Brands Can Tinker With Twitter: So Let’s Tinker With 7/8/9 Gathering…

As I sail into full-time consulting around social media (with video being the obvious focus, given its visceral nature), I can’t help but also hear brands desperate for a Twitter strategy. My former colleague, Marc Monseau, who manages the Johnson & Johnson blog, made headlines for using Twitter to fix a Motrin ad (see AdAge story if you’re registered or learn more here).

Today I learned via my beloved AdAge 3-minute video report about Tinker, which orients information around brands so if you’re Yoplait you could have a live section where people’s tweets are syndicated on your site (sanatized from obscenities and competitors). Okay- maybe there’s not a surging demand for a real-time yogurt discussion, but still worth a glance…

This is especially useful for events because Twitter is oriented around people and not events… so unless everyone uses #BoringDigitalConference on their tweets, it can be hard to surf the microblogs from attendees…. so….

Here’s a Tinker event I’ve created to help facilitate the discussions around the large YouTube gathering in NYC, culminating on the weekend after 7/8/09 (it’s dubbed Gathering789 and other terms). Now various tweets can be connected to similar tweets (even with #tag variations), and the dates can easily be found. Endless possibilities here, and it still links to the 789 website that has videos and blog posts.

I tried a Tinker search for my former brand, Propecia, and it was interesting. Sure you can do a real-time Twitter search at Twitter (which is how I kept informed about the buzz of my Merck departure), but this can help organize and syndicate the brand-specific mentions/events in a more organized format.