Business Twitter hub in progress

I confess I'm a Twitter user and not just to keep up with friends. I use Twitter for on-the-spot news, links to coupons and keeping track of business, food and fashion trends.

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I received a tweet from the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association drawing my attention to an article in The Wall Street Journal about how entrepreneurs use Twitter to get through a crisis.

The National Restaurant and the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant associations stress that Twitter is a powerful tool for small businesses, especially during any sort of customer-service or public-relations crisis. However, I see an opportunity for Hattiesburg businesses to use Twitter not only for crises but to use it as a public relations machine, as well as to keep up with business articles in the Hattiesburg American.

I'm thinking of starting our own Hattiesburg business Twitter to keep all businesses and customers up-to-date with sales, holiday closings, hiring fairs and special events. Send an e-mail my way if you want to take part or even if you have ideas on how to run it and work out the kinks.
Openings

# The Grill and Grocery, 121 E. Pine St., opened next to Go Young Fashions. The G&G is a combination convenience store and a grill/takeout eatery with a very interesting menu. The G&G is open Monday through Saturday. Details: 336-7986.

# Elements Salon is moving to Canebrake Country Club, 1 Cane Drive, and will reopen as Elements Salon and Spa at Canebrake. The salon, with full spa and massage, has a tentative opening date of Sept. 30.

# Topher's Rock 'n' Roll Grill will open in the old Ray Ray's Fried Chicken building, 5252 Old U.S. 11 in Hattiesburg. The family-oriented, fast food restaurant plans to open Oct. 1. Owned by the parent company that also owns The Bottling Company and Mugshots, the restaurant promises tasty burgers and vintage music memorabilia. Details: 336-7418 or visit www.tophersgrill.com.

# Gatti Town is slated to open this fall. It is located between Best Buy and Toys 'R Us.

# Qdoba Mexican Grill is expected to open Nov. 1 on Hardy Street between Applebee's and Wachovia Bank.

# Auto Barn is being built at the corner of Emerald Lane and Broadway Drive. No completion date was given.

# An independently-owned burger shop is being built in the former Popeye's on U.S. 49 location. No completion date was given.
Events

# The Kitchen Table will host Young Chefs with Julia at 4 p.m. Sept. 28. Participants will learn to cook pasta jambalaya, white chocolate bread pudding with white chocolate sauce. Cost: $35. Details: 261-2224.

# Curves is offering a free 30-day diet program for Hattiesburg-area women Sept. 30 at Curves of Hattiesburg on the corner of Hardy Street and North 25th Avenue. Details: 450-2878 or visit www.curves.com. ...Read More ! ⇒

Can Twitter Rake in the Ads to Justify $1 Billion Valuation?

The question about Twitter used to be, "Is it a business?" Now, the question becomes "How big can it be?"

And the answer is: It better be big. CEO Evan Williams confirmed last week that the microblogging service had finalized its new funding, reported to be $100 million, giving Twitter -- which now has no monetization program in place -- a whopping $1 billion valuation. Prior investors Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners doubled down, and late-stage investors T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners joined up.

With the funding, Silicon Valley and the venture community are once again setting their sites on the marketing budgets of American business to support another free "cloud" web service, in this case 140-word bursts of text. Indeed, they're counting on the exponential growth of advertising revenue in a flat market for a company that -- while certainly useful to marketers -- has yet to earn its first dollar.

"I think they can build some kind of ad business, but the more relevant question is can they build an ad business worth a billion plus dollars," said Warren Lee, VC at Canaan Partners. "That would require tremendous volumes of impressions and reasonable conversions. Lots of execution will be needed. Not impossible but unlikely."

The cash infusion (on top of $55 million already raised and the estimated $25 million Twitter has left in the tank), puts the pressure on Twitter to earn its first $100 million within the next year or two, and sparked cries of "bubble!" from the cheap seats, but that was true of AOL, Netscape, Google and Facebook.

'No precedent'
Yet Twitter is quite different. "It's the first one that's not a destination -- it's a distributed service," said Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia and investor in early Twitter backer Union Square Ventures. "There is no precedent for how to monetize it. "

Like Facebook, businesses already use Twitter to communicate with their fans and don't need to pay Twitter a thing to build followers or communicate with them. "What we see is a move away from brands using broadcast media to more engagement media," said Zephrin Lasker, CEO of sales-lead exchange Pontiflex. "If you have engagement on a one-to-one basis, extremely scalable, that's valuable."

Valuable to marketers, but is it valuable to Twitter? With the money comes an expectation of corresponding revenue, and while verified accounts, corporate services and analytics are interesting, advertising is the business that scales. While co-founder Biz Stone said there are no plans to start an ad business this year, it seems inevitable Twitter will be going toe-to-toe with Facebook in the ad market.

"What is interesting from an advertising perspective is the same thing that is interesting about Facebook: It is one of the only platforms of scale that has two-way messaging potential," said Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which sells ads on Facebook widgets. "But are they a $50 mil or a $1 bil business?"

Twitter could turn on revenue immediately, but appears to be in no rush to do so. Observers have, for example, long wondered why Twitter didn't start running contextual or keyword ads next to tweets, like Google. Twitter could run the ads based on the content of tweets combined with what Twitter knows about the user from their profile and registration details.

Outside factors
The problem with that is that more and more users access Twitter from third-party apps like TweetDeck or Tweetie not owned by Twitter, and those services, too, need a business model and may also incorporate advertising.

Mr. Stone said that ads won't come before 2010 and Twitter's early-stage venture backers have told Ad Age the ad business, narrowly defined, isn't that interesting to them. On its site, Twitter touts marketing success stories from Pepsi, Jetblue and Dell, which consist of the brands using the service to connect with fans.

The cash could allow Twitter to make some acquisitions; perhaps one of the URL shorteners like Bit.ly, one or more of the Twitter applications, or one of the many, many firms now making dashboards to manage Twitter for corporate clients.

With a valuation of $1 billion, Twitter's investors believe one or more of the following outcomes are likely: an IPO or an acquisition at a healthy price. Already Twitter has reportedly turned down bids from Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

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How should my business market itself with Facebook?

How should my business market itself with Facebook?

Facebook is growing by 700,000 new members every day and is the third-most-trafficked site on the Web. Your business should be making the most of this marketing opportunity.

The most important thing to remember is that you’re there to build relationships with customers and prospects. Connecting in an authentic manner means approaching the world of social networking as a person and not necessarily as a brand.

You should actually start with your personal profile — if you’re not already on Facebook, sign up (it’s free), add a photo and a little information about yourself, find some friends on the site and begin to interact. Then, and only then, should you set up a business page with your logo.

After all, you wouldn’t start a sales call with a trial close — you’d get to know your prospects first and give them a chance to know you.

There are some distinct differences between personal profiles and pages. With personal profiles, people must request to become your friend in order to see your information, and you confirm these friendships manually. With pages, however, anyone can become a fan of your business page. Even better, all of their friends will see that they’re a fan and can join them; now you’re leveraging the viral power of the Internet to make new connections.

Content of your page and posts should be of service to the reader. Consider including reviews, tips, helpful hints, related articles you’ve found, relevant discussions, events and photos.

Next steps: Facebook ads may be purchased. These work similarly to Google AdWords.

Response provided by John Addessi, a consultant with the Kansas Small Business Development Center at Johnson County Community College. ...Read More ! ⇒

Twitter Strategies for Marketing Your Business

-“Brevity is the soul of wit,” wrote William Shakespeare. And it also appears to be the heart of the microblogging phenomenon, Twitter. Microblogging as a marketing strategy is bound to thrive, and sooner or later you’ll find it’s just smart business to communicate with your customers 140 characters at a time.
“Twitter is a great way to position yourself as an expert and go-to source in a particular field,” says Julio Ojeda-Zapata, author of Twitter Means Business: How Microblogging Can Help or Hurt Your Company. Ojeda-Zapata says people have found jobs, hired staff, promoted books, and been written about by major media outlets by blogging on the popular site. And while most business owners have heard of Twitter, relatively few are taking advantage of its power to promote their businesses.

The irony is that while blatant self-promotion and marketing on Twitter can be a recipe for failure, there are other uses that make it a back-end marketing and public relations bonanza. Here are three Twitter strategies every company should consider.

1. Search and respond: To see what your customers are saying about you, follow the advice of Tim O’Reilly, author of The Twitter Book, and search for your name, your company name, your Twitter name, and your brand or product. A few useful search engines include Twitter Search, TweetGrid, and Monitter.

2. Educate customers and be an expert: Natural Food Exchange in Reading, Massachusetts, is an independent, natural food store featuring the largest gluten-free stock of supplies in the state. Lisa Kalner Williams says the company uses Twitter as a way to distinguish it in the whole/natural food marketplace by tweeting useful information about celiac disease, a condition where a gluten-free diet has produced positive changes in those afflicted. Occasionally the company will do promotional tweets that mention gluten-free products available in the store.

3. Engage in conversations with customers: Of all the misconceptions that business owners have about Twitter, the biggest one is thinking of Twitter in terms of a monologue rather than a dialogue. “Old-school, one-way marketing is at best quaint and at worst annoying in this two-way world of social media,” according to Steve Mulder, director of emerging interactions at Molecular, part of Isobar, a global network of digital marketing companies.

...Read More ! ⇒