Reliable statistics on the usefulness of Twitter are hard to come by, but a couple recent stories suggest what we already know: if influence is important in your line of work (and it probably is), Twitter and other social media platforms are obvious ways to increase that influence and make a positive impact on the audience you are trying to reach.

The first story is from Fast Company and tells of Eric Kuhn, a 23 year old social media early adopter who started as an intern at NBC and is now working as a “Social Media Agent”  at United Talent Agency. In the cutthroat world of Hollywood casting, an actor or entertainer might be more likely to get a role because of a serious social media presence. Not just because of the increased visibility, but because of the potential to leverage the actor’s social media presence to promote projects.  Mashable recently suggested that Ashton Kutcher’s almost 7 million Twitter followers may have played a part in landing him a role on Two and a Half Men.

But Twitter and other forms of social media aren’t just for the stars.  A Tech Crunch poll indicated that consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that are responsive on social media. This may seem like an obvious point, but many brands, even ones active on places like Twitter, are hesitant to engage users. And engagement is really the point of these platforms.

The one takeaway from both of these stories is that people are making decisions based on their experience with brands online, and social media is a bigger part of that process now than ever.  Has it affected your decision making as a consumer?

Today marks the very first Social Media Day and its all thanks to Mashable, who believes that social media has changed our lives. And here at GY&K, we believe this to be true. It’s changed the way we communicate, connect with one another, consume our news, conduct business, organize our lives and market our brand.

And with 80 percent of social media users interacting with companies or brands online, there’s no better time to get in the game. Online engagement, especially, social media can be your friend as it offers an opportunity to have a person-to-person dialogue, in real time. Here’s how to apply social media to your brand, company or business:

• Integrate – Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, in your email signature, on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly e-newsletter.
• Drive Traffic – Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places – on your blog, on your website or on your Twitter account. Use newsletters and blog posts to send to your subscribers, archive it on your website and tweet it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it easy for others to retweet and share on social sites.
• Be a Content Sharer – Be a thought leader and content sharer by filtering other people’s strong news stories, links and posts, and retweet them to your followers, fans and subscribers, helping to build your overall reputation and helping you bring value to the conversation. 

So, today, we celebrate Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Vimeo, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blogger and WordPress. And so should you.

Sure, Twitter is a universal tool that allows you to use it in whatever way best serves you – follow friends, interact with people with similar interests, network, market your product, etc. It also serves as a relatively open platform for you to share your thoughts, opinions, interests and in some cases, information about your job to your fellow Tweeple.

And in the case of Mark Shurtleff, Utah’s attorney general, he felt it was appropriate to announce a murderer’s execution on Twitter (Twitter.com/MarkShurtleff). Last Thursday, he offered his 7,800+ followers tweets as to the progress of the state’s most recent execution finally saying: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.”

The media has been abuzz, some calling Shurtleff’s Tweet a very modern way to announce a very old-fashioned punishment and as a result, Twitter has morphed into platform beyond following your favorite celebrity – it’s now a court of public opinion. 

With Twitter being used for so many communications of an immediate nature, it is surprising that an attorney general might choose to use it to communicate such professional ‘updates?’ What are some other unexpected fields of professionals that are using Twitter to provide updates?

What do you do as a company when an Internet meme leads to increased sales and nationwide exposure? If you are Smirnoff, you shut it down.

BrosIcingBros first began popping up on sites like Tumblr and Twitter. With the internet swirling with the ‘rules’ involved in so called ‘icings’ and plenty of pictures of celebrities and athletes Photoshopped to include an “ice,” Smirnoff had a phenomenon on their hands.

Before long, those Photoshopped images were soon replaced by real photos of actual “icings.” Bros across the country kneeling and accepting their punishment for not being more aware. See, all you have to do to “ice” someone is hand them a (preferably warm) Smirnoff Ice. They are then required to drop to one knee, and chug.

With wedding and barbecue season kicking into high gear, brosicingbros.com was a hit. There were T-shirts with slogans like “Don’t Ice Me, Bro!” across the country, and even Mark Zuckerberg was “icing bros.”

Yesterday the brosicingbros.com page was dead, with only the headline “We had a good run bros.”  AdAge says Smirnoff parent company Diageo was responsible. In my eyes, it makes total sense that they took down the page – they didn’t want the consumption of their product seen as a punishment for losing a game! But, with all of the recent organic buzz, did they do the right thing by shutting it down? Isn’t there some value to letting this meme run its course, gaining momentum and having them reap the (sales) benefits?

From Google Earth and Gmail to GOOG-411 and Nexus One it is clear that its wide range of products and service offerings have molded Google into one of the most dominant companies on the Web.  As if Google wasn’t already a huge threat, it developed Google Buzz.  As you’ve probably heard, or experienced, Google’s new development aims to combine the best features of different social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, sending many of those sites scrambling to re-examine their features to make sure Google Buzz does not become a monopoly in the social media space next.

So, what supposedly makes Google Buzz more appealing than Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites? Well, according to an article in Channelweb, the top reasons are that Google Buzz:

1. Integrates with Gmail
2. Drowns out the noise
3. Cuts out the hunting and pecking
4. Works well with cell phones

Ok, so do you want to know what this really means?  To start, Gmail users will now have access to all of their status updates, photos, new comments and other content mixed in with their email.  Cool?  Not so much.  Do we social networking fanatics really want ALL of our updates mixed in with email?  I think this will make emailing and social networking more of a hassle.

Google claims Buzz will “drown out the noise,” by using algorithms and history to sift through unwanted status updates or photo uploads based on a user’s previous activity.  Yes, I do not want to know what Friend A is doing every second of the day, but that doesn’t mean that I never want to know what he’s up to.  Google Buzz also has an “auto-follow” feature where all of your previous Gmail contacts can automatically connect with you.  Imagine all of the people that you email:  your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, coworkers and children.  Is this option really preferable?  Well, if you are a fan of Google Buzz so far, AND if you are an Apple or Android user—don’t worry.  Google has developed mobile applications for the iPhone and Google Android.  Google is also developing an enterprise plan for Buzz.

Yes, Google Buzz compiles email and social networking content all into one program, but should this really make Facebook and Twitter that worried?  I would rather keep social networking separate from emailing.  It is quite clear that Google can do it all, but is Buzz really going to attract current Facebook and Twitter users?

Jenaleigh Landers is an intern with Griffin York & Krause.  She is currently a full-time Business Major at Saint Anselm College.

Over the past year and a half I have heard the phase “social media” 100,000 times.  No matter where you turn your attention someone is discussing social media and how it can help your business.  For brands there is no escaping social media, their only choice is to embrace it.  One industry that has embraced social media as a means to communicate with their target audiences is the hospital industry.  Since 2006 the number of U.S. hospitals engaged in social media has skyrocketed.  Over the past three years more than 350 hospitals throughout America have engaged their brand in one type of social media.

According to the blog “Found In Cache” by Ed Bennnett, a hospital Web manager who is engaged in the social media space, as of September 21, 2009 there are 186 hospital YouTube channels, 190 hospital Facebook pages, 267 hospital Twitter accounts and 35 hospitals that have their own blogs.  The hospital industry is silently leading the way in the social media space; however, there it is hardly reported. 

Hospitals are being pretty innovative in the ways they have chosen to use the social space.  There are a ton of examples out there explaining the ways in which hospitals are using social media to engage patients but here are a few that stand out.  In Detroit, at the Henry Ford Hospital, doctors while performing a brain surgery on a 47-year-old man used Twitter to answer consumer questions.  At Nebraska Medical Center a patient shared her experience with cancer on YouTube causing the NCU to open a monthly clinic for the condition.  At Sarasota Memorial Hospital Twitter is used to answer patient questions and provide them answers in real time about health issues.  Plus consumers can inquire about patients who are currently staying at the hospital via Twitter.

The reason why you are seeing hospitals make the jump into the social media space is that it makes perfect sense for their industry.  During all of our lifetimes we are going to have many physical interactions with a hospital, some positive and some negative but healthcare is consumed by everyone.  Think about it;  healthcare is the most important service you will ever utilize.  So when you are discussing a service that almost all consumers will use at one time or another, it makes sense for an industry to use all potential communication tactics possible. Expect to see more hospitals join the social media movement; remember more than 60% of Americans have used the Internet alone to search for information on a health topic.  Pretty soon it will be 60% of Americans have used social media tactic to gain insight on a health-related topic.  

In the latest installment of “Two Minutes with the Real GY&K,” our director of business development, Brady Sadler, dishes about how music gets him in the right frame of mind to do what he does.

Two Minutes with the Real GY&K: Brady Sadler

Make sure you follow him on twitter: @BR80 and stay tuned for next Friday’s edition to hear another behind-the-scenes story.

It seems like everywhere you look someone is talking about Twitter.  In case you don’t know what Twitter is, Wikipedia defines it as a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other user’s updates (known as tweets).  Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Click here for more on Twitter.     

Twitter has seen a substantial amount of growth and is currently the third most popular social networking service behind both MySpace and Facebook.  Recently Twitter received a lot of celebrity attention as both Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern joined the service.  Two different media juggernauts with substantial audiences, decided to join Twitter because of the attention the service was receiving.  The simple fact that Oprah joined caused a phenomenon as she quickly became the fastest person to have 1 million followers, but here is the kicker, a number of people don’t understand the point of Twitter.  Stern admitted on his show that he got quickly tired of using the service and turned over the updating responsibility of Tweeting to his show’s producer.  And does anyone really believe Oprah is the one Tweeting?  Last time I checked Oprah was getting $40 million from XM satellite radio to put her name on a channel she has barely ever appeared on, so I don’t see her taking the time to tweet for free.   

The biggest problem with Twitter is that people quickly become bored with the service.  According to a report by Nielsen Media over 60% of Twitter users quit within their first month of signing up for the service.  That is an extremely low retention rate and something that should concern the venture capital funded Twitter owners.  Before the Oprah factor, the retention rate of Twitter was around 30% so there is some hope out there for Twitter but there are not too many people, if any, that can have the social impact that Oprah can. 

So, maybe it is not fair to pick on Twitter by itself, so let’s compare it to other social networking services.  Well consider this; according to Nielsen, when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks, there retention rates were twice that of Twitter and when they were going though their explosive growth phase, like Twitter currently is, their retention rates were over 70%.  Consumers are not getting tired of social networking but more than 60% of the people who join Twitter are getting tired of their service. 

Personally, I am not a fan of Twitter.  I don’t understand why people want to know that Aston Kutcher is playing scrabble with Bruce Willis as they discuss their views on life.  I don’t care if Shaq is giving away donuts at Dunkin.  Once, just once, I heard a good Twitter story.  Paul Piece, forward for the Celtics, sent out a Twitter message saying the first five fans to the player’s entrance would receive five free tickets to the Celtics game.  A number of individuals showed up and Pierce got as many in as he could while signing some autographs.  I would say that when most people tell me a good story about Twitter, or what they consider to be a good story, 98% of the time it has to do with a celebrity.  I don’t know about you but I think our society gives celebrities too many avenues to speak their opinion and Twitter is just one more medium adding to the clutter of our world that I don’t have time to pay attention to. 

Posted by David, Griffin York & Krause Public Relations

This is an interesting example of the use of Twitter by a company for communication but also in my opinion an example of how if a company is going to use social networking, it can’t and shouldn’t hide from the bad news.  I also want to note that PSNH is a subsidiary of a publicly traded company, which are often the most careful about how and what they communicate because of fears that bad news might affect the all-important stock value.

PSNH put a link to this seacoastonline.com editorial in its Twitter feed that includes updates about the outages from the recent ice storms.  The editorial calls out another utility more than it does PSNH, for some perceived communication shortfalls and it also makes some good suggestions.  For example,  the writer suggests that the utilities should send representatives into the hardest hit communities to give in-person updates to residents.

Not a bad suggestion in my opinion and a flip-side example of how even though social media tools like Twitter are a great way to engage and inform people, we shouldn’t forget about “old school” tactics like face-to-face contact, particularly when those who are likely most affected by the ice storm outages may be elderly.  However, I’m sure the utilities have very few extra people available to go door-to-door and in the no good deed goes unpunished column, I can foresee another editorial or customer complaints saying “the utilities should have more people fixing downed lines and less people knocking on doors.”

  PSNH on Twitter is…PSNH.

(Editorial from Seacoastonline.com as linked to by PSNH.)