360DigitalInfluence

People love to rant and rave on Twitter. Brands and organizations love to engage with current and potential influencers. The combination is perfect. It allows Twitter to be used in increasingly creative ways and tweets to be shared in the most unexpected places. The following are five creative ways real-time opinion from Twitter is being shared:

1) Retail Stores – Last week I was at a Las Vegas mall when I passed Metropark, a men’s and women’s store that had a live in-store Tweet stream running on multiple television screens in the store as well as in the front window. It was very interesting to see as a consumer that I could walk by the store and read what people were discussing about @MetroparkUSA in real time.

2) Religion – The Mountain Park Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona hosted a four week series that featured Twitter interaction. After creating an instructional video on how to set up a Twitter account, the church’s pastor would ask questions throughout the service and encourage worshipers to respond via Twitter. The pastor would then read several responses out loud throughout his sermon.

3) Sports – Want to tell sportscasters what they should talk about on the air? Well, now you can. ESPN’s show Audibles asks you to guide the hosts’ conversations by sending them Tweets with questions you want them to answer. While announcers select questions from Facebook comments as well, ESPN is continuously thinking of ways to increase fan interaction through social networking.

4) Elections – For the past few election nights, anchors have sent viewers to stage left, their makeshift social media election center (a large screen TV monitor hooked up to the Internet). The center features a reporter reading citizen reactions to the latest election night results. This goes to show that producers feel that viewers aren’t only interested in a professional opinion of the results, but opinions of social media users as well.

5) Award Shows – If there’s a live award show on TV, there’s a great chance you’ll be able to interact with the show via Twitter. Whether it’s live tweets scrolling along the bottom of your screen or celebs tweeting from stage, we’ve seen it all. Check out MTV’s Twitter Tracker from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. The program provided a hub for viewers to tweet about the awards show. There were over 1.7 million tweets about the VMAs and its participants during the awards show.

Twitter is being incorporated into anything and everything that human opinion can be provided on. Receiving real-time opinion on Twitter is becoming more valuable.

What are some creative ways you have seen Twitter being used?