crowdsourced via Twitter: Tan traveled to the US in 2009, and with artist Geo Geller, rode the Greyhound across the US on the way to a Twitter conference, interacting with fellow Twitterati along the way. You won’t see many of Twitter’s suggested users in the film. Aston Kutchner isn’t in it and neither is Shaq. What you do get is an astonishing array of people: female truck drivers, the homeless woman that travels across the country with them to speak at the Twitter conference and who eventually find housing through Twitter, social media gurus, porn stars, actresses, activists, hungry customers and pizza franchise owners.

By focusing on users, the movie becomes an examination of the reasons people use Twitter. For many of them, it seems to be loneliness, and a longing to connect with others. The female trucker whose main companion is her dog (also on Twitter) uses it to keep touch with the world beyond the interstate, and campaigns through Twitter to end sexual abuse within that community. Porn star and sex worker Mika Tan is dating someone she met via Twitter (they first exchanged messages about shifts in the earth’s magnetic field and natural disasters) and hopes, rather wistfully, that he really is a nice guy. A woman whose close friend died suddenly just before they met keeps him in her life by using Twitter to communicate with his friends, family, and admirers of his artwork.

The Greyhound – perhaps the ultimate venue for surprising conversations with strangers before the advent of social media – is the perfect vehicle for the adventure. Stranded by a missed connection, a Twitter friend meets them at the bus station and offers to let them stay at his house (at the last minute the connection comes through). There’s a happenstance nature to the movie that reflects the tangential nature of the social web. People meet through friends, chance encounters create lasting bonds, and individuals who don’t at first glance seem to have much in common relate to each other.

There are lessons here for marketers as well. Social media users are all individuals with their own set of issues, hopes, and stories. People log on to Twitter because they want to interact, connect, and share. Listening and acknowledging goes a long way – forefront people’s stories, respond to their complaints. The movie features the famed Dominos franchise owner who crafted the video response to a hungry customer who complained via Twitter. The woman still speaks about it excitedly, not because it got her a free pizza (Dominos isn’t that good), but because her frustration was recognized. Which is a good reminder that your audience on Twitter isn’t just the users you interact with, it’s the vastly greater number of users who witness those interactions. At the end of the day, people log onto social networks for very human reasons – to share, to commiserate, to brag, and to feel part of something. Respect that, and make connection a core component of your Twitter strategy, whether it’s for marketing, CRM, or community management.

Twittamentary is worth watching even if you aren’t a heavy Twitter user. At the end of the day, internet marketing isn’t about certain tools or platforms, it’s about connecting with people. While some might see Twittamentary as a movie about a social network, it’s really a film about how people struggle to connect in the 21^st century, and often succeed in surprising and wonderful ways.

Find out more at the Twittamentary website or watch clips on YouTube

While we think these are all accurate assessments of ways Twitter can retool traditional advertising models, we hope that one thing missing from Morrissey’s musing makes it into the final rollout of the program.

GEO TAGGING!

Can Twitter send real-time foot traffic to your business?

As a search engine marketing company we see the high value and transaction rate of geography-driven searches. Combined with the real-time expectations of Twitter users , there could be a really great opportunity to connect people with the most relevant information, products and services for their immediate surroundings.

So when the Twitter Google Groups API Blog announced that there are big upgrades in the hopper for the geotagging segment of Twitter, we couldn’t help but cheer!

According to the Daily Galaxy, the new geo-features will supposedly let you “find  events, businesses, or even friends” in your immediate surrounding area using “human readable” information  (read: not the currently required Latitude and Longitude Line data coordinates from a device but simple text interface) and a linked tag of tweets in or around your current location.

With daily stories about Twitter bridging the geographic jump to offline – see how tweeting affected the real ground searches for earthquake victims in Chile and abducted San Diego teenager Chelsea King — and as more people rely on Twitter to inform them of  whats happening  in their adjacent blocks, marketers might be being handed a golden ticket.

Envisioning the Possibilties…

With a linkable geo-tag, local business could tweet about last-minute sales to nearby shoppers. An artist with an upcoming concert could offer free song downloads to local laptop users at a coffee shop. National brands can offer promotional codes targeted to geo-locations, see direct correlations in sales of their product with distributors, and take note of their geo strongholds. Geo-tagging twitter ads would be the digital equivalent of the street-corner, sandwich board campaign “This Way to the Open House –> “

Will it happen?

Well, for users to demand it would require the one-two combo of truly valuable, relevant information from advertisers within a non-invasive interface. It still remains to be seen if Twitter users will appreciate #ads flowed directly into their feeds, or if the message needs a new real estate space entirely.  Also, what will the specs be for ranking? Solely cost or will a user’s favorite advertisers get some sort of preferential treatment? This is where some sort of cross-partnership with a Twitter reader like Hoot Suite or Tweet Dek that allows a sub-stream to immediately popup when location is tweeted but doesn’t influence a users “Following” stream might be helpful.

As Twitter is expected to launch its new advertising platform later this month, fingers crossed that timing of this geo-tagging announcement is indication that it will feature prominently in their plans.

Lauren Salazar is a Social Media & SEO Strategist at Path Interactive, a NYC-based Search Engine & Social Media marketing firm.

Twitter should be a fun place to play and obsessing about your follower count can be very unhealthy, but that being said I think it would be prudent to provide a few tips on increasing your followers while staying “legitimate” and not spamming accounts like too many people often do.

Increase Twitter Follower Count to Get Valuable Real Followers: 4 Top Ways

Teach something: People are increasingly drawn to learning things from others. If you know any one thing well enough to talk about it, you should. Take to teaching on Twitter and see your follower count rising. Of course, it would mean that you dedicate some time to sharing some great information on twitter and you could learn how to do just that by following some Top Twitter users ( or power users) and pay attention to how they use Twitter.  The key here is not to become an expert in everything that is popular, just be focused on something well.

They won’t follow you if they don’t know you: Leaving your twitter account empty or half-filled will get you a follower count which leaves me nothing to write home about. Complete your bio and add as much information as possible. Further, don’t fill out the information like you have on your resume. Twitter isn’t a recruitment service (although, it could be construed as one); it’s a social media platform. If there is one thing that stands out from the next Twitter account is your personality that blazes through your profile. Avoid using Jargon, make it easy for others to know you and understand what you do.  Add your personality to your profile as well.  It does not have to be all business.

Give before you ask: A classic tip for success has always been that you should be willing to give away valuable stuff in any form – be it information, trials, ebooks, reports, tips and trivia, little known facts, whatever. Perhaps, you are content with just re-tweeting others’ tweets relentlessly? Just keep giving stuff away for a long time to come and don’t even expect anything in return. Eventually, you will realize that you are being followed.

Let pictures speak: It has been noticed that pictures tend to be re-tweeted more often than anything else. Pictures truly speak a lot more than the 140 characters that you are allowed on Twitter. Use your mobile devices , camera, etc for taking pictures on the go and share it with your followers.  Share with Twitter is now an almost standard option on most recent PDA software downloads.

Be careful not to obsess, having a few hundred loyal followers based on real information is much more valuable then falling into the traps of obsession will aggressive spammy techniques that are so often shared by the 6 digit home office twitter user.  Personally, I wonder what some of these people actually do all day.

What other methods based on real value have you used for gaining followers on twitter?

Michael Coppola is Founder & CEO at Path Interactive, a NYC-based Search Engine & Social Media marketing firm.

With yet another sweeping gesture, Google manages to make all heads turn with its latest real-time search release. With Twitter giving Google nightmares, thanks to the latter’s real-time updates and even Bing taking longish strides by picking up partnerships with Myspace and facebook, this move from Google isn’t surprising, but it is certainly welcome.

So What exactly is Google Real-time Search?

Your other wise normal search results pages will now be fed with live feeds from Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Press Releases and news articles making it all dynamic. Your updates on any niche, depending on what you type into Google’s search box, will be as up-to-date as you ever wanted it to be. Look out for the very first few listings at the very top before the organic search listings show up.

Here is a video from Google that lets you take a peek into how Google’s Real-time Search works:

As I sit here and write this post out, I already see a lot of things going for online marketers and online businesses. Imagine the extent of your niche dominance when you bring in even more traffic made possible by all that content you sow across media converges through a simple search.

However, it calls for a slight tweak in your online marketing strategy and content development structure. It isn’t enough to work on SEO and just focus on seeding content everywhere; in fact, it demands a thorough understanding of how Google’s real-time searches work and how to best use this for your advantage.

Have you checked Google’s Real-time Search yet?  What is your take on it?

Twitter is trying to organize and promote tweeters with yesterday’s release of their new feature, “Twitter Lists”.  It is not available to everyone just yet.  For the last year and a half, we have relied on applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic to organize our twitter followers into categories and groups.  Outside of these applications and being able to monitor mentions and direct messages on twitter directly, you were left with a constant endless stream of status updates of all the people you were following, unless you followed a small amount of tweeters.

If you don’t already use tools like TweetDeck, then this new feature, which came out yesterday, will enhance the way you use twitter.  Like other applications, now directly on twitter, you can use the new feature to organize your followers into groups.  For example, you may want to group all your close friends and follow them more closely and or group all your business contacts.  Other group ideas may include people in your local area, prospects in a particular vertical, and competitors.  Besides being able to monitor these groups seperately, it will show on your twitter profile page and you can also publish your lists via your tweets.   So instead of referencing individual handles in your tweets, you can reference an entire list of tweeters in your individual tweets.

The benefit?  Higher visibility for the smaller tweeter.  Cool feature, but not a game changer as of yet.   Keep an eye out for applications to enrich this feature in the future.

…… @rubenq

Facebook to merge between live status updates and highlights

The news feed will incorporate what was lost in that process and moved to the right hand sidebar.  It will now include it in the “News Feed”, which are highlights that facebook believes you might

be interested in, such as new photos, videos, comments your friends have made about other posts, etc.   As a result, items that were hard to find in the past since you had to scroll down, like birthdays and events, will now be moved up above the fold.  The News Feed will also include fan pages, new friends and rsvp to events,  that your  friends have made.

@rubenq

Well, not quite yet, but last week Google did invite up to 100,000 users to a beta application called Google Wave.  The previous smaller amount of invitations went mostly to developers in two other waves (pun intended).  Google Wave has been creating a buzz in the tech, social media, and blogging communities ever since the I/O developer conference in San Francisco back in May.  Trying to capitalize on the attention, some who were fortunate enough to get invitations, were  attempting to sell their Google Wave invites on Ebay!

Why all the attention?

This isn’t just another application, the preview of the tool shows how transforming it can be.  According to co creator Lars Rasmussen, It’s “what email would look like if it were created today”.   If Lars sounds familiar, it’s because he along with his brother Jens, co created Google Maps, which actually delayed the concept of the Wave.   This communication tool marries email and instant messaging with some rich functionality added onto it.  Although, there is only a preview available, some of the sleekest features include…

• The ability to see real time typing from your user’s keystrokes, character for character.  No more staring at a small box saying that your party “is typing”.  You can turn this feature off.
• Add other contacts, via a drag and drop fashion into a conversation.  If they are not immediately available, they can pick up on the conversation when they are connected.
• If a contact is added into a conversation in the middle of it, they can go to a play back feature, which will go back and look at the history of the conversation before they were invited.  As a result, they can pick up on the context of the conversation with out having to play catch up verbally or via an independent request.
• Editing document/s on the same screen with multiple users on different computers at the same time.
• Open source platform, allowing developers to provide additional functionality.

Users will dictate the success and usage of the tool.  Will it be limited to a enterprise solution?, or will it disrupt  mediums like facebook or twitter in the social community.

Have you received an invite from Google Wave?  If so, how is your experience thus far?

Either way, the wave is about to hit us.

- @rubenq

For top brand marketers to small businesses to celebrities, twitter continues to provide a new outlet for communication.

At the end of the day, the real-time web’s social element is the key motivating factor for use.  Move aside the early adopting tech heads who compare sizes of their iPod application centers and you find the highest form of social communication: gossip!    Straight, simple, irrelevant and highly entertaining celebrity gossip!

Twitter the personal celebrity PR Agency – for a few seconds a day

I admit that in my most private moments, my eyes drift over to the wife’s recent copy of Us Weekly to check out what’s happening with my favorite stars. (I really did not say that and don’t tell her).  What caught my eye was how adopted Twitter has become in mainstream media.  The feature was “Trend Alert! Stars Who twitter”, and although celebrities have been rifling out their “tweets” for a while now, it looks like it has found a home for exposure in one of the top gossip weeklies.

John Mayer twitter and other celebrities

Celebrities like John Mayer: twitter.com/johncmayer, Tina Fey: twitter.com/tinafey, Britney: twitter/britneyspears and Demi: twitter.com/mrskutcher all got highlights in Us Weekly to further their gossip brand with quoted “tweets” that readers gobble up.

Twitter provides a real point of personal engagement for celebrities with their fans.  It also allows them to reinvigorate their brands by keeping them young, relevant and youthful, yes Demi…you’re always 25 to me.

Celebrities can also use their “tweets” to misguide, manage spin and create controversy just like their PR agencies are challenged to do.  Most importantly the real-time web allows them to respond to the trends and stem rumors before they get out of hand.  PR in a few seconds can go a long way for both sides of the rumor mill.

Brand Gossip is just not as fun on twitter

Just like celebrities, Marketers need to figure out how to make it work for their brands. The reality is that brands with raving fans like John Mayer are going to have a much easier time attracting and keeping a following. Marketers for less popular brands need to think outside the box to tap into some unique content or gossip of relevance, or create new ways to capitalize on the real-time web.

Path has had some success adopting twitter for clients and we will highlight a few of these in coming posts.

What marketers do you think are doing it right?  Wrong?  Share your thoughts and let us know.

Michael Coppola is Founder & CEO at Path Interactive, a NYC-based search engine marketing firm.