Below is Part One of my Table of Contents (TOC) for Twitterville. It is the road map that I will follow as I write the book. It is not complete, I need more content to reach the 65,000-70,000 words I'm shooting for. That's where you folks come in. Yesterday, I received 12 leads for new stories, some of which I'm already following. I will write up new interviews and post them here as they come in.
Three other notes:
(1) This road map will change as the Twitterville story evolves. Twitterville is a dynamic place. There are constant reroutings and detours caused by Twitterville's rapid expansion.
(2) If you offer me content, I will try to make sure your name is included in the acknowledgments, but please assume any content you offer me can be treated as my property once published in the book.
(3) My links are listed to the right of the words used, slightly annoying on a blog, but it saves me the time of relinking for the book manuscript.
(4) When we wrote Naked Conversations, people who visited this blog helped make it a better book. I am hoping this happens with you folk this time. I don't have Scoble this time, and I have a much shorter time line, so I need your help. Give me your story ideas, but also give me your tough love. Let me know what you think works and what you think sucks. Help me make this book a quality work.
Here we go:
FOREWORD
Charlene Li [http://www.altimetergroup.com][http://twitter.com/charleneLi] , founder of Altimeter and co-author of Groundswell, the best-selling social media book for business has agreed to write the foreword. She will dwell on the death of geography and the relentless advent of social media in the enterprise.
INTRODUCTION
The opening statement is: “It is in the worst of times, that the best of times are created.”
It will note that a great deal has happened since 2005 when Naked Conversation was written. This section will examine the speed and breadth of how social media has been adopted in business. But despite all of this glory and notice, social media to date has not truly reached its potential. It has remained somewhat of a little experiment in the big company, where small groups of perhaps five employees without budget have been allowed to create highly promoted skunkworks projects.
But the time for those pet projects to inherit a much larger place in corporate strategy has come. It has come because of the constraints of troubling economic times. It is an affordable solution to the vexing problem of how companies can talk with customers after the cuts have been completed. It is an answer to how companies can provide better product and services even after R&D has been curtailed.
It argues the case for using social media as the most efficient and effective way to have conversations with customers and for those conversations to not just make happier customers, but also make more profitable companies.
It explains that of all the tools and option of social media, Twitter is the most risk-free starting point; that Twitter lets companies interact with customers on a global scale with the personal style that you might experience in the old neighborhood market and that Twitterville is intended to show them a way out of troubled times that may be low cost and remarkably high impact much sooner than they believe possible
Part One—What happened
This section will be the major portion of the book. It will examine numerous examples of how business and other organizations are using Twitter to succeed in troubled times.
Chapter 1 The Tweet heard round the world.
Twitterville's story begins in March 2007 on the streets of Austin, Texas during South by Southwest [http://sxsw.com][http://twitter.com/swsx] a popular multimedia festival attended by 5,000 mostly young and hip tech enthusiasts.
It is the day that a new social media tool is introduced. Called Twitter, for no particular reason other than the name is available, it is the first mobile SMS application, meaning that people can chat in 140 character spoonfuls on both their cell phones as well as computers. It becomes the show's instant rage.
As a young woman walks down the street on her way to an allegedly hot party, she reads a single word message on her mobile device from a Twitter friend inside the party. It says: “Sux.” In seconds, more messages appear: “Too crowded to move.” “Can’t get a drink.”
Then comes yet another message, or “tweet” as they would be called by the end of the festival. This one talks about a competing party with live music, free drinks and lots of space.
As she reverses her waking direction, so does just about everyone else on the street by the Austin Convention Center—as if on choreographed cue.
The best promoted plans of publicists and promoters at events where attendees embraced social media would never again be the same. Twitter had usurped their ability to promote and control. Attendees communicating with each other and spreading news useful only to them had taken over. In the course of the next few days they would decide which presentations would thrive and which speakers would address empty rooms.
Twitter was the rage of SXSW. Attendees used it to share what major or excessively minor details came into their minds and they influenced each other with a seemingly constant flow of tweets that simply drowned marketing voices.
They also began to spread the word about this new Twitter toy. They used email and blogs, Facebook and MySpace to spread the word among social media enthusiasts.
Like the useful communications tools that preceded it, Twitter rapidly became fruitful and multiplied. In fact it has been doing so faster than any product that has preceded it. In it’s first 18 months, it has continued to grow at about 500 percent every six months to nearly 3.5 million by the end of October 2008 and it did so without spending a penny on marketing efforts.
This chapter will describe how this phenomenon began and spread around the world. It will also argue that Twitter can do for other companies what it did for itself—create low-cost, powerful word-of-mouth engines at extremely high velocity. It will note that during these tough economic times, companies need to embrace such tools, because the old "tried and true" marketing practices are no longer true and if companies keep trying them they most surely will fail.
Chapter 2: The Pinot that begat Twitter
Twitter was invented by Odeo [http://odeo.com], a start up founded and financed with every intention of becoming a podcast search company. Like many tech start ups, the founding team members were constantly bopping around from one place to the next. They were rarely all in the same place at the same time. One of the three founders created a simple hack to SMS, an instant messaging system that is restricted by technology to 140 characters.
The team used it so they could find each other. “I’m in the office,” or “at lunch,” or “working from home,” was all that it was intended to convey. But as time went on, the team discovered a growing fondness for, then an addiction to the tool. Messages got more informative. They developed a short-hand that each understood. Soon the company found it was running on the Twitter information stream.
One hot day, founder Biz Stone [http://www.bizstone.com] [http://twitter.com/Biz], took the day off to tear up carpet in his apartment reaching near exhaustion by late afternoon. When he checked Twitter on his phone, partner Ev Williams [http://evhead.com] [http://twitter.com/Ev]sent a link to a photo. When he got there, Biz saw a smiling Ev savoring a glass of Pinot.
That became a defining moment. Biz and Ev realized there was something about Twitter that had their hearts and minds. They gave the Odeo money back to investors and restarted a new company to produce Twitter.
Like so many milestone products in technology, twitter was designed for small mobile workgroups to share brief personal messages. But it soon became more than that. Much more.
It now enables people at home, work and in play to do things the founder never imagined. The secret sauce is about the same as in the telephone. People do with it whatever they want, whenever they want. Like the phone it is easy to keep in touch with whom you know, but unlike the phone, it also allows you to find and build friendships with others with whom you share a common interest all over the world.
Chapter 3 Dell clears a shelf
Ricardo Guerrero [http://twitter.com/GGroovin] was at SXSW. But a mobile party platform did not particularly interest him.
He’s a serious business guy, a direct marketing pro, whose job is to sell off Dell refurbished computers. He was at SXSW to find business opportunities. He could not avoid Twitter’s noise level as it roared over the conference, but his serious business eye left him underwhelmed on first glance.
Twitter hardly provided space for typical direct marketing messages. Watching the spontaneous gush of Twitter messages seemed to be a study in chaos. No one was in control. Conversations appeared to start in the middle, then fade out to nowhere in particular. Topics were often excruciatingly mundane. Anyone could follow what you say and conversely, anyone could block what you want to tell him or her.
Still, Guerrero thought, Twitter held a certain charm. It was fun, fast and easy. There was no ramp up time involved in getting started and little risk in screwing up in front of a community that seemed to forgive anything short of deliberate malevolence.
Maybe, Guerrero thought, just maybe there was a business opportunity buried somewhere in Twitter. He decided to play around with it in his spare time. He set up a personal account and began exchanging messages with a small circle of acquaintances.
With that inauspicious start, Guerrero launched DellOutlet [http:twitter.com/DellOutlet]the first Global 100 Twitter account and was the first person to generate revenue directly from Twitter--$500,000 in the first year.
Guerrero quickly came to understand a paradox. While the store is small and intimate in feel, it accommodates about 2500 customers at any time and they have all come to DellOutlet hoping to buy. He also realized there was another factor involved. Twitter was fun, so potential customers tended to hang out there longer than they might in a tangible store or a Web site. They told you what they thought allowing a smart marketer to adjust course.
Now, you can argue that $500,000 is chicken feed for a $16 billion company like Dell. True, but Guerrero’s DellOutlet, as he called it, had opened up a new channel that significantly reduced the cost per sale dramatically from any other way his goods could be sold.
Now, 16 months after the birth of DellOutlet [http://twitter.com/delloutlet], Dell has 21 Twitter accounts. Only three are designed for sales. Most are used to engage in conversations with customers and prospects.
This chapter will contain excerpts from already-conducted interviews with Guerrero, as well as Dell founder-chairman Michael Dell, Corporate Communications officer Richard Binhammer[http://richardatdell.com] [http://twitter.com/richardatdell] and Principal Blogger Lionel Manchaca [http://direct2dell.com][http://twitter.com/lionelatdell].
It will speculate that Dell has become a global leader in social media because it was one of the first global enterprises to face tough economic times and has determined that social media will help pave its road to recovery. It emphasizes that Dell now has 21 Twitter accounts and has placed more emphasis on Twitter than on blogging, Facebook or any other social media platform.
Chapter 4 Global Upstarts and Twitter-based startups
This chapter will look several people who have evolved from relative oblivion into a global presence. They include:
• Laura Fitton, [http://pistachioconsulting.com] Twitter’s Pistachio [http://twitter.com/pistachio] is a poster child for the small business and home office knowledge workers who might be wondering about Twitterville’s value to them. A year ago, she was an unemployed mom-at-home. Now she enjoys her own global speaking and consulting business built almost entirely upon her prolific Twitterville contributions, where more than 7000 people follow her. “All of my business and speaking engagements comes from Twitter. All of them,” she told me in a recent interview. She estimates her business will earn in the six figures in its first year.
• Jim Long [http://vergenewmedia.com], a 15-year NBC cameraman who currently follows the President of the US around the world. Alarmed by the fact that NBC economic woes have led the company to force all camera operators senior to him to take early retirement, Jim began Twittering as NewMediaJim [http://twitter.com/newmediajim], where 13,000 people follow him. “I am a dinosaur,” he told me in a Spring 2008 interview. “The writing is on the wall.” So in preparation for his imminent forced retirement. Long has started Verge New Media, a niche market production company recently. We will check in to see how it is developing prior to publication of Twitterville.
• Laurel Papworth, [http://laurelpapworth.com] Twitter’s pink-haired, Aussie Silkcharm [http://twitter.com/silkcharm]who was invited through Twitter to visit Saudi Arabia, where she helped Saudi women set up a social network
• Redmonk,[http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor] a four-person “open source consultancy" whose partners work out of home offices in three countries and who is generally regarded as a top-tier analyst group competing successfully against powerhouses like Forrester Research. In mid-2008, the company recruited and hired Tom Raftery [http://www.tomrafterysocialmedia.net], an Irish blogger living in Spain, who has started the company's environmental blog [http://greenmonk.net]. Raftery's offer and acceptance transpired in public view on Twitter[http://twitter.com/tomraftery].
There are many additional examples of independent home office professionals who have achieved fortune and global prominence without investing I marketing dollars, based almost exclusively on Twitter.
There is also one start up in addition to Twitter that launched itself successfully exclusively through Twitter.
• Seesmic [http://seesmic.com]. In September 2007, suave French serial entrepreneur Loic LeMeur [http://loiclemeur.com] [http://twitter.com/loiclemeur] moved from Paris to San Francisco to launch this innovative and popular video blogging start up. He has raised $12 million dollars, has tens of thousands of users and has been covered extensively in social and traditional media. In launching the company and building his groundswell of support, LeMeur used only two tactics: (1) Twitter and (2) speaking at social media events. A year later, the user base has expanded beyond the Twitterville insider circle to make serious mainstream inroads. His traditional marketing & PR budget: Zero.
[Note: If additional startups are found, this chapter will be divided into two.]
