Genuine Juice

In my daily scan of Mashable, I saw this quote from Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, and thought it concise and helpful:

“We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

Over the past year, we as an agency have been learning about, listening with and leveraging various social media tools for about as wide a variety of clients as you can imagine. And while they range from consumer packaged goods to pharma/hospitals to the MFA and financial services firms, they all have one thing in common: Each organization has some people who are immersed in tools like Twitter, and others who have as much interest in it as the Justin Bieber calendar that was the gag prize of our recent prom-themed holiday party.

For those who are trying to extol the virtues of Twitter, Costolo’s quote might be of use. If that doesn’t work, perhaps a version of a conversation I had with one of our medical clients will help. In talking with her about the community outreach work she does, I asked if she used Twitter. She replied that she didn’t see the point and that people just use it for silly, banal updates.

Not wanting to argue, I acknowledged that, yes, that’s one of its uses, but that perhaps she should think of Twitter like the telephone. It’s a medium that can be used to disseminate a wide range of information, but if you judged it solely by how a teenager might use it to relay information to a friend, one-to-one, that would be missing the larger perspective of its promise.

“That’s fine and all”, you might be saying, “but it’s still a pain in the butt to easily derive value out of most of what I encounter on Twitter.”

As far as Twitter goes, we’ve only begun to appreciate its potential. We look at the service as being as advanced as the telephone was in the days when people had a separate ear piece and speaker on their telephones (aka Andy Griffith style). But as is the case with most things on the web, the future will be here before you know it, and for some, it’s already here.

Case in point, my new favorite addiction: paper.li. This new service, launched last summer, creates what it calls “custom newspapers” from the tweets of those followed by a Twitter user or tweets with a certain hashtag. I didn’t get as involved with the service until I made a slight change to my account, having it tweet out a daily update that the new version was available. This tweak garnered some positive feedback from a variety of people I respect a great deal and helped me provide value to others with no heavy lifting.

You can click see the paper.li “newspapers” for my @chadrem and Genuine’s @wearegenuine accounts.

Attempts at finding new ways to integrate Twitter into existing and new digital products abound. We have yet to find an existing or potential client who couldn’t leverage this service in some way. Our favorite recent example of this is in the Buzz section of the new Museum of Fine Arts site.

By curating tweets sent to @mfaboston and weaving them into the site, it helps the audience to feel a new level of vibrancy from a type of organization that could be thought of as antiquated or stuffy.One of the things we’re most excited about for 2011 is to see the further integration and embrace of services like Twitter by brands and clients. And of course we’re very excited to bring creative applications for these services to life.

Are you re-thinking/expanding your embrace of Twitter in the coming months? What internal and external challenges do you have to overcome? What’s the best use of Twitter you’ve seen recently? Let us know in the comments.