If the Presidential campaign put together by Barack Obama’s team has taught us anything, it’s that we need to think outside the box when it comes to our advertising and marketing strategies. Traditional media, like television and newspapers, is still effective, but you need to reach out to people in new and innovative ways. That’s partly why the Twitter and YouTube aspects of Obama’s campaign were so effective: they reached an audience that may not otherwise have been reached.

How can you apply this kind of strategy to your own business? Simply having a Twitter account attached to your company is not good enough. You should be using it for more than simply pumping out company news and press releases. Twitter needs to be interactive and it needs to be a conversation. In this way, one of the first things that you should keep in mind when developing a corporate Twitter presence is that a real person should be behind the account and not just a bot. This real person can reply to questions and other queries, just like a customer support line, but on a more casual basis.

What about attracting attention to your Twitter profile? One method that I have seen as very effective is having Twitter-only contests. Give people a reason to follow your company’s profile on Twitter. For example, you may put out a tweet saying that there will be a prize giveaway in the next few days and they’ll have to stay tuned for more information. At some random point in the next few days, you may say something like “The next five people who tweet me with XYZ will win our ABC product.” Naturally, you can replace the XYZ with whatever you’d like and the ABC product being given away can be of varying value.

And don’t forget to publicize the fact that your company has a Twitter profile. If people don’t know about it, there’s no way that they’re going to follow it.