Are fans twittering about you?

My friend Wendy Livingston is the Manager of Marketing and Communciations at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.  She's been a huge advocate for Web 2.0 efforts at the museum.   This has included a number of blogs hosted on their site, plus Nasher entries on MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more.

Twitter is probably the least familiar of these to some of us.  For starters its short (140 character) entries and 24-hour feed make it harder to tackle as a marketing channel.  It's hard to feed that beast with new content constantly, especially when time for our non-web marketing duties is already at a premium.

If you're really new to Twitter you may want to check out a great introductory video called Twitter in Plain English.  It's just under 2 and a half minutes long and gives you a great overview of how twittering works.

In addition to posting messages promoting events and activities.  Twitter can give you an opportunity to see how people are viewing your brand.  There are a number of Twitter monitoring services that allow you to type in a word, for instance "Nasher", and watch what others are saying about you in their Twitter messages.  I like Monitter, it's amazingly intuitive and in seconds you can start to see what's being said about your organization.

Even if you never post a single Twitter message you can still make connections with individuals that are already acting as brand advocates for you on the web.  I'd recommend an observation period first, but after that you may decide to approach a select few with special promotions, discounts or insider info.  

Those rewards should help their tie to you grow even stronger.