During my recent viewing of Inception, I noticed a change in my movie-going experience. Instead of the typical announcement urging us not to chat or talk on our phones during the movie (i.e. “don’t spoil the movie by adding your own soundtrack”), there was a request for viewers not to text or use their phones to stop the glare from distracting other moviegoers.

Despite the warning, the laps of many moviegoers were lit up. Many may have been coordinating dinner plans for after the movie, but the more social media-savvy viewers may very well have been tweeting their favorite lines or in-the-moment reactions to the film.

My daily Twitter feed is full of links to articles people are reading, updates from events they’re attending, or their random thoughts based on the experiences of their day. (Did you know Twitter now sees an average of 600 tweets per second?) As communicators, we’re constantly sharing information and messages with our stakeholders and hoping the right messages will make it onto those Twitter feeds.

What if there was something we could do to prompt stakeholders to tweet about us? And even more than that, what if we could influence what they say?

We’ve recently seen an interesting approach from Intuit. Based on their social media listening, Intuit has seen a jump in traffic on Twitter. They realized much of the traffic was coming during speeches and presentations led by their executives. To capitalize on this behavior, Intuit adjusted their traditional approach to speechwriting to spark even further message “flow.”

They now outline every speech with a number of “bumper stickers” — catchy little phrases of 10 words or less that punctuate key moments in the speech, and get repeated throughout the presentation. This may not be too different from “talking in soundbites,” but instead of trying to appeal to journalists, they are using the language that will capture the attention of stakeholders (aka Tweeters) themselves.

Key ‘bumber stickers’ from CEO speech are picked up by the audience and tweeted during the event. Source: full study on Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment.

Intuit told us, “A couple of years ago, we used to stand in the back of a conference room and try to read the faces of the people who were at our presentations or listen to what people were talking about in the hallways in order to see what really resonated. But now, we just track Twitter, and we get an instant read on what was hot and what was not. And, we can see the downstream effects as other people react to the tweets that people in the audience were posting.”

This is just one example of how a company is adapting to the way information flows in the networked world, and how we in communications can begin to think about how to create content that is more likely to be passed along.

What new approaches has your team tried to spark “flow” among your stakeholders? Anyone else experimenting with Twitter in this way?

CEC Members: Contact your account manager if you’re interested in a further conversation about creating content that flows.