When was the last time you cancelled your Super Bowl party because your favorite team wasn’t playing in the game? That was the question posed by Michael DiLorenzo, the National Hockey League’s social media and digital communications manager, at the Business Development Institute’s Social Integration breakfast Wednesday.

DiLorenzo explained that one the challenges faced by the NHL is convincing fans to “activate nationally” during the Stanley Cup playoffs — that is, getting people to care and watch playoff games even if their local or favorite team isn’t playing. So when a couple innovative fans came up with the idea to have a “Tweet Up” for the 2009 playoffs, the NHL ran with the idea. Since then, #NHLtweetup has become a great example of how marketers can use Twitter not only as an engagement tool, but as a loyalty and community building tool as well.

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Further to my colleague Paul Verna’s post today about the smartphone factor in Twitter usage, I wanted to mention one of the key findings of my recently released “Mobile Social Networks: Marketing by Location Shows Potential” report (full version of the report available here for Total Access subscribers only):

From a usage perspective, mobile users are starting to access social networks with an even greater frequency than PC users, offering a glimpse into a possible future for other online content and media.

The report points to smartphones as the force behind this emerging usage pattern, noting that the contrast in levels of social networking activity between smartphone and non-smartphone users can be dramatic. Just to give a sense, according to comScore, smartphone users in the US indexed five times higher than non-smartphone users in terms of accessing social networking sites or blogs, while in the EU-5, smartphone owners indexed at approximately triple the rate of non-smartphone users for social networking activity.

Twitter is clearly an important destination among mobile social networkers (it figures in the top three, after Facebook and MySpace). That said, the Crowd Science study that my colleague Debbie Williamson referenced in her recent post also indicates that the majority (85%) of Twitter users around the world still prefer to access the service from their PCs. Only 8% mostly or exclusively use a mobile device and an additional 8% shift back and forth between the two environments.

Factoring in age (specifically, youth) may shed additional light on the impact that devices have on social networking behavior. For example, among the US Internet users surveyed by consumer electronics shopping site Retrevo, 46% of those under 35 named their mobile phone as their preferred device for accessing Facebook, nearly matching the 54% who opted for their PC. By comparison, 81% of those over 35 preferred to use their PC.

Granted, Facebook and Twitter are not the same thing, even if there is undoubtedly significant overlap in the audiences for both sites. However, extrapolating from the relevant data from these studies may help to define the where, when, why and how behind shifting social network usage patterns. What’s your experience?

TechCrunch reported today that the number of US unique visitors to Twitter’s Website was off 8% in October compared to September. Twitter.com had 19.2 million uniques in October, down from 20.9 million in September, according to comScore. But until Twitter or some outside measurement firm can capture total activity on Twitter, including all the tweets that come via clients such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or CoTweet, any discussion of Twitter’s health is going to be faulty.

According to the TechCrunch article, Twitter is working hard to make its Website more interesting.

CEO Evan Williams recently acknowledged the slowdown in the U.S., and hopes that a slew of new features will help revive growth to the site. Many of these features are already rolling out, including the new Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features.

Twitter is obviously committed to making its service better on its own Website (these numbers do not measure usage on mobile or desktop clients, which is easily half of all Twitter usage). But while it fiddles, rival Facebook keeps moving further and further ahead.

While it’s valuable to look at Twitter’s Web traffic, the true picture won’t emerge until all the third-party traffic from mobile phones and API clients is accounted for. And it’s likely sizeable.

According to Crowd Science’s August 2009 survey of Twitter users in the US, while 71% said they primarily accessed Twitter via the Web, 26% said their primary way of accessing Twitter was via a third-party application.

And of people with only one Internet-connected device, just 10% use Twitter or another status update service, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s recent report. But among people who have at least four Internet-connected devices (such as a mobile phone or game console in addition to a PC), 39% use Twitter or another status update service.

Who’s tracking Twitter’s non-Web usage? Add a comment to this post if you know of a company working on this. I’d like to learn more.

Update: TechCrunch cites data from PingDom saying that US Twitter users sent an average of 27.3 million tweets per day during the three weeks ended Nov. 11. While that data doesn’t say anything about the number of users Twitter has, it does show that they are quite active. (No word on what percentage of the tweets were spam, however.)

LinkedIn users can now send their status updates to Twitter and post their tweets on LinkedIn. This makes complete sense, since Twitter is becoming the go-to place for professionals to share information, links and more.

Earlier this year I talked with LinkedIn’s head of ad sales, Steve Patrizi, and one of our conversation points was on Twitter. I asked if Twitter was a threat to LinkedIn. Steve responded:

“We actually see Twitter as being quite complementary. … What we see happening a lot, though, is that people think about Twitter almost as advertising and LinkedIn as being the Website that the advertising might point back to. So we see a lot of people saying, ‘Hey, I just posted a slide up on LinkedIn—go check it out.” Or, “I just answered a question,’ or, ‘I just posted a poll.’

Twitter is very good at the ‘right now.’ LinkedIn is a more persistent experience. I can showcase more about my professional accomplishments, give you a better sense of who I’m really connected with using LinkedIn.

But we see a very complementary scenario, actually. And we’re thinking through ways to even enhance that complementary relationship even more.”

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.

Today, digital agency Razorfish released its annual Feed study of “connected consumers” — a group that includes broadband users who have spent at least $150 online in the past six months, have visited a community site and have also consumed or created some form of digital media.

One of the key points Razorfish makes is that the primary reason these connected consumers interact with brands in social environments is because they want to get deals. If that is true, it could have major repercussions for the way marketers should think about social media and what their goals should be.

According to the Feed study, 44% of respondents said the primary reason they followed a brand on Twitter because they thought they’d have access to special deals. Among Facebook and MySpace users, 37% said the main reason they friended a brand was for the deals.

But I believe that marketers should not take the results of this study as license to act as if social networks are merely promotional playgrounds. Promotions are designed to drive immediate action. Brands that use promotions or deals to increase their Facebook fan count or boost their Twitter follower count may experience short-term success but then risk losing the attention and loyalty of those fans and followers unless they keep pumping out the offers and deals.

As the Feed study points out, Dell Outlet deserves credit for its use of Twitter to promote sales and special discounts. And Starbucks used promotions (such as a free pastry giveaway) to build its Facebook fan base to nearly 5 million. But what kind of fans are they? Ones that will be loyal only as long as the discounts keep coming, or ones that really want to interact with the brand over the long term?

Ever find yourself with the need to monitor social network and online buzz about your brand, your products or even yourself while on the go? Well, now there’s an app for that.

Actually, more than one. A number of Twitter tools have built-in monitoring features, but so far they’re limited to Twitter chatter. Larry Chase, publisher of “Web Digest for Marketers,” has a rundown of some of these (and other) business-oriented iPhone apps here.

Digital agency iCrossing recently introduced Say What?, an app that aggregates keyword-based search results from Twitter and Digg as well as blogs and forums into a single interface (full disclosure: I used to work at iCrossing). It also allows you to save your search history, which is handy for frequently searched terms like brand and company names.

Revolutionary? No. Efficient and easy to use? Yes. And that counts for a lot, especially as the quantity of conversations about brands and products (and people, for that matter) multiply. A side benefit for iCrossing, of course, is that it can use Say What? to monitor the buzz it generates by launching a tool like Say What?. Maybe not the raison d’etre for building it, but no doubt a highly useful side effect for an agency focused on the intersection of search, social media and mobile.

iPhone users can download the app from the App Store here (iTunes required).

Businesses are flocking to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter so they can be where their customers are. What many of them don’t realize is that they have to adapt their messages to the medium’s culture.

Zappos is a widely cited example of a company that understands this. In an interview with social media blog Mashable, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh summed up his philosophy: “I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal.” This approach allows customer to get to know a company and the people that work for it on a more personal basis. They can see how the retailer communicates and how it responds to the conversations on its Facebook page.

As Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and media manager at pet supplier Drs. Foster & Smith, told eMarketer, “At the end of the day, it’s the relationship that’s being developed so that you have a genuine desire as a company to provide customer satisfaction to the customer, and the customer trusts you enough to give you some money to have you send them a product through the mail.”

A new survey finds that consumers are far more willing to provide an e-mail address to marketers than they are to provide their social network user name or even their Twitter profile name. According to the study by Pontiflex, a lead-generation firm, 96% of online adults have shared an e-mail address while only 12% were willing to give their social network user name. Mediaweek writes:

According to Pontiflex’s interpretation of the research results, users may be more comfortable with sharing via email because of its opt in nature—and brands may need to start with that relationship with users before jumping into acquiring leads via social networking environments.

Obviously that’s true, but it’s also true that consumers tend to have more than one e-mail address. Many have an address they only use for marketing purposes. When it comes to social networks, the information is much more personal. And while consumers may have more than one social network profile, they guard that information much more closely than they would their e-mail inbox.

Bottom line, social network marketing is a two-way street; e-mail marketing is one-way.