Guy Kawasaki Part Two: Engagement Critical for Twitter Success

On May 12th, Guy Kawasaki presented an amazing discussion via WebEx about social media. This presentation was offered in conjunction with our new free beta, WebEx Meet - which is our first step into turning online meetings into social media (you can get it here). We hope you enjoy both the WebEx Meet beta and the blog posts!

Part One: The Power of Twitter Search for Brand Monitoring

Guy: The next stage of Twitter is engagement.

Virgin America has a very good example of this. Virgin America uses this account to talk about what their features are on a plane, such as Wi-Fi but they also about their mileage program, Elevate, about radio, about downtime with their reservation system. I've seen them also talk about new routes that they put in when added San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale. They announced it on Twitter.

There's an apocryphal story that someone was on a Virgin America flight - and Virgin America has Wi-Fi on every plane - and the person didn't get his meal delivered. He tweeted that he was on a Virgin America flight and the flight attendant had not delivered the meal. And the story goes that Virgin America on the ground saw the tweet, radioed the pilot, the pilot talked to the flight attendant and the flight attendant delivered his meal.

I think that's a great story. I hope it's true.

So of course, after hearing that story I tried it when I was on a Virgin America flight. I tweeted, "@VirginAmerica: if you're so good, have the flight attendant bring me a Coke; I'm in seat 2A." Shortly thereafter Virgin America tweeted back to me and said, "Guy, why don't you just ask the flight attendant for a Coke." I view that as a success that clearly they were monitoring and engaging.

Another great example is Clever Accounts.

What Clever Accounts does - it's a guy at Twitter - he is always looking for how people are using Twitter in interesting ways and he posts what he finds. This is a very good filter. This person is purposefully looking for innovative, engaging uses of Twitter. You can look at his tweets and say, "Oh, so let's see how the FDA is using Twitter. And let's see how lawmakers are using it. And let's see how Hugo Chavez is using it."

This is a very good account to follow just to see how people are using Twitter to engage. Let him be the filter; let him find the interesting things.

This concludes part two. Come back on Monday to get the next section of his talk on "selling"! And don't forget to try the new WebEx Meet beta.