Twilert makes is easy to follow tweets about your clients. (And your agency.)

One of the best things about the twitterverse is that new apps  pop up to fill needs that the main system doesn’t cover. For client-centric agency types — especially those who grok the warning of the Motrin twitterstorm —manually monitoring twitter (via the search tool formerly know as Summize) has become part of our day. Now you can use Twilert, in much the same way you use Google Alerts.

Motrin, twitter and the two-headed #Hashtag

Seems almost mandatory for me to write about the Motrin twitterstorm. (Dan has a good post here.) This is a perfect example of a gulf between a brand image (that ad) and what became a reputation crisis. Of course, agencies pushing out ads that the target audience doesn't find half as clever as the copywriter does, is tired news. The fascinating freshness, imho, is the power of the Hashtag.

"Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag."

By adding the hashtag #motrinmoms to their tweets, irate bloggers found each other and created a strong, searchable voice that outweighed its actual size. They got to the top of the "trending topics" on twitter (which is how the rest of us found them). Then, their blog posts feed mainstream media, and the results are history. Results literally, as in on Google for a long, long time to come.

It doesn’t matter exactly how many moms were angry enough to contribute. Or that other tag along bloggers (mostly the non baby wearing , male skewed demo, btw) thought they over reacted. The lesson here for our client brands is Hashtags. Keywords you can’t buy. Sounds like  mandatory place to be.

 

Follow my hashtagging trail on twitter
 

Live from SF: Web 2.0 Summit

Wow, here I am in San Francisco. Epicenter of technology. And progressive tech fueled activism. Home! I used to find it a conflict that this conference happens on or around Election Day. This year it all ties together. Get ready for endless new media marketing lessons about the Obama campaign, even though many of us have always picked up on 2.0 communication innovations (like Meetup.com) via grassroots netroots politics.

For us marketers, a fun fact is that the phrase Web 2.0 was actually coined for this conference. And therefore they get to define it. (Talk about a catch phrase going viral; a copywriter’s dream.)

This year, the conference is organized around the theme “Web Meets World”. Which means “...how the Web...might be tapped to address the world's most pressing limits. Or...its most pressing opportunities.” Well I certainly agree that it is the interwebs to the rescue, or rather people using 2.0 technologies, that can change the world. There are some cool start-ups here that I’ll link to in next post. Lots of reporters too. The organizers rock at PR.

More on the conference live (PST) on twitter. Or just follow twitter newbie, Al Gore.