For example, am I the only one that isn’t wetting myself with excitement now that I can embed an actual Tweet into a live web page? For example….

Wow, the wonders of technology huh. At this rate, next month Twitter will be sending men to Mars.

(If you really are excited about it, or just curious, try out this aptly(?) named piece of coding genious called Blackbird Pie for yourself.) And if you need help using the freakin thing, here’s a handy little Blackbird Pie how to guide.

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In more recent years, since the  ’online’ world came on the marketing scene, free stuff has frequently been offered in exchange for personal information, rather than to   word of mouth and brand-in-your-face promotion . For example, you’ve probably participated in online campaigns where you  ”Enter the email address of 5 friends to increase your chances of winning”, or “Provided your name and email address , and we’ll give you instant access to our whole library of online reports and online our online community”.

And now, with the inception and acceptance of social media, word of mouth online marketing is now possible.  As online marketers, we can now officially offer the public free online stuff, in exchange online word of mouth promotion.  Many marketers will argue that word of mouth advertising is the best form of promotion, so the ability to achieve this online is a major milestone.

If you’re interested, check out a very recent example of a Twitter free-stuff-in-exchange-for-word-of-mouth advertising campaign below, by Brisbane musical act Yves Klein Blue (credit for the article below goes to B&T Magazine).

Music fans are being asked to pay in “tweets” to download music from Brisbane band Yves Klein Blue, as it seeks to grow its audience through digital word of mouth.

The campaign, created by digital social media agency The Population, record label Dew Process and Universal Music Australia, launched this morning and saw the band tweet a message to its followers offering them the chance to download its new single for free.

The only condition is that after downloading the track, they must tweet about the lengths they would go to see the band play at the Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay next month. The campaign not only aims to engage with existing fans, but to use social media to reach new audiences.

Tony Thomas, managing director of The Population, said: “The social web provides entertainment companies like Dew Process Recordings and Universal Music with an opportunity to reward their fans with valuable content, in exchange for spreading the word. Ultimately the fans become the communication channel.”

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It’s a simple piece of hardware (based on an Arduino platform) that allows bakeries to select what has just come out of the oven, and send a Twitter message to local customers who have subscribed to the bakerie’s Twitter profile. What does this mean for the customers? They’re guaranteed the freshest and hottest bread and bakery treats. And for the bakery, it’s a new way of keeping their customers happy, and part of an engaged and almost exclusive local community – of course with a little bit of novelty factor sprinkled on top (alongside the sugar and cinnamon).

Why has this concept of pushing short & relevant digital messages to willing recipients taken so long to hit the market?

At first I wondered why it had taken so long for products such Baker Tweet as to be ‘invented’, because to be completely honest, ‘pushing’ digital messages in real-time to an audience is nothing new. Heck, well before the pre-Twitter days, we had SMS technology with it’s ability to ‘push’ messages to willing recipients!

It then dawned on me that Twitter has two very unique, and previously unavailable, attributes which contribute to its success as a viable digital marketing tool:

1. Twitter is (almost) free to push data to, and

2. Twitter currently receives over 10 million unique visitors per month, and continues to increase in visitation each month

Ok, so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that this concept could readily be applied to other retail markets. If you own a busines that could adapt a similar technology, my advice is to strike while the bread is hot (and the novelty factor is still there) and create a similar Twitter based product. If you’re in an environment that is not full of flour, icing sugar dust and whipped cream, you can even simply use the web-based on mobile-based Twitter application, rather than rely on a dedicated piece of hardware, as is the case with Baker Tweet. Using Twitter in a way that benefits your customers, could see your sales soar through the roof, and your could well see your customers grinning their biggest of jam-donut-covered grins!

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Twittadd can generate passive revenue for you with very little effort on your part.   Firstly, and most importantly for you, Twitadd is free to join, so you have nothing to lose but a couple of minutes of your time at worst!  

You will be ready to start earning some Twitter coin after completing the simple Twittadd registration process (which takes about 30 seconds).  If you are not already enlisted on Twellow.com, you will also need to register your Twitter profile there too.

(Twellow is a fantastic tool that I’ve only just discovered – it’s essentially the Twitter yellow pages, allowing you to search through Twitter users based on their personal interests.  When you sign up to Twellow, you simply nominate your personal interests and the regular topics of your Tweets.  It’s also great if you want to increase your number of Twitter Followers, as you can search for Twitterers with certain interests, Follow them, and then hopefully they will also follow you!   Twellow already has over 3 million enlisted)

How does Twitadd work?

Twittadd  uses the profile information stored in Twellow (refer to the previous paragraph), in order to matching your personal interests with advertisers.

As a Twitadd user (in other words, a dude like you or me, who is interested in making a few quick and easy dollars with minimal effort!), you have two options

1. You can put your Twitter account up for grabs for an advertiser to snap up.

This one is interesting, and I am yet to see it in action, however cannot wait to do so! Basically, with this option, you are offering permission for an advertiser to ‘take over’ your Twitter account for a set period of time (either 7 days, 15 days, 1 month, or 3 months).  You also nominate the commencement date, and the price for which an advertiser can ‘take over’ your Twitter account.  Interested advertisers will then contact you with their proposal, and you can either accept their proposal and take the cash, or decline.  

This may sound a little scarier than it actually is. By ‘take over’ your Twitter account, I don’t mean that the advertiser has complete control of your account. That is far from the truth.  The advertiser is simply allowed to send one Tweet at the commencement date of the campaign, another Tweet at the conclusion, and are they allowed to set a custom background wallpaper which will generally contain their branding message.  

Earlier today I listed my profile for 7 days, at the very cheap rate of $2.00.  Hopefully this price will be low enough for advertisers to pounce on – I will keep you posted with the results. 

2. You can opt-in to a pre-existing Advertiser Campaign.

The second option for you to make some cash online with Twitter, is Twittadd’s Opt-In option.  This is a relatively straightforward idea, whereby advertisers set up a campaign (nominating a start date, end date, campaign terms and conditions, price and category), and if the campaign is aligned with your Twellow profile, you have the chance to “Opt-In” to the campaign.  

* * * * *

Twittadd  is a great concept, and has huge potential for Tweeters who have highly targeted traffic or a huge amount of Twitter Followers.  Though Twitadd is still in it’s infantile stages, and advertisements aren’t always available at the drop of a hat quite yet, my advice is to sign up to Twittadd now before the masses find out about it.

Those of you who recall when Google Adsense was first released will certainly realise the potential of this exciting new Twitter contextual advertising channel.  (In the early days of Google Adsense,  before the 100-page set of stringent rules and regulations were established, there was a huge opportunity to exploit the system and make some serious cash for the early adopters who included Google Adsense on their websites….now, due to the over-saturation of the Adsense advertiser market, most advertisers are lucky to make more than a couple of dollars a day!)

What have you got to lose. It’s new, it’s free, it has plenty of potential to boost your bank balance, and heck, it’s pretty cool!  Twittadd  

Please keep me posted with your experiences so we can all learn together about this interesting new tool.

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This is where TweetScan (30-day trial/$15 annual fee) comes in really handy.

Tweetscan is a Twitter-specific search engine that scans all Twitter posts for the keywords you specify and delivers the results to you in a daily email.  In addition, if you visit the Tweetscan website you will find a Google-like search box, allowing you to conduct a live search of the most recent Tweets across the entire Twitter network.

However, Tweetscan’s real value for those who use Twitter as an internet marketing or monitoring tool, is when it is set up to send you the automated daily email. Tweetscan acts as an extra pair of eyes that stay awake while you sleep.

If you are using Twitter as a marketing tool for your business, some suggestions for choosing effective Tweetscan keywords include:

• Your company’s Twitter name,
• Your core products and/or services
• Your brand name
• The names of your top competitors
• And even the keywords that you focus on for SEO and Google Adwords

Tweetscan is a highly valuable tool for anyone using Twitter as a component of their organisation’s online marketing strategy.

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More likely, you have had the full intention of signing up to Twitter and investigating its capabilities, but just haven’t yet squeezed in the time to do so.

Well…maybe it is time you did so. Twitter already has an estimated 6-7 million registered users. That’s 6 or 7 million users that have already ‘taken up’ some of the best Twitter usernames.

What does this mean for you or your organisation? That you are in risk of missing out!

If you are serious about online marketing, it is advisable that you get in and register your business name before it is too late.  

Sure, it could just be a fad…but Facebook was also a ‘fad’ that is having a lasting impression on social marketing.  Plus, what risk is a free registration to a service that takes less than 5 minutes to set up from start to finish?

The growth of Twitter registrations is reminiscent of the .com domain name registration boom. Every man and his dog is madly signing up accounts and stealing business names – the difference with Twitter being that name registration is free!

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Register for Twitter today, or risk ending up with the most ridiculous and unmemorable Twitter URL ever .

Oh, and it goes without saying that you can follow me on Twitter if you want to hear my short daily insights about anything and everything.

www.twitter.com

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