Twitter Battle Heats Up
Tons of comments on this article I wrote and posted Monday on the Multichannel Merchant site: Twitter Better for Nonsense than Business Sense.
The premise: More than 40% of all tweets are considered “pointless babble.” Twitter may not be all about self-promotion, as the surveyor had thought. Heck, MCM editor Melissa Dowling pointed that out in this post last month.
With the exception of one comment (which may be by someone who has a personal vendetta against Pear Analytics, the company that did the study on Twitter content), everyone brings a valid argument to the table.
The debate ranges from Twitter allowing you to reach the masses, to Twitter not allowing marketers to capture actionable customer data. And the reason for this medley: The article was featured across the Chief Marketer brand, so you have a clash of experiential marketers and data geeks.
I have written and edited for the PROMO and Chief Marketer brands, and am with Multichannel Merchant now. So I’ve seen both sides of the marketing debate. And I find myself on the data geek side, but it’s not because of my current loyalties to Multichannel Merchant.
It’s because it seems a lot of brand marketing managers fall or have fallen in love with the next big thing.
Did naming rights to The Ballpark at Arlington help Ameriquest sell… whatever it is they sell? Did product placement on “The Apprentice” help whatever American brand of automobile sell vehicles beyond that new sportscar it was showcasing?
Now it doesn’t mean I’m all anti-Twitter. I think Twitter is a great customer-service channel for brands that have the time and resources to do Twitter searches and find out what people are saying about them.
And if these brands and companies can do that right, then maybe they will find gold in Twitter.
August 26th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Ok — I’ll bite on the customer service benefits of Twitter by offering critical question:
On the customer service side Twitter’s success is a symptom of a problem?
Specifically, are Twitter’s legitimate customer service wins (ie. how Soutwest Airlines and Comcast use it) symptomatic of customer service FAILURES in traditional (often, strategically more important) channels?
While I admit Twitter delivers customer service value the answer is clearly yes in my opinion. What’s troubling to me is how companies have had access to this information (about broken CS processes) for decades… and they have largely ignored it.
Before I part I’ll offer more pleas for marketers to stop embarrassing themselves… by giving a widely used example of a company that “gets Twitter” but doesn’t really deserve all the silly hype around it: JetBlue.
A gent named Scott Rafer and others across the blogosphere are impressed with JetBlue’s continued use of Twitter. Why? As an example, a woman named Meaghan O’Connell tweeted “I want to make love to the @jetblue terminal” to which JetBlue replied “Goodness… I hope you at least buy the terminal dinner first!” The result? Hundreds of re-tweets and exposure of the exchange.
Blogger Michael Galpert goes as far as saying “You cant buy that kind of advertising with money @Jetblue did however buy it with 72 Characters!”
You can’t? Of course you can… and you can make the dollars spent deliver tangible value beyond MAYBE making people THINK “aren’t they a great, funny airline.”
Again, it’s called traditional direct response marketing. Why have we lost track of that? What about making people BEHAVE differently — DO something that adds value to their lives through your brand’s actual tangible behaviors?
Yes, indeed, such as positive customer service outcomes!
Yes, brand marketing managers are prone to falling in and out of love with “the next big thing” far too early — good example, Tim.
Just my thoughts.