11. Small Business Use:What I want to learn more about There were many more stories about uses for big companies over small, local business (I am more interested in the little guy, but I am biased because of my family business)
Odeo was founded at the end of 2004 as an online audio search engine for digital and video content on the web. The cofounder was Ev Williams (also the cofounder of twitter) , also the founder and creator of the word “blogger”. Biz Stone started at Google just after Williams had left and a long distance business relationship blossomed out of their shared interest for social media. After TWTTR was created, people from their team were posting information about where they were and what they were doing. After working out the kinks for finding people, sharing information became an early part of TWTTR. Williams posted a link to his Flickr site which sparked something. TWTTR became Twitter on October 2006
Lon Cohen, an advocate for logo tweeting defneded his argument through the case study of Betty Crocker, who in 2003 was replace with a spoon. 1924, General Mills sponsored a live “womanly-tallk radio show” and her name was taken from a corporate executive because it sounded “warm and friendly”. 1936 her face was created and put on cake boxes. By 1986 there had been 7 imaged of Betty. Cohen said brands like Betty Crocker were apart of the American culture. In 2002 she was replaced with a spoon. In Twitterville, brands can be enhanced by letting people repersent them in their own voice with their own face.
IBM uses Twitter possibly the most out of anyone. In February , there were more than 1,000 tweeters within IBM and it was not orchestrated by IBM. The employees use is mostly to talk with fellow employees and partners, customers, vendors, media, analysts, and etc. Now, the company is using Twitter at different company levels with no “How-to” meeting needed. The employee use has created citizen journalist spreading the word on IBM faster and more efficiently .
Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) is a senior analysis for Forrester Research covering all things social media, a job which he got because of his personal branding. When the person he replaced was searching for a replacement, he kept coming up. Social media site as among the fastest growing consumers of data storage. Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan) is another person that leverages Twitter with their already existing personal brand.
The CoffeeGroundz is one of the small, local companies mentioned in Twitterville. J.R. Cohen the manager uses Twitter to compete with Starbuck. In a particular instance, a customer was hungry and running late for work. He tweeted to @CoffeeGroundz if they could start his meal and he pick it up. A blogger wrote about it and with the online publicity, CoffeGroundz began to-go Tweeting. Than people in the Houston area (where the coffee shop was) began holding their Tweetups (get-together events) at his coffee shop, bringing in about 200 people once a month to his coffee shop. This buzz was generated solely through Twitter.