Twitter can be a confusing place. There are so many people, and so much content being shared. Don’t get me wrong, that’s an amazing thing – it makes Twitter one of the most exciting social networks around. But it can be difficult to know where to start, who to follow, and where to get the best content. I’m not going to tell you that this is the definitive list of people you should follow on Twitter – because it isn’t. This is just a collection of people I like, people who make me laugh, and people who share content I love.

• @acarvin – Andy Carvin is a senior strategist at NPR, and an online community organizer. He has been live tweeting the recent events in the Middle East – providing analysis, retweeting people at the scene and always confirming reports before passing them forward. His tweeting has been a truly amazing example of how Twitter can be used to spread news from countries where the press isn’t always that free.

• @HilzFuld – Hillel Fuld is a tech blogger and enthusiast – and an incredible tweeter. He produces and shares content at a speed that leaves me in awe, and is always happy to help or comment on tech questions and stories. Plus, he’s a really nice guy!

• @caitlinmoran – Caitlin Moran has been one of my favorite writers for a long time, and the chance that Twitter gives me to read her snarky comments and funny thoughts on an hour-by-hour basis was not one I could miss. Caitlin tweets such truisms as: “Great when you return from a hot Saturday night party, check your internet history and see the last thing you did was buy Urine Off”; “This song would make even elves puke”; and “My [rugby] training sessions would consist of standing on the touchline in a fur coat, smoking a fag, shouting “RUN and CATCH! RUN and CATCH!””. You can’t argue with genuine wisdom like that.

• @gilescoren – Giles Coren is another writer who I love and who Twitter gives me a chance to stalk more closely. As one of the food writers for The Times (UK), I have been giggling at his restaurant reviews/critiques of society for years. Now I get to giggle at his tweets too – including his honest response about his builders: “Paying builders online, Barclays site with typical lazy phrasing asks, “How much do you want to pay them?” Truthful answer: not much.”

• @RyankHudson – Ryan Hudson draws one of my favorite webcomics – Channelate. When I started using Twitter and didn’t know who to follow, I checked out my favorite websites to see if they had Twitter accounts – and sure enough, Ryan obliged. It’s great seeing the man and the thought processes behind the comics.

• @francescomugnai – Francesco Mugnai is a designer, blogger and teacher from Florence. I had followed his blog for a long time before I started following him on Twitter – he was someone else I found as soon as I started tweeting in a search for people whose tweets I liked.

• @brainpicker – Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, and also writes for other sites including Wired UK, The Atlantic, and Design Observer. Her blog is so interesting, with each short post giving a short history about something you thought you never cared about until you found yourself in the middle of her fascinating description of it. A Pictorial History of Muscular Women, anyone?

• @OMGFacts – I’m not a big fan of automated Twitter accounts, as I see Twitter as a way to interact with others, not as a way to shout out information. This account is one of the few that I follow that disproves that theory. Did I know that Central Australian Walibri men from different tribes greet each other by shaking penises on ceremonial occasions? No. Did I care? No, not really. But do I feel more intelligent now that I know that useless and amusing piece of information? Yes, I do.

• @imrogb – Roger Byrne works in advertising, but his Twitter account focuses on photography and design. He tweets interesting content, and is a great conversationalist on Twitter. In addition, he curates a list of design related tweeters which I also follow – his list is a more passive, yet very comprehensive, way to provide excellent design content to others via Twitter.

• @sarahezekiel – Sarah Ezekiel is my aunt, and also my inspiration. She was diagnosed in 2000 with Motor Neurone Disease (ALS/Lou Gehrig Disease) and, after a rocky start, has become a pillar of the ALS community online. She uses her Twitter account to connect with other people diagnosed with the disease, and to chat to family and friends of those who have been diagnosed or who have passed away. She’s constantly fundraising, working to spread awareness about the disease, and providing support to those around her. In my opinion, this is the perfect use of social media and Twitter.

There are so many amazing tweeters out there, many of whom I could have put on this list. I have had the good fortune to have connected with many amazing people via Twitter, almost none of whom made this list despite being people whose content I love and who I interact with on a nearly daily basis.

Twitter, despite being a network used by millions of people across the world, is a very personal thing – and everyone has their own favorites. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic – who do you love to follow on Twitter?

Joanna is a Content and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0

Post written by Jonah Balfour

This was a very exciting morning in Israel. After more than five years in captivity, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel. It was amazing how all of Israel tuned-in to the news, whether on TV, the Internet, or the social Web. At one point it felt like all Web access had somehow slowed down, probably due to everyone simultaneously refreshing their browsers for more news.

As the events of the day unfolded, Twitter became one of the best sources for instant updates and the latest news. Tweets flew back and forth fast and furious as Israeli twitterers, political pundits, and news organizations covered the story. To social web observers it seemed obvious that #Shalit was bound to become a trending topic. Yet, as the day moved on, it didn’t.

Then I noticed something strange. While “#Shalit” wasn’t a trending topic, “Tel Nof” was. That’s the name of the base they took Gilad to meet the Israeli PM and to be reunited with his family. It seems odd that the name of the base became a trending topic while the much more common #Shalit did not. In fact a search for the phrase “Tel Nof” reveals that it is almost always paired with a mention of Shalit.

It turns out that Twitter’s algorithm to determine trending topics is, well, a bit complicated. The SocialFlow blog took a long look at trending topics after some of the Occupy Wall St. protesters felt they were being censored. They found that becoming a trending topic is not just about sheer numbers, but more importantly about being a breaking story:

“The precise algorithm for determining trends is private, but the basic thrust is that it’s not about volume, or else Justin Bieber would be forever trending. The algorithm adapts over time, based on the changing velocity of the usage of the given term in tweets.”

That may be true, but clearly something isn’t working right when a secondary term is trending and the main term isn’t. Let’s be honest, no one was talking about Tel Nof, but everyone was talking about Gilad Shalit. Wouldn’t it have been strange if Twitter had picked up “dies” from all the tweets that said “Steve Jobs dies” and marked that as a trending topic?

Clearly Twitter has a responsibility to prevent spam and to mark only the truly relevant terms that are making waves on its service. But Twitter is also relied upon to provide an insight into the most relevant and breaking discussions on the Web. It seems that today, Twitter saw what was relevant, but failed to identify it by the proper term.

Jonah Balfour is a Copywriter and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0.

Last week Facebook announced another set of changes to the popular social network. In a surprise move, one of those changes gave the power back to the Facebook user to monitor what photos are tagged of him or her. As most people are trying to ensure that their parents don’t see pictures of them lying on the ground outside a club, passed out due to the drinking of their own body weight in alcohol, this has been greeted with much happiness. It has been seen as a victory for those who value their privacy and were tired of having their private lives splashed across Facebook for everyone to see and comment on.

So privacy has been saved again. Good over evil and all of that. The line between public and private has remained sacred, protected and very much secure.

The thing is, have we not given up the right to privacy already? The dawn of the social media era has changed how we interact with each other as well as how we interact with ourselves. Back in the day, one of the last things many people did before they went to sleep, was write in their private diary. It would not just be a diary of events, but of feelings and life views. Most diaries had key locks or combination locks on them to ensure that only the writer had access to the inner thoughts of the diary and many a friendship was ruined by the intrusion of someone other than the writer reading what was contained within. It is true that, and prepare for a massive generalization, most writers of diaries were girls, but you would get boys who wrote journals too. I, for one, kept a diary when going to my local youth movement’s summer camp. No one has ever read what I wrote, although that could simply be because no one can read my handwriting, but the contents of my camp diary are private.

Cue the start of the social media era and suddenly it became accepted and almost expected for people to have a blog. The difference between a blog and diary, in my opinion anyway, is not very much. Both contain the inner feelings and thoughts of the writer and cover a whole variety of topics from sports to politics to romance. Had a bad break up? Instead of dealing with it with your close friends and family, why not write a blog about it and let the whole world read how badly you were treated! This is where the main difference is between a blog and a diary. A blog is out in the open for anyone to read and even comment on – who needs support from friends and family when you have a stranger living thousands of kilometers away from you post their support for your unfortunate situation.  In February of 2011 there were already more than 156 million blogs in existence. It would seem the line is growing thinner and thinner.

Twitter has also revolutionized the way our private lives interact with the public domain, and by interact I mean how we publicize our private lives. When first launched, Twitter was a computer based platform so unless in front of a computer screen, it was very difficult to tweet. That did not stop thousands upon thousands of users signing up and tweeting about the first random thought that popped into their head.  As technology progressed, it became possible to access one’s Twitter account from any smart phone. Nowadays it is not uncommon to see a tweet from a tweeter that states ‘Waiting the in the line at the bank – man in front of me really smells’ or ‘That was the worst pizza I have ever eaten – #brandfail’. Word of mouth has turned into letter of tweet. If I felt strongly about something, I could tell only those that I chose to but now with Twitter, even people I have not ever met, nor likely to ever meet, will know everything about my life and my daily activities.

The line between public and private, that was once the basis for society, has almost meshed into one ‘anything goes’ line. So yes, I now have the ability to stop a photo of me being tagged on Facebook but everyone knows the story behind it anyway.

Kevin obtained his B.A (Hons) LLB from the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) and has extensive experience in marketing, copywriting and project management from his work in the Non-Profit world. Kevin is an avid sports fan with an unhealthy obsession for Manchester United and the Springboks and will tell anyone who will listen how Albus Dumbledore was the greatest wizard that ever lived.

Yesterday a friend took a picture of me and two other friends sitting together at a coffee shop with all our heads buried in our smartphones. When he was asked why he did this he yelled “This is what these <expletive deleted> phones are making us! We don’t communicate anymore! Every morning before I wash my face I check my phone! It’s not normal!” That got me thinking, is technology changing the very core of human society and communication?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Last Friday was the 30^th birthday of the PC. We even commemorated it here on HP South Africa with a cool time vortex (caution: rickroll coming up). Thirty years ago, you could walk into a store and purchase a PC (or a “desktop calculator” as they were sometimes called then) that would make your life just a little bit easier, if you knew how to use it. Since then, many things have come along to make your life easier, from the Altair that allowed you to build your own computer (BTW, Bill Gates had his first programming gig at Altair back when programming was done by punching cards) to the iPhone (or in my case Android) that you have in your pocket right now. Each and every technological tool created has been made to do one thing: make your life easier.

A couple of days ago we were sitting in a meeting with a client who has an awesome new product and one of our copywriters was sick. We called him on Skype so he could hear the background of the company from the CEO himself. Our client showed us some cool features on our big screen, and instead of explaining to our copywriter what he was showing us, he said “I’ll just share my screen with you later and show you.” Suddenly it hit me. Technology has made our lives so much easier and more efficient that conversation, the most basic (and, granted, primitive) form of communication, is now so inefficient that we feel the need to check Twitter and Facebook while sitting with friends at a café. It’s not that we don’t communicate; I answered a friend’s tweet and liked another one’s post while they were sitting right next to me. It’s just that speaking to only two people is way too much work when I can type something to 350 people, including the two people sitting next to me, while having two conversations on two completely different subjects with both of them, and participating in a huddle with a couple of friends nearby.

So my answer to my friend is this: these <expletive deleted> phones let us communicate better, with more people, and more efficiently. It’s been happening since the invention of the spear; something is invented in order to make life easier and more efficient and soon enough doing the old thing that was common practice (hunting with your hands) seems useless and obsolete. I’m sure that when spears became a thing someone came along and shouted “Look what these <expletive deleted> spears are making us! It’s not normal!” and thank God no one listened to him. That’s why I think sitting at a café with your head buried in your phone is a good thing. What used to be the most common form of communication (speaking) is now simply obsolete.

Shahar has a Master’s degree from the University of Bowser in mushroom kingdom, as a result he is the only Israeli that can finish Super Mario 1 in 11 min 32 sec, very experienced in creative and new-media, internet and tech are his life, has recently successfully graduated from WOW rehab.

I’m still digesting the massive amount of announcements that Steve Jobs and Apple dropped at their recent WWDC keynote, but I was particularly interested in the new built-in Twitter integration that is part of iOS 5. There had been word about this shortly before the keynote so it wasn’t really a surprise to me, nor was it a particularly ground breaking announcement. It’s awesome, to be sure, but the integration with Twitter feels to me like a logical progression for the OS. This isn’t a radical new concept; it’s simply the process of making Twitter a default option throughout the OS. It’s a necessary step for Apple as the whole industry seems to be concerned with the intersection of mobile and social. However, the question on my mind after the announcement was “why Twitter”, or more precisely, “why not Facebook?” I think the answer comes back to one word – onerous.

Let me take you back to just after Apple’s last major social announcement – Ping. This was Apple’s first foray into the social realm with what they described as a social network for music. The only thing truly remarkable about Ping was how unambitious it was. It felt like Apple wasn’t really trying, and a bit like they didn’t really want to try. Steve Jobs has said in the past that Apple doesn’t enter markets where it feels other people are doing a good job. This is why you won’t see an Apple search engine, or an Apple maps service. It’s also the reason we will never see an Apple social network. Apple would much rather work with Facebook and Twitter than compete against them.

So again, why Twitter and not Facebook? When Apple released Ping it had enabled Facebook connect. To find friends on Ping, users would simply need to connect with Facebook and voila – instant friends to share with. But the feature was disabled shortly after Ping launched due to what Steve Jobs described as “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”

The word onerous carries with it a powerful connotation, especially when it passes from the lips of Apple’s high priest and chief reality distorter. Steve Jobs doesn’t seem to me to be a man who is careless with his words, and I think he meant every negative connotation that the word implies. What it means is that he was pissed at Facebook. What do you get when you piss off Steve Jobs? You get the announcement of Twitter integration in iOS 5.

My reading of this move is a bit different than some Apple observers. John Gruber, for instance, views this as “stamp of approval” from Apple of Twitter. There is certainly truth to that and this is a unique move from Apple to integrate so closely with a third-party service. But Apple needs to become more social if it wants to continue to compete against Android and Windows Phone 7, both of which are moving towards tighter social integration.

I’m sure Apple likes Twitter, but Apple knows that the king of social right now is Facebook. The Ping story shows that up until now, if Apple wanted to work with Facebook they had to play by Facebook’s rules. I imagine that’s why the much talked about Facebook integration in iOS hasn’t materialized yet. Facebook is holding the cards right now in social and Apple doesn’t like what they see as Facebook’s onerous terms. So what does Apple do? It gives a huge boost to one of Facebook’s main challengers and tries to level the playing field a bit.

I still think some kind of partnership between Apple and Facebook is inevitable. The recent announcement with Twitter strikes me as even more evidence of that. But Apple wants to gain just a bit more leverage vis-à-vis Facebook before the partnership is formed.

Jonah Balfour has diverse experience in communications and journalism and honed his skills in marketing writing while working at SPEEDbit. Jonah is an avid fan of technology and social media with a special interest in all things Apple. Jonah currently works at Blonde 2.0 as a Community and Content Manager.

Starting tomorrow, each Tuesday, a different Blonde 2.0 employee will publish a guest post and share his insights. Posts will feature new apps, add-ons, reviews, tips and tricks and much more. You’ll have the pleasure of hearing many different views on the most innovative social media tools from the social media experts themselves.

Awesome new app? We’ll let you know about it. Cool internet add-on? We’ve got you covered. New search engine you need to try? We’ll direct you to it. Besides providing exposure to the most up-and-coming media services, the Blonde 2.0 team will be providing a plethora of information about the best social media marketing strategies. Get ready for some seriously exciting social media talk. Enjoy!

Fotobabble launched its new iPhone app today, allowing people to add voice to the photos they send and share with friends and family via Email, Twitter, Facebook or an iPhone. With the new Fotobabble iPhone app, users can easily create talking photos within seconds with a few clicks on a Web browser or their iPhone.

The possibilities of what one can do with talking photos are simply endless, since adding life to photos is a tool truly everyone can enjoy and benefit from. As if the experience of sharing photos is not fun enough, knowing I can add my voice to a photo I want to share really allows the viewer to share the memories with me. A few cool memories I look forward to capturing my voice & sharing with others: a friend’s live wedding engagement and sharing it with family; sending a picture to my roommate with my voice describing the perfect couch for our living room; recording my voice in a home-made greeting card or send a talking postcard from my vacation to Hawaii. Fotobabble gives a whole new meaning to the famous quote: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Creating and sharing a “Fotobabble” takes seconds, is free to use and is now available for users who are out and about with their iPhones. After downloading the free Fotobabble iPhone app, users just upload a photo and record their voice directly through their computer’s microphone to create a talking photo. They then have the option to select an existing photo or a snap a new one and then record their voice. Whether using a computer or an Phone, users can share talking photos via Email, Facebook, Twitter, or embed them into a blog or Website.

Kamal Shah, CEO of Fotobabble, noted that there are tens of billions of static photos on the Web without voice or sound – three billion photos of which are uploaded to Facebook each month alone! “Using Fotobabble, people and businesses can greatly enhance these images with the energy and emotion of voice” – says Shah.

Fotobabble for Fun & Communication:

Fotobabble for Business:

Businesses can also utilize Fotobabbles to promote their product, engage with customers online more effectively or to increase the number of visitors to their Website, blog or Facebook page. Fotobabbles are easily embedded anywhere on the Web and greatly improve how images are presented and experienced online for your customers.

Brand and ad agencies may use Fotobabble as a social media marketing platform. Fotobabble’s flexibility makes it easy to build customized viral marketing campaigns that are more engaging than text or static photos and are much simpler than video to create and share. Brands can build truly unique campaigns using Fotobabble in contests, Facebook, Twitter and blogs – to name a few.

Companies and celebrities can leverage the power of Fotobabble by creating talking photos to raise awareness for their brand and better engage with their customers and fans.

Fotobabble takes photo sharing to a whole new level. No software is needed to download the app, since Fotobabble supports PCs, Macs and the Apple iPhone, making it easy for people to create talking photos and share them with friends, family, their business – or with the whole world. You may download the free Fotobabble iPhone App here to start adding life to your static photos.

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0.

Providing incentives for fans and followers to take part in the community is a must when brands take a part in the social media world. A brand should be ready to compensate fans who promote its name both by social incentives as discussed in this post and also by giving fans prizes. In the end of November, early December, we unleashed HP Israel’s first giveaway campaign, asking our fan base to participate in a creative contest that would offer them a chance to win a new HP Mini laptop (the Mini 110c). We wanted to emphasize the product’s easiness of mobility and asked our fans to tell us where they would take their laptop if they won it. We encouraged fans to be as creative as possible, giving them the option to upload videos, sound clips, photos and graphic materials to the fan wall as their contest submission. The response rate was overwhelming and we were amazed at how much fans invested in their creations in order to win. We received over 630 entries within 3 weeks time. The winner of our competition was a creative song writer Nadav Harel who wrote an enthusiastic song about HP: HP song: Cute Little Computer. Nadav received recognition and praise from the community (social incentive) and a new laptop. The HP laptop contest did wonders for our activity and growth of the HP Facebook Fan Page. Our community grew to over 2,580 fans.

Campaigns held on twitter also encouraged HP fans to become more involved in our community. We asked our followers to tweet us a personal experience they had with an HP product. The creators of the three most creative tweets of personal experiences they had with HP products were awarded a bluetooth mouse known as “The Dragon.” During the two weeks of our twitter campaign, HP Israel’s twitter community grew by more than 140 followers.
With twitter, we continually monitor what people say about HP PSG’s products and provide assistance in real time. Below, a user complained that he had not received his computer from the service lab on time. HP Israel quickly intervened to fix the problem and everyone came out of this story happy.

It is always exciting to build a brand’s community from the ground up and watch our marketing efforts and activity grow within the social sphere.

We have learned a few lessons along the way and continue to learn daily from our valued community members.

A few tips for the newbies who haven’t yet led any social media campaigns:

1) Listen to what people have to say about your brand and be responsive to their needs. Don’t be defensive. Be attentive.

2) Always remember to be transparent and honest with the members of your community. Make sure that if you promise something, you make it happen. Don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong – people appreciate that from a brand.

3) When creating contests, make sure the rules are loud and clear. There’s nothing worse than bitter fans angry after a contest’s rules weren’t made clear in advance.

4) Remember that building a community takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an online community. Enjoy each one of the phases you go through when building your community and learn from them.

We live in a wonderful age today where brands can interact and have an open communication channel with customers and potential customers. I am happy to share our experiences with the building of one such community. An online community just like an offline community needs to be nurtured with delicate care and fed with content, activity and live discussion at all times in order to keep it buzzing and this is what we aim to achieve above all.

The lecture I enjoyed in particular was Yaniv Golan’s (CTO of Yedda)  “The 140-characters Netscape” where he stated:

“I believe that in 2 years the Twitter brand will be in the same position as the Netscape brand is in now: Twitter will be credited with starting the revolution, and paving the road for followers (pun intended). But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor position in the market with other players taking the lead (or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist).”

It’s an interesting position and definitely a realistic one. What do you think? Do you see each of the big players creating their own twitter-like services? Do you believe like Yaniv that twitter should switch to a wordpress type model? Check out the video below.

Recently, I noticed a friend of mine following a food truck company on Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t even know food trucks were still around – let alone had Twitter accounts! Food vendors always reminded me of a place where starved businessmen would run to grab a quick bite in TV sitcoms. I realized I knew very little about this business, so I began to do some research, as the concept of food trucks’ branding and marketing tactics on Twitter began to intrigue me. I was amazed at the amount of information I found online revolving food vendors’ online presence and I quickly grew an appetite to write a new post.

Street food vendors, trucks and carts have been around way before the time of Twitter – so it’s evident that their primary source of growth and ways of  promoting locations on an hourly basis is not solely done through Twitter (most of them have developed websites with full menus and directions to daily location stops). On the other hand, since Twitter is now available as a means of marketing and promoting brands, food vendors have quickly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are utilizing its real-time status updates to their advantage. According to Ann Handley from Mashable, “a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business” – in her article Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter. With the help of Twitter, street food vendors can promote their precise stopped locations and what they are serving throughout the day by tweeting to the hungry public.

Many brands are on Twitter but don’t know how to engage with their followers or create constant dialogue to keep them coming back to read about company news or industry updates. When searching for street food vendors’ presence on Twitter, I found that most of them didn’t have more than 2,500 followers – and some had as few as 250 followers. Since their target markets are “geographically constrained” – says Ann, you won’t find food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers. For street food vendors, “1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business that 100,000 less-engaged people.” There are exceptions of course – like Kogi Korean BBQ –  an extremely successful Korean BBQ taco truck that has a dynamic website filled with photos, videos, a blog, and also a Twitter account with almost 50,000 followers! According to an article in the LA Times – Living section featuring this successful taco truck,  Kogi brings in “300 to 800 people each time it parks (often several times in an evening).” But overall, street food vendors have to do much more than just “follow” people on Twitter in hopes of gaining a customer or two – for it doesn’t matter how big the list is if they don’t make it to the food cart.

For street food vendors, it is about finding the right followers in order to ensure a successful lunch hour. There are a few important tips that food vendors must keep in mind in order to get proper exposure in general – and most importantly, before lunch time when its their busiest time for sales.

First, they must know who their target market is. If the local taco stand or hot dog cart tends to remain in the Los Angeles region, for example, roaming from one college campus to another within the same county boundaries, their target audience is specifically people who live in Los Angeles and attending students of those colleges. If the food cart tends to post up near local museums, on the other hand, their target market is much wider and appeals to a variety of crowds. In general, it is crucial to know who their target market is and where these customers roam in order to ensure a high attendance to their parked food cart.

Next, street food vendors must create a tasty demand for their products while simultaneously creating a sense of urgency in their tweets. Some vendors post a brief menu of their available foods or how many items they have left before they run out for the day to create that sense of urgency in the customer’s potential purchase and gets their mouth watering for the vendor’s food (if they can throw in a quick link to a picture of their melting grilled cheese sandwich or their sizzling hamburger, this helps wonders!). According to Ann, food vendors must “communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customer’s needs.”

Food vendors must humanize their brand in order to reach out to their customer’s hungry heart. Monitoring conversations online is key in this business and goes a long way in terms of keeping customers feeling appreciated and humanizing the brand. Responding to customer’s comments and questions in real-time is crucial to keep the business going successfully and they should listen to customer’s suggestions and feedback with the use of Twitter and use this vital information as a resource for product development and ways to improve their business. According to Ann, food vendors must “reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.”

And now, its all about continuous open communication. Twitter’s real-time social platform allows food vendors to be in regular, instant communication with its customers and keep them informed on news and updates – even if the news is not in their favor (for customers respect honesty and would rather know the truth than come hungry and be let down). Whether food vendors publicize their locations and hours on Twitter or send a tweet about how they didn’t find parking on the street, communication is key to keep the customer engaged and coming back for more tasty treats.

Done correctly and with style, Twitter goes a long way in having the ability to connect customers with their business in an immediate, intimate level. But since Twitter is only one social media tool for food vendors to utilize for promoting their brand, like any marketing efforts, spreading the word about their tasty foods is done best when integrated with other valuable tools – like having a company blog, a dynamic website and by reaching out to the blogosphere for other companies to write about their products. Now, Twitter is simply another great resource for food vendors to be able to reach out to their community in a quick fashion with real-time updates and tasty tweets that bring hungry customers to their cart simply because they feel they have to save the last, lonely hot dog from the stand before closing time.

Is it lunch time yet?

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0