- The big story (and the one most of us were waiting to hear about) at #Twitter4Brands last Thursday was the launch of Twitter #Music. It can be used either as an app on iOS or on the web. Powered by We Are Hunted, it allows you to listen to music based on public data posted on Twitter. For example, what your followers are listening to, songs you might like based on who you follow and top music overall. As far as we can foresee at the moment, this will have no real impact on brands but will be great for music artists and their teams.
- O2 won the first ever #flock award for their outstanding work on Twitter this past year. Twitter will be handing out a #flock – a cuckoo clock that rewards you with a different action each time you gain a follower, are RT’d or mentioned – to someone in the industry each year. O2 are quite good on Twitter on a normal day, but they won in particular because of their great and often hilarious response to negative consumers during their big network outage last year.
- David Levin was probably one of our favourite presenters at the event. He runs the @The_Dolphin_Pub account which he created during the 2011 Riots as Twitter users falsely claimed the rioters were burning the pub to the ground. He has a great story on Tone of Voice when using social for different brands, which is no surprise as he’s gone from managing that spoof account to doing Twitter for The Voice and soon The Apprentice.
- Paddy Power had the most epic case study of the day. ‘We Hear You’ is a big part of their ongoing campaign. During the Ryder Cup, they wanted to show their advocates that this was true, so they took some hi-tech word-writing planes, flew them over the green and spelled out some funny tweets that were tagged with #GoEurope to ‘HELP A YANK TO SHANK’. However, it wasn’t just about Twitter, in my opinion. It was about a well integrated campaign. By leveraging one action (a tweet) across multiple touchpoints (experiential, offline + online), they earned a media coverage equivalent of about £4.5m. Obviously, a lot of money went behind it as well, but still an inspiring story!
- Oli Snoddy, Twitter’s Head of Planning, had a great presentation about planning your activity on Twitter, or ‘Planning for the Moment’ as it was coined. Oreo was the poster child for planning ahead lately. Have a look at the planning book published by Twitter.
- Gary Lineker is even more amazing in person. That is all.
- And finally, they discussed their new Keyword Targeting product. You can now target promoted tweets (a tweet from a brand that’s been used as an ad on Twitter) to a user’s timeline based on the words of their outgoing tweets. For example, I tweet: ‘I’m so in need of a holiday. Wish I could just transport to Paris!’ Say, Eurostar was running promoted activity and targeting keywords ‘need holiday’ and ‘Paris’. The next thing I might see is a tweet from Eurostar with a call-to-action to research journeys to Paris. A bit on the creeper side, but real-time ad serving does that!