by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

That is the question. With a million and one answers.

Twitter, the 140-character micro-blogging site, has generated the largest social media tsunami of the past year.

Pundit opinion runs the gamut from the greatest thing since…the last greatest thing on the Internet…to a debilitating waste of time for both Twitterer and follower.

The real question is, “What is it good for?”

At this point, it seems that Twitter is best for:

• A thought leader whose opinions or even daily insights are worth reading
• A source of fast-changing, frequently-updated news, data or information
• A celebrity, athlete, politician or other high-visibility figure with a fan base that cares about she or he is thinking about or doing
• A retail business whose loyal customers are on the lookout for the latest deals, new products or special offers

Oh yeah, then there’s my dog Mollie. She also has her own Twitter profile. She’s dumb as a bag of hammers, but as they say, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

On a serious note, Twitter also has merit for publications and other content sources that hope to attract readers by teasing out their content, tweet by tweet. Twitter also helps foster community among people with shared interests, from road cycling to interior design. Brands are exploring creative ways, including polls and contests, to enhance their overall visibility via Twitter.

Twitter-land is a wild and wooly landscape. Its few rules and regulations means that it’s easy for squatters to use any trade name they want, so for merely defensive reasons to protect one’s brand, it makes sense to register several permutations of a company’s name or product name. It’s all free, so the barrier to abuse is low, but thankfully the cost of defensive maneuvers is also low.

The long term utility and implications of Twitter probably still remain to be seen, from both a commercial as well as sociological perspective.

I’ve already begun to hear young adults say Twitter is a waste of time. But I’ve also heard of Twitter addicts who send tweets to friends on their Blackberries…while they’re having dinner together!

Here at The Creative Alliance, after some initial skepticism, we’ve taken an agnostic approach, taking the time to evaluate whether there’s enough potential ROI for a client to not only set up a Twitter account, but to invest in maintaining a Twitter presence. A full 60 percent of Twitter profiles get abandoned, and this is not just individual pages. Many companies, jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, have learned that staying interesting and current is a lot harder than it looks. Sure it’s free…but it can also be very expensive.

by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

The National Geodetic Survey recently announced that the famed “Four Corners” marker identifying where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet was actually misplaced by roughly 1,800 feet to the west. Granted, the spot was identified in 1875 by land surveyors who did an astonishing job given the tools they had to work with.

But it’s been wrong for over a hundred years.

So millions of tourists, posing in all those photos with a hand or foot simultaneously in four different states actually are only touching two states.

Much like the improved accuracy of the Four Corners placement gained by using GPS technology, it is necessary to periodically reassess an organization’s brand to validate its position with an evolving audience. Over time, even while core values and virtues remain immovable, their translation into cognitive and emotional brand associations needs to be refined.

Just the other day, we had the privilege of meeting with a client for precisely this purpose: a check-up to see how his market, his audience and the world in general had changed since the last time his organization’s brand was developed.

As with the many owners, founders and CEOs of organizations that we work with, we plumbed the depths of our client’s brand and found new insights that could speak with a fresh, relevant and persuasive voice to his evolving marketplace.

Like the Geodetic Survey, the re-branding process requires moving the brand “markers” to a more accurate position. The shifts usually aren’t huge, but they are crucial to a company’s future success.

by David Heitman, President of The Creative Alliance

Seconds.

That’s often all you have to captivate a visitor to your website.

People subconsciously scan a page and make decisions about not only what they see, but what they expect to find if they stay and keep clicking.

Try it yourself. Pull up a site you’ve never seen before and pay attention to how your eyes scan the page and the conclusions you draw about the site and its content in the first three seconds.

This tendency to a quick scan and digestion of information hierarchy when visiting a website is why video is so useful in fast-tracking the visitor’s experience, especially a visitor disinclined to read long pages of text.

Seeing the opportunity to catch a video clip can stop many visitors long enough to click the video’s link. The video better cut to the chase pretty quickly, but at least the user is engaged at this point.

A big decision you’ll have to make is whether YouTube quality video is going to get the job done or if professional production will set your company apart from competitors.

We generally steer clients away from the overly informal YouTube approach, unless of course they want to appear informal for strategic reasons. Sure, YouTube thrives on informality. It’s fun. But it’s also why Google is losing money on it: serious companies with big ad spends have held back from investing in a medium that is so rife with amateurism.

Professional-quality video is bound to make a far better impression, and certainly communicates that an organization spent more than 200 bucks on a video camera.

High quality video suggests that a company believes in its own message enough to deliver it with precision and style, and has the financial resources that suggests staying power for the future.

It’s subtle, but it’s something people notice.