5 marketing tips for tackling Twitter

Steve, this is a terrific outline about how to work with Twitter! More and more of our customers (Sysomos) are asking for Twitter analytics, especially when combined with other forms of Social Media. I will be using this outline as part of our customer discussions.
Specifically, there are many great examples of B-B marketing in this domain and it is growing quickly.
Thanks.

I appreciate the way you've broken this down, and want to point out that the same factors apply to marketing in small businesses.

Twitter has, in many ways, evened the playing field for both large and small businesses. Large businesses can act small (connecting with customers, projecting a personality, reacting quickly, etc.) and small businesses can act large (reaching large numbers of people quickly, driving customer opinion, generating buzz, etc.).

Thanks, Steve, for a great article that I plan to share with my clients who don't quite "get" twitter yet. I know they need to be there (b-b as well as b-c) especially after speaking to someone at an event last night who told me how much the word on her company's biz has spread since they've been twittering.

Well organized post and great synthesis of Twitter's role in a marketing context.

Re: Melinda's B2B question, consider following @crosbymarketing to see how we're using it to dimensionalize our agency and add value to customers, prospects and employees.

Melinda is right that most Twitter experimentation is on the B-to-C side. I'm not aware of B-to-B Twitter successes yet, though I encourage people to share any they've seen. But like all elements of social media (blogs, wikis, ratings/reviews, etc.), B-to-B usage eventually follows B-to-C successes. After all, every business user is also a consumer in other areas of their life. They all experience firsthand the value of blogs, user reviews, Twitter, and so on, and start looking for them and expecting them in their B-to-B interactions as well.

Thank you for such a great article for newbies to Twitter. This was really helpful and I'm going to start some experimenting. Quesion for you...most of the examples you cited are for B-to-C. Are you seeing success in Twitter for B-to-B (non-technical companies)?