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That means that there is a potentially free (money, not time) communication channel to reach more than 5mm American adults every day.

Should you use it? Probably, but also keep in mind your specific demographic and their use of Twitter.

Also keep in mind your geographic area, and the local use of Twitter (especially if you are a retail location). Do your customers use Twitter? Daily? Do they retweet or reply?

Finally, keep in mind all of your other marketing channels and how effective they are on an ROI basis. Even if Twitter isn’t right for you now, keep an eye on it, as it will only become more common as time goes on.

If your market is that 18-24 (and really 15-18 and 24-35, if we think about it), that changes the calculus on whether or not to try location-based promotions, a mobile version of your site, or even a mobile app.

Gap Promo Shows Location Deals Need Work

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with location-based offers, but that there are a few considerations.

1. Do you have reason to suspect that a quorum of your customers/potential customers use Foursquare/Places/etc.? Managing and maintaining an active social media presence and/or mailing list will let you ask this question directly.
2. Does your offer explain itself well enough for people to take advantage of it? Are you trying to generate interest among early adopters or just get more people in your door?
3. What is your plan for managing customer reactions when they don’t understand the offer correctly? If your goal was to generate foot traffic, and a customer has come in without officially “checking in”, does it really matter?

And the list goes on beyond that, of course, but without answering those basic questions, perhaps another campaign would be a better choice for generating foot traffic.

PS: To be fair, the promotion was still a success for Gap, and a great first trial for Facebook Places deals, as this quick summary on FastCompany shows.

Social Media platforms are incredibly popular and therefore a necessary part of any web content plan. You can’t participate on Facebook, Twitter, etc. without a roadmap for what you are going to publish, when, and who’s responsible for it. This doesn’t mean planning out each individual Tweet in advance, but it does mean understanding what is and is not helpful from the perspective of helping the team accomplish its goals. It is especially important because too often businesses diving into social media do so by using it to broadcast messages, when the real purpose of, and success stories in, social media involve listening to and interacting with fans/customers.

Twitter should primarily be used to provide news, behind-the-scenes info and pictures, and answer fans’ questions in real-time. While it should be used several times per day year-round, it provides the most value to fans (and therefore sponsors) just before, during, and just after races. Not even live TV, radio, or cycling media text updates can provide a complete picture of everything that’s happening at a race, making team-supplied updates a valuable commodity. Since races are incredibly hectic, a plan needs to be in place for who is responsible for tweeting, what they can and cannot say, and, if they have to stop to care for a rider, who steps in to let fans know why the stream has gone quiet. One thing I have yet to see, but would be a fantastic use of Twitter, would be a staff member answering questions during the race about what is going on. Hard? Yes. Sure to generate growth in engaged, interested followers? Definitely.

Where Twitter is the live update and interaction stream, Facebook is the place to cultivate deeper connections with fans. Its robust capabilities to share news, images, and video, and for fans to share the same with you, creates a unique environment where you can interact on a meaningful level. It provides the ability to create an incredibly detailed portrait of your technology savvy fans through polls, surveys, and day-to-day interactions – it is the environment online where people feel the most comfortable sharing personal information. This also makes it a great place to introduce your sponsors to fans in a meaningful way. Polls and contests are ubiquitous and expected, so don’t seem so much like the interruption marketing we all hate so much – just be careful not to overdo it! While the creation of a Facebook page is simple, the maintenance of it (which is the critical part of success), is time intensive. Even though updates can be less frequent than on Twitter, because it is a less anonymous medium, they take longer to create and fan interactions must be more personal.

Video is one of the most effective media for attracting fans, but means frequently updated content, which can quickly use up server space and bandwidth, the two potentially large variables in Internet costs. Fortunately, hosted platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Ustream provide a cost-effective way to provide video content on a consistent basis, and also to allow fans to post their own videos, further drawing them into the experience. The quickly falling price of quality video components has driven the cost of video down from the 10s of thousand of dollars into the low hundreds, with little discernible loss in quality. Ubiquitous Internet access makes it possible to upload video from virtually anywhere, but has created the expectation on the fans’ part that video will be uploaded from anywhere. Because of that, a simple, realistic plan for uploading video on a regularly scheduled basis is a requirement of any modern web content strategy.

But, as with most things in life, it’s not quite so black and white. The US Twitterverse alone is expected to cross 25million users in 2010, meaning that being found within that crowd is going to become harder and harder. People follow more and more folks, and unless you’ve already got a name, even your good content can get lost in the shuffle. One of the solutions, especially if you’re trying to use Twitter as a marketing channel, is to build a huge follower count knowing that some percentage of those people actually will see what you say. You can afford to only have 10% of your followers see what you write if you have 10,000 of them, right?

Most of these follower auto-generators sell themselves on that principle – you need a big following, so pay us money to get one for you! With varying degrees of accuracy and targeting, they work by following other twitterer’s followers. Going on the theory that 50% of people automatically follow anyone who follows them, if the software can follow 500 people per day for you (without tripping Twitter’s spam filters), that’s 250 new followers every day – bingo!

Like I said, my first reaction is to go running away from these damn spam bots. This isn’t growing my list organically, this is gaming the system. It’s just not right!

But life isn’t that cut and dried. What if the software followed the followers of your competitors? Sure, that might be a bit bold, but if they’re interested in what your competition has to say, won’t they be interested in you? What if you could target keywords, so the software picked people that were clearly interested in what you have to say? In a way, you are actually doing them a service, assuming you have something to write about. After all, what good is a storefront on Broadway if you don’t have a sign out telling people what you do!?

In the end, it all comes down again to having a plan for posting content, interacting with the community, and being useful. If you can’t do that, beating AplusK’s follower count won’t do you the slightest bit of good. So, build yourself a plan, write some great stuff, and if you buy yourself some followers, I promise not to gag reflexively.

Once upon a time, a cool website was a “nice-to-have” element of a cycling team’s marketing assets. But as individuals and corporations both large and small lead the way onto the social web, it has become a vital core of the marketing portfolio. Complicating matters even more is the speed at which web trends and technologies develop. Twitter and Facebook were nice-to-have elements last year, this year they are a must-have. Within the next year, some new technology that is just on the fringe now will become a vital element of a sports marketing portfolio.

Sadly, you can rarely look to traditional marketing and PR firms for support in keeping on top of the web. Some agencies have areas of competence, and some digital agencies can create spectacular looking websites, but they usually come at a price and rarely understand the unique opportunities cycling presents to teams and their sponsors. Of course, if you are concentrating full-time on running a team, you don’t have time to keep up with what works, where fans are, and how they interact with each other, you, and your sponsors. So you put up a quick blogger “website”, or if you’re lucky a WordPress or other CMS-based website, posting content in the form of race reports that get written by whoever has the time or was at the races that week. There’s no season-long plan, little adoption of the variety of inexpensive multi-media tools, and too often a lack of follow-through (how many teams last posted content in September, August, or even July of 2009?).

The move of corporate marketing dollars from traditional media outlets to online and customer engagement outlets demands that sponsored properties create and manage modern online media programs, regardless of time-intensity. This series outlines a strategy for creating an engaging team website, integrating it with social media outlets, and populating all of them with content that engages fans, delivers value to the current sponsors, and establishes a framework that increases the value of the team to existing and future sponsors.

This series will cover four separate areas teams need to consider when developing a strategy for creating web content:

• The website as an online hub
• Connecting with social media
• Integrating Multi-media
• Measuring, measuring, measuring

We won’t talk about everything in detail, and we won’t cover ever last potential item, idea, or tactic. The idea is to give you an idea of what the landscape is like, what the basics are, and give you a way to measure yourself against a benchmark. The idea is that you can improve in a few areas depending on time and budget, deliver more value to your sponsors (justifying more money), and take the next set of steps. Hit me up in the comments or on Twitter if you have questions, thoughts, or topics you’d like to make sure I cover.

The problem is pretty straightforward: Jokes that are funny when you’re in your mid-teens tend not to be funny to other groups – in this case women, or most adults in general. But with some very quick searching, I found this prospect was not alone; some of his peers also left an unseemly electronic breadcrumb trail that, I would have to expect, could illicit [sic] some pretty damning questions when the NHL draft combine comes up in the summer.

To further complicate matters, you not only have to worry about what you say, you also have to worry about what your friends say. This, of course, is more of a problem on services like Facebook where mutual consent is required than on Twitter, where you can’t possibly be expected to be held accountable for your followers. What this means is that, like the rest of your public communications, you need to have a process and strategy for establishing friend connections, creating and posting materials (text, photos, videos), curating what other people post to your wall, and managing your privacy settings.

My process and strategy for posting on the blog and/or Twitter is fairly simple – I call it the Mom Test. Basically, would my Mom be offended if she were to read this? Not “tut-tut-that’s-not-nice” but actually “can’t-look-her-in-the-eye” offended. If it fails that test, it doesn’t get posted, period. Same goes for things that get posted on my Facebook wall. Same goes for photos and videos (I’m lookin’ at you, Iinterbike!).

My Facebook friending strategy revolves around actual connections. Family obviously makes the cut, friends that I’ve known, and work connections that I have a more-than-professional relationship with. People that I ran into that one time at a race or bar don’t make the cut, nor do people I quickly did a project for (they end up on LinkedIn). If I actually had success in any of my sporting endeavors, all of those people’s friend requests would have been directed to a Facebook Fan Page with a polite note saying something like, “my friend list is confined to close, personal friends and family. I have a fan page, and look forward to connecting with you there!” Nice and polite.

The curation strategy goes back to the Mom Test. If it’s written on my wall and would offend Mom, it comes down. That goes for both the personal page as well as the fan page.

Finally there is the matter of privacy settings. My personal preference is to set everything to only be visible to Friends, and remove the ability for others to tag me in photos and videos. Especially because images can be taken out of context, you don’t want to be explaining away photo after photo. Make sure your settings notify you every time you’re tagged in a photo, and if it doesn’t pass the Mom Test, remove the tag and/or ask the poster to take the photo down.

That prescription might sound terribly restrictive, but it really is the best way to nip problems in the bud before an employer, team, or sponsor walks away from you.