TWENTY FIVE BRANDS USING TWITTER RATHER WELL ...

This is a relatively unrepresentative starter-for-ten (or twenty five, in actual fact) list of brands that are doing good and or interesting things with Twitter.

Some of them are doing some really very clever things. Some are doing some really, really bloody simple things, but they seem to work.

There are some not really very clear rules we set ourselves.

We have deliberately excluded media brands - hence BBC, ITV, The Times, Guardian et al Twitter feeds are not in the list. And we have also excluded individual or personality brands - hence Scott Mills, AplusK, Britney and the like don't make it in here.

We'd also be the first to admit that is a far from exhaustive list. We're really interested in getting any more suggestions from people who think that they're doing interesting things, have a good war story to tell or think they've seen something that might qualify.

Thanks to those who've already made suggestions, including @wadds, @chris_reed, @r_c and @dekhmcclelland.

Please leave any suggestions (your own work, or others) in the comments and we will check them out.

Brand Ambassadorship: Whyte & Mackay's The Nose
www.twitter.com/the_nose
Who'd have thought that a whisky would take to Twitter?

Actually, the charismatic Richard Paterson (aka, The Nose), the Master Blender for Whyte & Mackay, the Glasgow-based blended Scotch has an online persona all his own.

His Twitter feed is a beautifully balanced spread of witty observation, occasionally outspoken (and once or twice outrageous) comment, chat with the whisky digerati and Twitterati and brand promotion.

The lovely thing about the man is that he engages with other brands and is unafraid to hat tip them where good work is being done.

If you're going to play the role of digital brand ambassador for an fmcg or specifically spirits or drinks brand, Paterson's feed is one to take a look at for best-of-breed practical stuff.

Twitter-based Fun & Games: Uniqlo
www.twitter.com/uniqlo_uk
Uniqlo celebrated the launch of its UK website with its Lucky Counter in September 2010.

The basic premise was that, the more that people Tweeted about a set of around 10 products, the cheaper the products would be when the site launched - to a predetermined floor level.

A shitload of Tweets later, the Uniqlo UK website was a lot more famous and some products were a little bit cheaper. Lovely.

Twitter-based Fun & Games: Albion Caff
www.twitter.com/albionsoven
Ah, the infamous AlbionsOven Twitter feed, as created (I seem to remember) by the nice folks at Poke.

This little fella is a box in this small, local London bakery which, in its own words is the ... "BakerTweet Box on the wall in The Albion. Every fresh baked tray of cakes and pastries gets a tweet by the baker, so you'll know when to show up."

Just downright clever.

Crowdsourcing: Starbucks US
www.twitter.com/mystarbucksidea
Love this.

Submit an idea to Starbucks via this feed and it'll go into the pot for consideration, sitting alongside the others sourced from social media. A whole heap of customers' ideas have been put into action thanks to the work. To see them in action, take a look at the accompanying MyStarbucksIdea website/blog.

Twitter-based crowdsourcing executed super-neatly. Smart stuff from the US superbrand.

Brand Ambassadorship: Starbucks UK MD
www.twitter.com/starbucksukmd
This side of the pond, Darcy Willson-Rhymer, Starbucks UK MD, has taken to Twitter in large style.

The erstwhile UK MD is a chatty fella, engaging with folk and presenting a human face. Without coming across as a marketing man, he still never-the-less presents an amiable face to a company that, let's face it, has its issues and its detractors.

Taking them head-on and answering the critics (as well as engaging some fans: @andipeters @fearnecotton Fabulous to hear and it wont surprise you I agree!!!! was a recent tweet), he's delivering a top-class business head on Twitter case study.

Borrowed Interest Online: Moo.com
www.twitter.com/overheardatmoo
If you print other people's business cards, you'd better be bloody interesting.

So Moo is.

Instead of waffling on about printing business cards (Okay they do a bit of that), they've taken a step back, worked out that if they present themselves as a company that's interested in design (something their core audience of people buying print is going to find appealing), they've just opened up a world of Twitter-based cool stuff to share.

So they do that instead.

Latest finds on the Moo feed include the Ninjabreadman (I am actually going to get some of these) and this kitschy camera USB stick.

A great example of a business that has built a solid social media presence by sharing other people's cool stuff (and a spot of their own from time-to-time): social media borrowed interest, I like to call it.

With thanks to @dekhmcclelland for the recommendation.

Brand Ambassadorship: Aleksandr Orlov
www.twitter.com/Aleksandr_Orlov
Brilliant branded character work via Twitter. The gold standard.

Anyone looking at this should take a couple of things away: some lessons in writing well on Twitter and engaging with an audience on the right level. And an understanding that, with the right character, people will want to engage, get involved and follow.

The irrepressible little fella also delivers time and again in supporting the ATL and digital work. From kicking off seeding of his iPhone Apps to taking the battle against the muskrats to new levels, he single-handedly does the work of an army of interns at a seeding agency.

Oh, and his best feature? Well-placed malapropism.

My favourite Tweet of the last week or so: "I am inform that the eloquent young gentlemens of UK school documentary 'The Inbetweeners' have quote "simples". I am now an aphid fan".

Customer Service done beautifully: Best Buy Twelp Force
www.twitter.com/TWELPFORCE
Twelpforce is another of those case studies that has gone down in social media lore.

Basically, Best Buy took its "geek squad" of technical specialists and made them available via social media channels to its customers, to help them get over, round, through their technical issues.

There are a bunch of write-ups on the service, but to quote a TechCrunch piece on its launch ... "Once registered, tweeting Best Buy employees from across all operations can send messages from the @Twelpforce account, and if they add the hash-tag #twelpforce, their messages will automatically show up under the twelpforce handle with a credit to their proper Twitter account."

Strangely, this piece of work must've looked enormously complicated on paper. But the truth of the matter is that it's supremely simple, it has just taken an almighty leap of faith in the ability of an entire workforce to engage with customers.

Which is, after all, what a mass-market, national and international retailer does every day of its life.

Customer Service done beautifully: Skype's Peter At Skype
www.twitter.com/peteratskype
Support, support, support. That's the raison d'etre for Skype's Twitterer and Blogger-in-chief, Peter.

Originally a creation of the chaps at We Are Social (UPDATE: but now in-house as he says in the comments below), he takes on and deals with customers' user issues on a daily basis.

A lovely piece of work in creating CS in the social media environment. The tone, the approach, it's all bang-on and a good template for anyone contemplating this sort of activity.

Sweet additions to the work include Peter's crowdsourcing questions - what would people like to see Skype do next, by and large being the sentiment.

A simple, effective piece of work for the brand.

Customer Service done beautifully: EasyJet
www.twitter.com/easyjetcare
If you're in a market with Ryanair, there's one supremely obvious place to differentiate and to justify any price differential: service.

Following where the US low-cost carriers went first, EasyJetCare is the UK carrier's very strong effort at just that. Slick as you like CS team helping customers out, in many cases in real time while they're waiting for flights, demonstrates the brand's approach vs the competition.

For the marketing value of the work alone - and lots of pleasantly surprised tweets from those it's helped - this is one twitter presence that appears to be paying its way. (thanks to @chris_reed for the recommend)

Outreach and Engagement: mflow
www.twitter.com/mflow
If you're a social media start-up going up against the mighty iTunes and Spotify, social media is the way not just to communicate but also to differentiate.

And if you want to recruit some social media superstars to pimp you ahead of launch, Twitter is going to be a core part of the strategy.

So mflow's Twitter performs three roles: outreach to Twittering DJs, labels, artists to get them into mflow and trying the experience (and recommending it to their followers), dealing with customer service issues and generating some community engagement with loyalists including the Friday challenge, music giveaways and social media marketing.

So far some big names have succumbed to @mflow's charms including Zane Lowe, DJ Semtex, MistaJam, Greg James, Futureheads, Plan B, Florence and a host of others.

Cracking example of Twitter based celebrity outreach combined with CS, community engagement and marketing.

(big old disclaimer here, it's one of ours.)

ALL About the Sales: Sainsbury's
www.twitter.com/sainsburys
This is not big. It's not clever. It was effective

September 2010, Sainbury's offered its Twitter followers the chance to win a £50 voucher in return for a retweet of a Nectar card offer.

The "just 15 minutes to go" Tweet scored around 200 re-tweets. The "just 30 minutes to go" even more. The "one hour left" the "one day left" ... well, you get the picture.

Simple, effective. And all of £50 total spend.

Sometimes, you don't have to be clever to get people talking (even if it isn't the most engaging piece of communications the world has ever seen).

Customer Service done beautifully: Vodafone UK
www.twitter.com/vodafoneuk or www.twitter.com/vodafoneukdeals
A recommendation from @r_c, this one.

The Vodafone UK feed is simply a smart piece of Twitter-driven customer support and occasional marketing gumph. But the delivery is flawless: transparent "real" people are giving responses to issues on (I assume) co-tweet, meaning that there's a named respondent in each case.

The smart piece of work is the out-reach that is being done by the team tho. The Tweets to folk with issues are friendly, concerned and yet serious enough to sound like there might be a real person who gives a f%&k and is able to do something to fix customers' issues.

Effective all-round. And a helluva smart process to have pulled off given the back-end interface that is needed to make it happen: tying communications and CS together with tech support. All in a way that feels right for the channel. And all on the scale of Voda.

Impressive.

Outreach and Engagement: Dom, ASDA's PR
www.twitter.com/dom_asdapr
The ever-chatty PR man of Asda.

Smart social engagement, sharing news and engaging with journalists (from the likes of Beth Rigby at the FT, to @moanaboutmen, with whom he had a cheeky "get a dragon to retweet you" challenge).

Top and bottom of it is that, if you're a PR on Twitter, this is how to do media engagement. Folks starting out in the world where social media meets media relations meets blogger relations should watch and learn.

Crowdsourcing: Threadless
www.twitter.com/threadless
Threadless has got the perfect business model to make Twitter the ideal channel to communicate with its users: crowdsourced T designs, voted on by the public, sold back to them.

So it really isn't a huge surprise that they have got a Twitter channel - one of the few - that is almost pure product promotion, but which has a super-healthy following and generates an awful lot of chat.

From people promoting their favourite designs to mates to get them to vote it up to design-watchers tuning in for a bit of graphics eye candy, chat will ensue. Combine that with a bit of "behind the scenes brand personality content" and a spot of Twitter user engagement and Threadless on Twitter just works.

Brand Ambassadorship: Zappos
www.twitter.com/zappos
There is a handful of Twitter-based brands that have gone down in social media legend. First and foremost amongst them is Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh.

As various people have commented, the wonderful thing about Tony's use of Twitter is that the man barely promotes the brand. He uses Twitter as a fan. As any average person who has embraced Twitter would do it. While at the same time ensuring that his twitter persona is very firmly that of CEO of Zappos.

But the fundamental truth - and the reason for Tony's viral success - is that he is someone who is just a bloody good, committed user of the network. And that has rubbed off on the man's brand - personal and corporate.

If a PR agency is suggesting that a CEO takes to Twitter, the Hsieh case would suggest they should do so because they get it and because they enjoy it, rather than because they're doing it as a piece of PR schtick.

How to do it: ENJOY doing it.

Brand Ambassadorship: Berry Bros. & Rudd
www.twitter.com/winematters
A 300+ year old wine merchant hitting Twitter may seem odd. But this is a glorious piece of marketing.

As well as checking out winematters, you might also see David Berry Green and Simon Staples, heads of buying.

All jolly good, a bunch of chaps offering some wine recommendations.

But what this does that others should learn from is turn a business inside-out. What does Berry Bros. have more than anything else (or indeed than anyone else)?: expertise.

And the perfect route to share that expertise and to get it out into the public domain just happens to be Twitter (although their blogs are pretty sharp too).

If you've got a business that you're doing social media that has expertise at the heart of its sales proposition, you might want to take a look at how BBR has gone about exploiting that expertise in a very public, social domain.

The Basics, Done Well: Playstation
www.twitter.com/PLAYSTATIONEU
If you're going to run a pretty bog-standard, albeit chatty, Twitter feed from a big corporate business, this is a template for anyone.

It's nothing particularly revolutionary.

But for an engaged group of fans, it does what it says on the tin: regular news from the brand that might be of interest to users alongside some occasional chat with users.

Will never set the world on fire, but as a 1-0-1 it's a good place to start.

Customer Service done beautifully: Eurostar UK
www.twitter.com/EurostarUK
Smart marketing, CS, corporate comms.

Across a number of Twitter accounts.

Whether handling corporate crisis through @eurostarcomms or promoting the brand through @eurostarUK (manned by the good folk at We Are Social, as Robin prompted me to mention) or handling CS issues through @eurostar, this is a template for multi-level Twitter interaction.

The brand has segmented the need-states of those who might engage with the brand: wanting information, wanting inspiration, wanting resolution. And has created feeds that will deliver against those things.

A solid, strategic approach to Twitter engagement that takes the consumer first.

(big old disclaimer here, it's been one of the Group's clients in the past.)

Twitter-based Fun & Games: Marmite's Marmarati
www.twitter.com/marmarati
Truth be told, I'm not sure that Twitter (982 followers) is really Marmarati's home ground: which is rather more facebook focused (552,000 followers).

That said, the piece of work as a whole is a classic case study in how to come up with a smart brand idea (the secret society of people who REALLY LOVE Marmite) and deliver it in social media: engaging fans through social media.

If you want to know what they got up to, check out this case study from the campaign's architects: We Are Social.

Customer Service done beautifully: South West Airlines
www.twitter.com/SouthwestAir
The South West business does customer service via Twitter.

It's neatly delivered. There are around 1 million followers and the account delivers more Q&A than you can imagine on a daily basis. From CS issues to delays to the odd piece on what's going on around the country.

If you want to see how a business does Twitter at scale, this is another one to study, study and study again.

Their break through moment? Coming across this video of their own rapping flight attendant, which was Tweeted by the @southwestair account into social media history. If they hadn't had the monitoring in place and the user-base in social media, it might never have happened.

ALL About the Sales: Alltop
www.twitter.com/guykawasaki
This one probably breaks my self-imposed "no media brands" rule.

But Alltop isn't a media brand as most folk have known it historically.

And Kawasaki is no average Twitter user: he's like a Twitter lovebomber.

The man has sent around 72,000 Tweets.

But he (like Threadless in so many ways) has a brand that lends itself to being exploited through social media.

Content-rich, regularly updated, always interesting, the Alltop business thrives on delivering content that is going to interest and engage the social media community. And indeed has structured much of its content to deliver content that is going to continue to keep that community engaged.

From time-to-time and in-between Tweeting stories from his social news aggregation site, Kawasaki comments on folks' @ msgs, but broadly speaking it's promotion, promotion, promotion. What's remarkable is that it works.

It's the moo card strategy of engaging borrowed interest gone mad.

Worth a look to learn.

Customer Service done beautifully: Jet Blue
www.twitter.com/JetBlue
The pioneering low-cost airline was an early comer to Twitter.

But the work that they do on it is quite remarkable: customer service par excellence. Off the scale awesome example of how it should be done. There is little if anything else to say about this one. If you're interested in what they do, take a look at this piece (from a while back: they have almost 1.6 million followers now) on what they do. Or this piece on some stuff they do beyond that.

The brand did, of course, have its nadir moment in social media with the nightmare of Steven Slater, the flight attendant who lost it on one of their flights. For quite some time they failed to respond in social media to the affair.

When they did, however, they understandably accepted that they should have said something sooner. But that they had other people's interests to protect: on balance, you have to take your hat off to their approach as being the right thing for the individual, not to mention the firm's legal position.

ALL About the Sales: Dell Outlet
www.twitter.com/delloutlet
If you want to see Twitter-based sales taken to the Nth degree, take a look at Dell Outlet.

The company reckons that it sells $6.5 million in stock through its Twitter presence.

The brand's social media footprint (at the end of last year) across - "Twitter, Facebook and their own Direct2Dell and IdeaStorm – now number 3.5 million and as the firm's "chief blogger" Lionel Menchaca announces proudly, that is "roughly a fan base the size of the population of Chicago"."

It's a staggering number (albeit dwarfed, as Mercedes points out in the piece quoted above, by the company's $12.3 billion total sales figure).

And it's not really all about sales, they have listened and learnt as well. For a brand that was once upon a time the posterboy for social and digital engagement gone wrong (remember DellHell?), it's a helluva turnaround ...

Customer Service done beautifully: Whole Foods US
www.twitter.com/wholefoods
Engage, Engage, Engage. But (like Voda in the UK), on an almighty scale.

That is what the Whole Foods Twitter feed delivers day-in, day-out. Customer service is their reason for being and they deliver it flawlessly: around 90% of what the account does is straightforward Aing of Qs. The rest is dealing with some dissatisfaction.

But it's a bloody sight deeper than that: there are now around 150 Whole Food Twitter accounts: all of them delivering across categories or to localities.

To see Whole Foods' commitment to effective Twitterage, you might also keep an eye of their cheese specialist (@WFMCheese), wine specialist (@WFMWineGuys) or recipe (@WholeRecipes) Twitter feeds.

Then there are all their stores who Tweet happily to customers ... One seriously connected retailer ...

And if you want to know more, have a read of this piece from their Twitterer in Chief.

Comments

[Steve]

The best corporate account I read is http://twitter.com/Betfairpoker . Beautifully written and always surprising and hardly ever mentions poker!

[James Gordon-MacIntosh]

Thanks Steve.

Will take a look at that one and add it in on your recommendation sir!

J.

[Peter Parkes (Skype)]

Thanks for including Skype in this list – as an aside, I’ve been in-house and heading up social media activity at Skype for a little over a year now.

[Holly]

There's some really cool examples here. I especially like UNIQLO's Lucky Counter - after looking at it I also discovered they're doing a viral pinball game (Lucky Machine) with cash and voucher incentives. Not quite social media but a nice little game to help promote the new ecommerce website (http://www.uniqlo.com/uk).

[James Gordon-MacIntosh]

Duly updated, Peter. Thanks for stopping by!

[James Gordon-MacIntosh]

So sorry for the delay in responding Holly. Yes, the lucky pinball is fun for sure. Like it ... Thanks for the comment! J x

[Olivia]

if you want to recruit some social media superstars to pimp you ahead of launch, Twitter is going to be a core part of the strategy.