Businesses are using social media tactics to varying degrees of success according to the B2C vs. B2B research results from MarketingProfs.com. Also, many of  Loic Le Meur's (Seesmic CEO) predictions like "Corporations will have entire teams devoted to Twitter and status updates" are already taking form. New roles and additional responsibilities are being created throughout organizations to include both employees and customers in social media engagement beyond just a 'community mangager' position as highlighted well in Amber Naslund's recent article.  According to theNEXTWEB, Starbucks has a very strong social media strategy which offers a great way to illustrate how TipTop is being used today to help small and large companies:

• effectively use resources and save costs by easily identifying the most influential people on Twitter related to your products or services using targeted keyword searches, 
• quickly evaluate feedback from PR campaigns and messaging through real-time social media sentiment trend analysis,
• easily massage real-time brand sentiment through key messaging on Twitter and social media engagement tools like Re-Tip.

1. One way to influence how others see your company's product, service or brand in TipTop search results is to Re-Tip, Retweet or Reply to people's 'Tip tweets' or 'piT tweets'.

2. People supportive of you are then featured as Top People on Twitter indicating that they are experts, influencers or actively engaged with your product, service or brand on Twitter. You can energize these people some more by using the Tip off feature in TipTop.

3. Quickly identify PR problems and opportunities using TipTop's Sentiment Trends chart or reviewing links from Top Pages on the Web. After reviewing the trend chart,
move the slider to get the search results from the corresponding period of time.  You can then Filter Tips by specific topics and see Tip tweets and piT tweets and the people associated with the observed shift in sentiment or buzz. You can do this for your own brand and product as well as of those of your competitors.

Large and small companies find it easy to use TipTop to conduct product, brand, and benchmarking research through:

• product, brand, or company keyword searching for tweets, trends and tips like "from:starbucks", "Pete's coffee", or "cafe latte".
• research short term sentiment trends and reactions associated with news about a "Starbucks barista" or promotional campaigns like the "Starbucks Love Project".
• reading product and service feedback directly from people who are tweeting about topics important to your company like "@starbucks", "starbucks coffee", "starbucks london", or "starbucks facebook".

For some more research ideas, you can also read a recent post on GrowMap's blog, "How to Use TipTop for Real-Time Market Research".

In this new year, companies big and small need to be proactive in managing their online personas, marketing campaigns and product sentiment on social media platforms like TipTop. We are here to help you and your business achieve great success this year.  Now that you are aware of the rich possibilities, we hope to see your corporate presence emerge stronger on TipTop profile pages like the one for Starbucks which are viewed by tens of thousands of our users each month.

What also makes TipTop unique is that our solution and platform is made available to everyone in the world free of charge.  Many businesses today spend large amounts of money on comparable services that appear to offer much less than what we offer for free. Please do not hesitate to contact us directly so that we can also tell you about our premier solutions which can be made available to you for a charge.

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team