All A-Twitter

On the job

Away from entertainment's bright lights, Twitter gets down to work in a variety of ways. Online T-shirt retailer Threadless.com lets a stable of designers submit shirt designs, which are then put up to a weekly vote among the larger community of registered Threadless fans and followers. The shirts that win the most votes get produced and sold.

“Our business is built on ongoing dialogue with our members, so Twitter is hugely organic to us,” says Cam Balzer, Threadless marketing vice president. “It's another way to express what it is to be part of our community.”

The company occasionally partners with brands in these design contests — for example, in a recent promotion with Volkswagen to find a T-shirt design around the notion of “pre-loved” cars. In that case, Threadless let its designer community know about the contest through Twitter. Threadless has also produced Twitter T-shirts by soliciting pithy tweets, putting them to a popular vote, and then designing the shirt around the message with the most support.

“We're enlisting the Twitter community to help us with our products,” Balzer says. “That's something almost any company can do.”

Threadless has 1.2 million followers right now. In part, that comes from being one of the accounts Twitter suggests to newbies as a useful or fun follow. But the company leverages that leg-up into a solid community by frequently running contests that award a free “Shirt of the Month” membership to randomly chosen followers who re-tweet — that is, forward to their own followers — a specific posting.

Besides being good for customer buzz, that re-tweet response is often strong enough to get Threadless placed on Twitter's “Trending Topics,” a real-time list of the 10 most tweeted subjects that Twitter fans can see when they use the Twitter Web site or search page.

“I would say brands need to be participating in Twitter if people are tweeting about you, even if they don't know you're listening,” says Balzer. “If we find someone wishing they hadn't bought a shirt from us yesterday because a new batch of designs came out today, we'll send 'em a $5 gift certificate.”

The Basics: WHAT THE TWEET??

CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT TWITTER IS, DOES AND COULD BE? HERE'S A CRASH COURSe

Users sign up for an account and get a user name (@janedoe) and a profile page at Twitter.com. Once logged in on a computer or a mobile phone, users can post updates to their page in 140 characters or less — “tweets.” If these messages are meant for a specific person, they must begin with the proper “@” screen name. Otherwise, everyone who sees that update page can see them.

• Users can go looking for friends, groups, stars and brands to follow using a “Find People” tab. Anyone they choose to follow gets an e-mail notification, and sometimes returns the favor.

  Twitter's native search doesn't go very deep and may miss 50% of the messages. Various third-party platforms hook into Twitter and offer to look harder and deeper for relevant tweets.

• The hashtag system (#) evolved as one way to flag content on a particular topic or intended for a specific purpose. Brands often do this to separate Twitter contest entries from other traffic.

• You can share links via tweets. Since long links may push your message over the character limit, shrink them using a service such as TinyURL.com. And users can also share photos to Twitter by uploading them to a third-party service such as TwitPic.

• FollowFriday has evolved this year as a weekly day to suggest interesting Twitter accounts to the world. The convention has already spawned a Web site, FollowFriday.com, which ranks the most endorsed users.
  — Brian Quinton