TheMarketingBackpack

So, keeping true to the mission of this blog, I wanted to talk about some of the tools that I’ve been using and how they can be used to market a neat idea or product. When I first used some of them, I wasn’t sure what value they had. One of the less obvious ones was Twitter. When I first signed up, I found it kind of useless to post what I was doing at the moment – who really cared? But after following a few people on Twitter I began to see the cool uses it had.

Twitter: Basically you have 140 characters to describe what you are doing. Most people will use this like the status option in Facebook or MySpace, to tell their friends what they are up to or how cool they are etc. But after following people like Robert Scoble, AmericanCliche, and TheLaughingSquid I saw the “marketing power” of twitter. You can use it like a mini press release feed. Read an interesting article? Write a small comment about it and then paste the link. Attend an interesting event? Post the link or website. Updating your blog? Tell your followers about it. Twitter is really great if you have a lot of followers and if you do really interesting things that people will love to hear about.

Friendfeed: A sort of aggregator of what you are doing on the web (with some limitations). Say you post some photos to Flickr, or write a Tweet on Twitter; Friendfeed will post an update about what you did and where you did it.

Here’s an example: