Twitter, trends and acquisition

#Twitter, what can we do with it, what should we do with it?

Twitter in the social media landscape

8m people and 140 characters
Twitter is the fastest growing micro-blogging platform
1 simple question: “ What are you doing? ” or rather , “ What are you interested in right now? ”

Similar properties

(Over) exposure in the mainstream media

… but don’t believe the hype?
Only 2% of businesses in the UK use Twitter
Source: WebTrends

Social media platform lifecycle

Levels of engagement with social media Community Utility Media

Levels of engagement with Twitter Difficulty

Four business approaches for Twitter
Direct
Twitter used actively as a marketing, public relations and/or customer service channel ( Follow > Create > Engage )
Indirect
Twitter used by employees to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company's reputation ( Follow )
Internal
Twitter used by employees to communicate and collaborate with each other about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that occur to them ( Follow > Create )
Inbound signaling
Using tools like search.Twitter.com , twendz or TweetDeck to keep track of intelligence about the company, its products or industry. Identify opinion formers and engage with them via Betas. ( Follow )
Source: "Four Ways in Which Enterprises are Using Twitter.” Gartner

Some direct approaches to Twitter South West Airlines Ford RAC Breakdown JetBlue Comcast cares Home Depot Whole Foods Market Customer Relations Create Engage Skittles Salesforce.com Dell Samsung Mobile RAC Patrols My Starbucks Idea Marketing & Sales Techmeme #G20 AT&T News Forrester Research PSFK Kodak Orange Business FR Twitter Tasting Live @Lenovo 2008 Twestival.com Events & News Follow

Customer services > Engage JetBlue offers Twitter-based customer service (and provide the customer support employee’s name currently on duty). Whole Foods Market asks what their clients like to read and watch, recommends new food podcasts and invites them to the company upcoming events. ComCast offers a friendly Twitter customer support; with a real person photo instead of the company logo.

Marketing & sales > Create Dell has created a number of Twitter profiles, each meant for different types of deals (e.g. DellOutlet posts recent refurbished Dell computer offers). RAC is using Tweets from Patrols on own site to convey new “the driving people” brand and for search optimisation Samsung has created a Twitter account dedicated to mobile phones and posts both the company and product news there.

Events & news > Create

Events & news > Engage On 12 February 2009 202 cities around the world held Twestivals, bringing together the Twitter community for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water. “ Recently in London, Robert McIntosh and Bibendum wines invited a group of around a dozen food and wine bloggers to a Twitter wine tasting at the Saatchi Gallery. For an hour they tasted 3 wines which had also been sent to wine and social media enthusiasts who couldn’t make it in person.” #TTL

Two wider trend implications

1# Wider trend implication from Twitter
A real-time search/help engine
Raw results, unfiltered and updated immediately.
No waiting for Google to crawl links
Breaking news, live event coverage (e.g. #G20)
A live-feed of what the web is thinking and sentiment tracking via Search.Twitter.com, Tweetscan, Tweetdeck, Twendz
Gmail outage: people switched to Twitter for help
People now ask their friends and peers for help, insight and expertise on a day-to-day basis

Twitter as a “help engine”

What questions are being asked?

2# Wider trend implication from Twitter
An open-source experience model
Twitter.com user experience is poor
Most activity is off-platform even when people are using a desktop PC
Huge list of APIs and Apps , large developer community http://Twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
The core service actually needs the community in order to function effectively
A mainstream breakthrough for crowd creativity & open-source business trend

People using Twitter.com itself to tweet Source: http://twitstat.com/Twitterclientusers.html

Can Twitter be used for acquisition?

Can Twitter be used for Acquisition?
What are the media opportunities?
Where does Acquisition sit within the three Twitter levels of engagement and business approaches?

Media opportunities

Media opportunities - Magpie
Advertisers create a campaign by providing ad message and keywords
Magpie identified key influencers who have signed up to the service based on the content of their tweets
Your message is blended into their tweet broadcast
Every message will be pre-headed with #magpie which makes it easily identifiable as a paid for comment
Some Twitterers believe that this falls under SPAM and products are already in place to scan which of your friends are using magpie

Media opportunities - adCause
Works on similar format to magpie except a percentage of revenue is donated to charity
Better accepted by Twitter community

Media opportunities – Twitapps
Twitapps have created several applications to.
twtQpon allows you to create an coupon and then message with a tiny URL on Twitter or Facebook. The link takes people back to the advertised website to redeem the coupon.
twtBiz allows an organisation to group different Twitter accounts under one organisation and file it under a business directory with relevant tags.

Media opportunities - twibs
Business directory for organisations who are on Twitter.
Allows users to search for suppliers and for businesses to tag their directory entry with keywords.

Media considerations
Activity highlighted is currently focused on the US.
Little information on UK take-up of applications and media opportunities.
Need to monitor Google’s take-over of Twitter as this could mean higher monetization of the Twitter platform.
Out of the recommendations TwtQpon is the most commercially relevant from an acquisition perspective.
Easy to produce and monitor
Can feed directly into Shop

Where does Acquisition sit? South West Airlines Ford Skittles Salesforce.com Techmeme #G20 RAC Breakdown Dell Samsung Mobile RAC Patrols AT&T News Forrester Research PSFK Kodak Orange Business FR JetBlue Comcast cares Home Depot Whole Foods Market My Starbucks Idea Twitter Tasting Live @Lenovo 2008 Twestival.com Customer Relations Create Engage Marketing & Sales Events & News Follow

Next steps and considerations
Twitter has a vocal and opinionated “opt-out” society made up of key influencers and opinion formers
Where can we add value to the people we are speaking to?
Can offers retain interest on a very casual and interactive platform?
Share openly and don't only talk about your services.
Will using Twitter solely as an acquisition tool garner a negative response (e.g. Magpie)?

Thank you

Twitter, trends and acquisition

by David Carr on Jun 08, 2009

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