Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

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Tweetindipity

I love Twitter.

Like everyone else, it took me a period of adjustment to “get it” but once I did, I fell in love with Twitter wholeheartedly. Why? In part because of it’s immediacy. It can also lead you to so many different places; down the rabbit hole, as it were. If you’ve ever spent an evening at home clickling your way through “if you like this artist, you’ll like…” links in iTunes, you’ll know what I mean. But mostly, I love Twitter because of serendipity. In my opinion, it is by far the most serendipitous social network out there. Let me give you an example.

This morning I was scanning through my Twitter list when I came upon this tweet from C.C. Chapman: “One of my favorite views…”. Naturally curious,
I clicked through to see a picture taken from his perspective in the back of a canoe. His son is paddling in front of him, his daughter sits squarely in the centre and his wife is at the front. The canoe floats quietly on a lake covered in lily pads and the scene is very peaceful. As an outdoorsy guy myself, it inspired me to look into canoes at Mountain Equipment Coop (MEC).

Upon landing on their home page, I spied a link to MEC Paddlefest, an annual celebration of canoeing and kayaking. I clicked through to discover that the event will be in Toronto, in our neck of the woods, in two weeks. I called to check the availability for the Canoeing for Parents and Kids program and $11.30 later, we were booked.

I then returned to my Twitter client—Hootsuite—and tweeted: “Inspired by cc_chapman’s photo, I’ve signed up for Canoeing for Parents and Kids as part of MEC’s #paddlefest. Can’t wait!” He responded with: “Awesome! It is a great family activity and SO peaceful. Hope you guys enjoy it.” and then re-tweeted my original post adding “This made my morning.” Indeed, and my morning too.

How has Twitter opened up the world for you?

Posted: June 1, 2010 by mcharbonneau | View Comments
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Kicking into High Gear

Unveiling the Audi R8 Spyder

Yesterday was quite an enjoyable—albeit busy—day at the Canadian International AutoShow’s Media Day. Both Kyle and I met early before making our way to the South Metro Toronto Convention Centre for Chrysler’s presentation. I was there to take photos, tweet and help out Kyle with our wee Flip videocamera. We managed to catch the majority of the presentations and interview half a dozen manufacturers for an episode of AutoShow WebTV which we’ll produce and post on YouTube (which you can check out here). It was quite the job juggling cameras and tweeting more than 20 updates (with pictures) but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

It was a great event that added yet another layer to our experience in both social and experiential marketing. The trip down naturally increased our engagement with the AutoShow’s website community, Twitter followers and Facebook fans. In addition, it helped create even more patron excitement before the Show opened.

Posted: February 12, 2010 by mcharbonneau | View Comments
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Creating Content

Phew. We’ve been pretty busy here at One On One. It’s that time of year where the Canadian International AutoShow kicks into high gear. As such, I’ve had little time to devote to our Insights blog. The good news is, we’re stockpiling some experience that should yeild a few case studies that we can share in this forum. While at this time of year we’d normally be starting our AutoShow efforts in earnest, the reality is that we’ve already been working pretty hard these past few months monitoring and managing the brand in the digital realm.

The latest news we can share is that one staff member—Kyle—was lucky enough to head down to Detroit for the North American International Auto Show on behalf of the Canadian International AutoShow. He flew down for the 2-day media event, recording some unveilings which had been requested by AutoShow fans via a Twitter poll that we’d created. In addition to this footage, Kyle managed to interview a few spokespeople from Chevrolet, Tesla, Cadillac and more. If you’re interested in seeing the movie, you can find it HERE.

Posted: January 19, 2010 by mcharbonneau | View Comments
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The Evolution of Twitter at One On One

by Mike Charbonneau

The Canadian International AutoShow's Twitter page.

The Canadian International AutoShow's Twitter page.

I have been using Twitter with a client, The Revue Cinema, for probably a year and it’s been going quite well. For The Revue, a not-for-profit community-run cinema with few dollars for marketing, Twitter has been a great tool which we’ve used as an electronic marquee. It lets followers (those who decide to follow your Twitter feed) know about upcoming events and what’s playing at the cinema that day. So I started looking at our other clients, to see who else could benefit from exposure to the Twitterverse. The first one that made sense and seemed like a good fit was the Canadian International AutoShow.

So we created an identity for the AutoShow on Twitter and started to fill this new channel with links to automotive stories we thought would interest our followers. We then asked our client—who was in Germany at the Frankfurt Auto Show at the time—to tweet from the floor to give our readers insight on the show. Over the course of a few weeks, we slowly increased our followers to about 40 people. Not bad, considering this isn’t usually the time of year when people think about the AutoShow.

Closer to a month into the campaign, I created a hashtag—#autoshowcanada—to help people find the AutoShow on Twitter. Within 5 minutes, two people had retweeted (RT) the hashtag in their own post. By the tenth minute, another person had retweeted. So what’s the big deal and what’s all this talk of retweeting? Let me explain.

Up to this point, we had 43 people following the AutoShow on Twitter. Whenever we would tweet anything, only those 43 people would see our message. The instant that three people retweeted our message, it meant that it would now be seen by their followers. So in the space of 10 minutes, our conversation with 43 people grew to a potential 3,000. This is called message amplification.

Of course, not everyone of those 3,000 saw the message and of those that did, many had no interest. But, there was a noticeable effect. Over the next couple of weeks, our number of followers grew to over 100. Now, you should know that the number of followers is not the best metric to measure your success on Twitter. Why? Well, that’s another entry for another day. But if you are interested in finding out if your business can benefit from the flexibility of Twitter, give us a call and we’ll help you out.

Posted: November 25, 2009 by mcharbonneau | View Comments
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