Neville Hobson: 5 Examples of Twitter Innovation

Neville Hobson, a blogger about social media (albeit from an older generation than C-Mac, et al) recently wrote about Five examples of innovation with Twitter from five major companies.

He in turn is pulling these examples from Entrepreneur magazine, as linked in his blog. To be honest there isn't a lot of analysis here beyond a vague description of the campaign. But look at the total number of followers - 6,000 for Subway, 4,700 for McDonald's, 38,000 for Dunkin' Donuts? And have you looked at what those accounts post? As Aaron explained yesterday, this is almost a lesson in how NOT to use Twitter, right?

25 comments:

  1. For instance, it says the Dunkin' Donuts Twitter account is conceived of "as a place for people to talk about how much they love DD products"... why would that be useful? I mean is the account there JUST so people can tweet "Man I love me some @DunkinDonuts in the mornin!" from their iPhone on the way to work? Is that helping Dunkin's brand?

    (PS - let me go on the record saying Dunkin' Donuts is freakin awesome. I love DD. I'm incredibly sad we do not any in Los Angeles. And just to give you an idea how ridiculous that is, there is a Dunkin' Donuts in the PANAMA FREAKING CITY AIRPORT, but not in LA. WTF, mate?!)

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  2. I'm surprised Pizza Hut didn't make the list. They've done a great job of branding their twitter and using twitter campaigns to drive marketing efforts. And what about these girls on twitter. Boom. Link drop. You're welcome, Royce.

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  3. Now THAT's an effective link drop. I'm impressed. Not that you got ranked 4 on that list (you couldn't take down Queen Rania? or the Google girl with only 7 tweets? really?) but rather at your use of links in text. Strong work Game.

    I hereby demand that we come up with a formalized system for determining Twitter dominance. I think followers is a good starting point - Oprah wins with 2 million. Maybe followers + retweets is the way to go. You need to be followed AND have an influence on the community. Can we calculate that somehow? That girl cannot be in second place with 4,700 followers and 7 tweets, it's impossible.

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  4. Umm - where's the photo? How come it's blank?

    I like the retweet way of determining Twitter Dominance - seems to combine popularity with relevance very well.

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  5. The photo is not blank for me. The fault, dear Scott, is in yourself.

    Is there a place I can look up a total number of retweets? C-Mac has been trying to tell me about the virtues of Twitter, maybe she knows.

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  6. Umm - I check in both FireFox and IE, and see nothing. When clicking on the link, I'm taken to a page on Neville Hobson that says:


    You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.

    Surfin’ ain’t easy, and right now, you’re lost at sea. But don’t worry; simply pick an option from the list below, and you’ll be back out riding the waves of the Internet in no time.

    - Hit the “back” button on your browser. It’s perfect for situations like this!
    - Head on over to the home page.
    - Punt.

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  7. Isn't that guy British? Why's he internet-talkin like a surfer?

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  8. RT @Scott Umm - where's the photo? How come it's blank?

    Yeah, it's broken for me too.. in the RSS feed and here on the blog

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  9. Twitter dominance starts and ends with shitmydadsays. This guy has 1,065,816 followers and is only known within the Twitter universe. Oprah and Shaq et. al. are celebrities in the real world. For a person who is only known through Twitter to have gathered so many followers, means that people are discussing shitmydadsays outside of Twitter.

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  10. Nice wrong link, that's my favorite yet

    Aaron makes a good point - if you're only known for your Twitter (or at least internet) persona, that has to give you some bonus points. Shitmydadsays is great by the way.

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  11. Not only Twitter for long! shitmydadsays dude got a TV deal

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  12. SERIOUSLY?!?!?! I am initially intrigued and want evidence in the form of a link. Then I gradually considered if I would watch the show. Then I realized they probably wouldn't have enough material for a 30 minute episode, let alone a series of episodes. The show will probably suck and ruin my enjoyment of a Twitter-only celebrity.

    This process took me 26 seconds.

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  13. What does levarburton get for being the only person followed by shitmydadsays?

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  14. hahaha Scott I love it... maybe you add all of shitmydadsays' followers up and combine them with whatever LeVar Burton has?

    Aaron... um... you just did a whole thing there all by yourself... that was impressive

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  15. But I can't get by on my good looks like Sam Seaborn.

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  16. Scott points out that LaVar Burton himself (who the eff is LaVar Burton? Jordie? Wtf?) has 1.5 million Twitter followers. This makes him eligible for some kind of obscure Twitterer award.

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  17. LeVar Burton = Reading Rainbow, Roots and Star Trek: The Next Generation. That's a pretty eclectic group that has the ability to develop hard core fans from multiple demographics.

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  18. Butterfly in the sky...
    I can go twice as high!

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  19. I agree that some of those case studies are pretty weak. There are a billion spam morons who will follow anyone so I don't think we should judge a twitter feed's success on followers.
    Actually, Twitter just released their own case studies that are way better. here - http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/case_dell

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  20. C-Mac, GotGame was just roundly criticized for not linking via html text, and now you - who uses Blogger on her own blog - do the same. I am outraged.

    Anyway, yes that is by far a better example of a business using Twitter than any of the 5 above. Does this mean that Nevill Hobson is kind of a crappy social media expert, if he was extolling these 5? Tell me what to think about this.

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  21. I did not intentionally mis spell Neville to slight him, although I did intentionally criticize his examples to slight him

    Thanks for the backup Aaron

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