Marketing

Everyone is trying to find uses for Twitter in their marketing. All I can say is “Whoa Nelli!” Slow down there. It’s just another tool! It’s not the coming of the messiah.

I think using a Twitter stream like you’d use press releases, ads or targeted marketing makes for a good use of the medium, but the information you push has to be extremely product-specific. If you’re a celebrity, your every motion is interesting to your consumers, but if you’ve got a more varied audience, you need to segment what you release and consider having multiple Twitter streams.

Every piece of info from Pepsi, for instance, could be interesting, but I doubt there are many people who love the company that much; what they love are various products. “Pepsi Water,” “Pepsi cola,” and “Pepsi Green” (for environmental initiatives) would probably be a better way to target consumers than just having a “Pepsi” channel.

I use Twitter as a human-powered (and hence much smarter) RSS feed. That’s what I try to do with my own Twitter posts: stick mostly to info on finance and not put any personal info on there. With an RSS feed, some static always intrudes on the clarity of the “signal,” but with Twitter it’s the job of the poster to keep the clarity high. Deviate from what interested someone enough to sign on in the first place, and you will probably lose them.

I still follow @cheeky-geeky, because I think he’s wicked smart, but he also clogs up my stream with a lot of stuff I have no interest in, and I kind of wish he split his interests into different streams and had more defined brands. However, Twitter is not yet modeled in this way.

You can’t have a top-level stream and substreams or designate substreams using tags that a reader can then opt into or out of. These would be good additions to the platform. For now, while each stream has its own users and a multi-account approach would segment one’s following (3,000 users on 3 streams versus 9,000 on one stream, for instance), I think it’s an option worth considering. Few people want to read about my personal life, but there are more who will take my recommendations for articles on finance, and I’m trying to respect their screen space by not posting minutiae.

From the point of view of a PR firm, there is typically no natural buyer for a firm’s “product line.” Some firms are very targeted (e.g., nothing but tech) so they could in theory post every press release or update about any one of their clients, but most PR firms have a varied client base.

Some reporters will want news on Firm A or B, but not on all a firm’s clients. So it would make more sense to look at the information “product line” that various clients represent and split that information into separate Twitter accounts.

From an information-gathering perspective, it makes TONS of sense for PR firms to cross reference all their journalist contacts with Twitter and follow those streams (just as they should be getting RSS feeds of articles). It could lead to a lot of annoying updates on personal issues from those reporters, but could also (now and then) alert them to what they’re working on so you can see where a client might fit in.

But despite the obvious practicality of taking these measures, I can’t see where Twitter would move the needle hugely one way or another. It’s just another tool. People get so wound up about these things, but technology is just a way to reach out. Don’t get caught up basing a marketing strategy on any one piece of tech, especially a platform that hasn’t yet figured out what its revenue model is.

There has been a bit of talk today about reputation. What makes it, changes it, defines it? Seth thinks about why Snakes On A Plane tanked at the box office despite buzz and press attention over the past few months. Robert wonders why Microsoft retains its bad rep despite recent efforts to open up and start having real conversations with customers.

I like Seth’s conclusion that SOAP basically failed because the product sucked. “I’m afraid we come back to something that marketers have been struggling with for a really long time–the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.” It’s a movie made by committee, so it was bound to suck. This reputation was cemented in my brain before the marketing even started. I was hoping that SOAP would fail, so that I would not be subjected to a storm of promotions for even worse copycats.

Robert’s point is a little different, but still gets back to the fact that it is the products that define a company. The problem for Microsoft is that reputations take a very very long time to build, and Microsoft has only recently started opening up and conversing with customers. The products resulting from those conversations are just beginning to come to market.

I switched to Mac when they went Linux, and since then I had never felt the desire to use a Microsoft product until I saw Live Writer. Live Writer is something different that leads the market by integrating word processing and web publishing in a simple user friendly fashion. If Microsoft puts out a few more products like this, their reputation will eventually change.

In the end, the quality of the products is the thing that defines a companies reputation. Conversations help make better products, they help market products, but conversations don’t make products. Conversations, are full of arm chair philosophers who love to pontificate, but making a great product requires a team of highly focused obsessive individuals, who sometimes listen to and sometimes ignore the general consensus.