Gina,

Although the following case study by Rae Hoffman was not written from a B2B perspective, you should be able to apply these same concepts to your industry if you read between the lines!

Rae’s case study is about a BBGeeks; a BlackBerry related website.
BBGeeks implemented a successful Twitter campaign using the following:

1. One of the BBGeeks.com staff was assigned to become the voice of @bbgeeks on Twitter.

This is such an overlooked step, whether it is blogging or twittering. By making one person responsible for the content, not only do you have ownership of the content, but the site gets a consistent voice and message.

2. We decided that our goal should be for him to become a BlackBerry trouble shooter (.i.e. help people) first, promotional evangelist (i.e. drop links) for BBGeeks.com second.
3. The employee running @bbgeeks (to be clear, he is not dedicated to Twitter and spends about 30 minutes a day on it) was encouraged to also post off topic here and there and to join in the conversation with our followers and people we were following even if it wasn’t always BlackBerry related (i.e. we wanted him to get involved).
4. We participated in a group effort to post and cross promote guides on Twitter related tools and created a guide to TwitterBerry (the Twitter application for BlackBerry users).

This is a common theme amongst social social marketers. By being engaged in the community and helping people you can grown your brand without being too salesey.

5. We pimped the background with a more Twitter friendly design.

The design makes BBGeeks stand out from all the other BlackBerry accounts and help differentiate them to the user.

6. We decided not to have our posts auto tweet and instead decided to take the same approach with dropping links into Twitter that we did years ago with link requests – make it obvious that we were taking the time to do it personally.

Nothing turns people off faster than obvious spam. By taking a slower approach, BBGeeks was showing that were committed to the long run and were not looking to “crash and burn” BlackBerry users

7. Thanks to a tip from @graywolf, we learned about Summize (which was later bought by Twitter) and used it to find BlackBerry users (we’d search for “BlackBerry”, “8330? etc.). We’d follow those users and hope that they’d visit our Twitter homepage, see what a great resource we were, and follow us back. And even if they didn’t follow us back on first glance, we hoped we would catch their BlackBerry related questions by following them and earn their following if we could help solve it with an @reply.

Successful marketing is being pro-active. By reaching out to BlackBerry Twitter users, BBGeeks was able to offer them something that (customer support) that makes them different.

8. Completely of his own idea, the employee running @bbgeeks started doing small giveaways here and there of branded T-shirts and stickers to followers

It is amazing what people will do for a free t-shirt and it is another inexpensive way to interact with your community

9. We run occasional “twitter only” discounts at our software and accessories store

By concentrating on solving problems and building trust within the Twitter BlackBerry community, the members would be more responsive to a Twitter sales message rather being hit by sales posts every day.

Links:

• http://admaven.blogspot.com

posted September 3, 2008