You gotta get, you got-got ta get it
Lately I’ve noticed a few marketing folks think they can keep serving up the same old shit sandwich to people the same way they have been since they started printing ads in papers. The old equation of “you give me your attention and I’ll give you subsidised media” doesn’t work in a medium such as Twitter.
Recently I was forwarded an internal email from a friends workplace, they were asking their staff to talk about an upcoming online campaign on Twitter, and dump a few #hashtags in their posts with a shortened URL to preload the Twitter seach for those tags.
I undertand that there is a need to boostrap marketing campaigns so that something is out there for people to respond to, this sort of thing happens all the time. But the site (which was a cross promotion tool for two very different brands) that they were asking people to talk about didnt have any hooks back into the converstions they were trying to start on Twitter. There was no link to the two brands pages on Twitter - because neither of them have one! So not only was the campaign diconnected from the conversation, the brands were as well.
In this case, the use of Twitter seems more of an afterthought. What is the point of starting a conversation if you aren’t going to be a part of it? The customer that isn’t happy with you will tell far more people about their bad experience than the customer who got a good deal. When someone says something bad about your brand, are you going to be there to defend it and rectify the situation, or let their comments stand?
People use Twitter to say whats on their mind and to listen to others thoughts and engange in conversation with like minded people. Its not a medium where people sit there and take whatever you throw at them. Its not hard to “unfollow” the boring or irrelevant conversations, or to block the really annoying ones; locking them out of the conversation completely. Do these brands really want to be locked out of the conversation before they’ve even begun to start talking?
Twitter is interactive, its not a broadcast medium like print, television and radio. If you keep using tricks from the old media days then people wont just stop listening to you, they will lock you out. As it will be very apparent, very quickly, that you aren’t paying any attention to them, let alone listening
How to do Twitter right?
With just a little tweaking to the site, and a little human resources diverted to the project these Twitter campaigns could be much more rewarding for both the customers and brands involved.
- Get involved. Create a Twitter accound for your brand
- Link to your Twitter profiles. Let people know that you’re getting involved
- Be real. Have a real person respond to tweets on your account, put their name on the account page, give your brand a human touch, “faceless corporation” isn’t as appealing to talk to as a real person
- Listen to the people who follow you and follow them back. Engage with the people who are into your brand and create real organic credibility and trust for your brand
- Dont spam your followers. Be a human being, communicate
Scared of negative comments? Who isnt? But as I said previously, these are going to happen anyway. So isn’t it better that you’re in there defending your brand, engaging with customers, resolving issues and creating trust than ignoring them?
