President-elect Barack Obama has started a social media movement among world leaders.  Among those tweeting are Great Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Vice President Al Gore and Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Gore, who signed up for Twitter on November 6 already has nearly 20,000 followers.  Although Netanyahu only has 192 followers as of today, it’s pretty cool to see tweets in Hebrew, a language thousands of years old.  

President-elect Obama was named the Marketer of the Year by Advertising Age, in part for his effective use of social media tools to engage the voting public.  But he hasn’t tweeted since Election Night. 

Other world leaders who have recently joined Twitter seem to think the medium is beneficial after an election is won.  Even after a term of office is complete.

So, what are you doing, President-elect Obama?  Now that you’ve won, do you think there’s no appetite for what you’re up to?  Think again.

Businesses of all types are joining the Twitter craze as a way to communicate directly with their customers. We recently participated in a webinar offered by Bulldog Reporter and led by two social media gurus from Ogilvy. For those who chose not to pay the $300, here are some highlights:

Who’s using Twitter?

Twitter receives more than 3 million unique visitors per month and has grown 5 percent per day on average since September. Sixty percent of Twitter users are male.  Twitter’s largest age demographic is 35 to 44 who make up 25.9 percent of the total user base.

Twitter is being used by business for the following purposes:

1. Customer Relations (e.g. comcastcares w/ nearly 5K followers)
2. Crisis Management (e.g. JetBlue w/ about 6K followers)
3. Corporate Reputation Management (e.g. Zappos w/ about 20K followers)
4. Event Activation (e.g. twitter #votereport w/ 11,000 tweets)
5. Issue Advocacy (e.g. redcross w/ more than 2K followers)
6. Product Promotion and Sales (e.g. delloutlet w/ more than 2K followers and sales of $500K)
7. Internal Communications (via Yammer)

Public relations professionals are using Twitter to pitch the media using a technique called twitpitch, which was coined by social media impresario Stowe Boyd.

There was plenty of other information shared, such as the rules of engagement, the ins and outs of developing a handle and top Twitter tools. The bottom line is that using Twitter as an effective corporate communications tool requires a commitment. A company needs to understand the culture of the Twitter community, be transparent in its intentions and engage in a two-way dialogue. You can’t simply create a handle and broadcast your messages without participating in the conversation. Not for long anyway. Along those lines, a company needs to follow its followers. When I signed up to follow Barack Obama, I immediately received a note saying “he” was following me.

Talking directly to consumers through social media is changing the way public relations gets done. And Twitter continues to expand its reign of influence every day. By the way, my handle is rosecomm. See you on Twitter.