Dell

Dell announced that it had made more than $3,000,000 in sales from Twitter followers who clicked through its posts to its web sites to make purchases using their @delloutlet sells refurbished products at reduced prices, and use twitter as a way to message out coupons, clearance events and new information.

The incentive to follow @delloutlet is to receive information about reduced priced goods. Dell started to tweet about discounted goods when they had around 11,000 followers.

Their followers responded by re-tweeting @delloutlet messages to their followers, and their numbers rose to around 600,000 in two years. Using their propriety tracking technology Dell estimates their twitter account @delloutlet is responsible for $3M of sales.

You can find out more from Dell’s website: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/06/11/delloutlet-surpasses-2-million-on-twitter.aspx

Square Space

Square space created a “gigantic THANK YOU to all of their favorite Squarespace fans” by offering them an Iphone. All their fans had to do was send a tweet with the #squarespace tag to be eligible to win a new iPhone.

Using this approach Square Space became a top trend during the first three days of their campaign. This helped them reach to 35,000 followers.

The use of #squarespace hashtags while explaining why one would want to win an Iphone became the viral device for the promotion to spread.

This illustrates in very simple, and raw terms how Twitter can be used to promote a brand by offering an incentive.

Spymaster

Spymaster is a social game based on Twitter. Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in spymaster, the more
network is.

You can make money, buy guns, assassinate other players, and collect safe houses.

Folks at overstated ran a sample study with random users which discovered that an average user with 120 friends on facebook maintains relationships with around 15 people. Perhaps even more importantly there is more one way communication than reciprocal communication due to the stories being published on the news feed. All the more reason to ensure your brands message gets across clearly in the news feed. To find out more about how they undertook the study, and what the terms mean visit their website

We have just completed producing the visuals for Saint Etienne’s ‘Fox Base Alpha’ tour.

The first gig was at Glasgow’s ABC where The Scotsman Newspaper described the visuals as a “…magical tableau of nostalgia” which I think sums them up very nicely.

All the same currently it is very difficult not to notice Twitter in the media. The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick has just published an interview with the US based singer and songwriter Rob Thomas. The interview was conducted on the social networking site Twitter.

And perhaps you might have heard of the first twitter message sent from space by the astronaut Mike Massimino.

It will be interesting to see when such powerful demonstrations of Twitter are taking place in media how the use and take up of Twitter will fare in the future. Perhaps more importantly when Twitter is receiving such coverage in the media can you afford not to be part of the conversation?