I believe lots of things about marketing. Here are two:
- You should aim to use techniques that are measurable, cost-effective, time effective, and produce results.
- You shouldn’t necessarily keep doing what you have been doing because it has been measurable, cost-effective, time effective, and produced results; you should keep an open mind about new techniques.
I never said good marketing was easy.
There’s a lot of noise about Twitter, and there appears to be some bandwagon-jumping going on, where traditional marketing agencies are reacting to the disappearance of some of their traditional income sources by talking about social media. And they’re talking about it a lot; Twitter features prominently in many PR and advertising agency presentations at the moment.
But, I believe in keeping an open mind, so I’ve been playing with Twitter. So far, I’m not getting it, but I will continue to keep an open mind. There seems to be a lot of completely useless noise out there in Twitterland, and I haven’t yet got good answers to the questions:
- How can Twitter help me (or anyone in B2B or B2C) make money?
- How can I do that in a measurable, cost-effective, time effective way?
That reference to 1999 in the post title was because in that year, before the internet bubble burst, I kept thinking “I just don’t get it, there are some big ideas here which are bound to fail”.
I also didn’t ‘get it’ from 2004 to 2008, where the bubble of easy credit seemed to me to have inevitable catastrophic consequences. It turned out I was smarter than I thought there too.
So is my feeling of “I just don’t get Twitter” justified, in a similar way? I don’t know yet. I’m casting around for wise voices on the subject, and Ian Cook at Juice Digital pointed me to this blog post, which has some interesting things to think about.
I’ll write more when I have some answers to the questions I’ve posed for myself. If you want to help me get there faster, add a comment.
About Matthew Goldsbrough
Try using a third party tool like Tweetdeck. It gives you the ability to filter out a lot of the noise
Why Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter.
I think it's an open question at the moment Matthew.
Sure, there are lots of blog posts and articles on the business benefits of twitter – but the examples they use are all of the exceptions rather than the rule. Unusual businesses (like internet marketing) or ones where viral campaigns can help a brand.
For most businesses, the benefits are yet unproven. But here are some thoughts:
Targeting:
Because you can search and follow people on twitter based on the content of their profiles and tweets, two things become possible. You can follow people who are potential customers & partners and begin to engage with them. In reverse, people can follow you based on what you're tweeting – some of them could be potential customers for you. If you tweet intelligently and on focused topics that add value to potential clients then you deepend the relationship. Tweet a link to your blog posts and the relationship goes further. Eventually it may turn into a business relationship. I'd say that of my followers, about 50% are just people who've fairly randomly followed, 30% are people interested in the same topics but not necessarily potential clients, and 20% could be clients (with a caveat explained later).
The Power of Big Numbers:
If you've got a lot of followers – I'm talking Guy Kawasaki scale here, then to some degree you don't have to be too targeted in who they are. In normal marketing you must target because all real world marketing costs time and money. A tweet is free and takes only a few seconds. So even if only 1% of your followers may be interested and bite the hook – if it's 1% of 50,000 it's still 500 people where the message really hits home. Not bad.
I've also used twitter more indirectly to find interesting resources and connect with people who could be useful – but I had no idea existed. They just happened to tweet interesting things that I happened to spot.
Sometimes it's possible to measure these activities – for example clickthroughs vi Twurl for example. Many times it's not – but that's no different to many of the other activities I do like physical networking where it's difficult to directly measure the impact.
One of the main challenges for me at the moment with Twitter is geographic targeting.
Although I can connect reasonably well to people who could theoretically be clients for me – lawyers, accountants, consultants and other professionals (I help professionals attract new clients and sell more effectively) – very, very few of them are in my preferred geographic niche of North West England. There just aren't enough potential clients twittering locally. Maybe there will be eventually, or maybe I need to think about service offers that are geographically independent like teleclasses or ebooks.
My final thought is that I don't think it's wise to ignore Twitter. Most networks – be they physically or virtual – reward early adopters much more than late starters. Maybe it's a learning curve thing or maybe the winners will be established players with reuptations and big followings once Twitter goes mainstream. Either way, I don't plan in spending tons of time on Twitter (especially given how addictive it can be) but I am going to keep experimenting and testing to try to find the value.
Ian