Nice follow up to the original summary of Social Media:
Brands having trouble building a large base of followers on Twitter can now turn to Australian technology firm uSocial.net and pay for connections (full story at Revolution). Surely if a brand wants to get more followers it should simply be interesting in what it has to say. Obviously the first thing any brand needs to do is identify what is the purpose of its twitter feed – it is a mistake to simply treat it as an extension of your PR communications channel.
Some brands have definitely got it right:
Dell Outlet (795,396 followers) – Quite simply an extension of its online outlet offering discounts on products. So far accounted for $3 million of additional sales
Zappos CEO (901,993 followers) – Surely the most followed CEO on twitter. Mixture of him running an amazing business, having a sense of humour and sharing interesting views. E.g.
Interestingly Zappos_service only has only got 1,712. However this only scratches the surface as they still very active. Here is the response I got soon after I recommended them as one of the best #socialbrands:
There are many more (see mashable for a list of top 40) but most seem to be focused on customer services and/or providing interesting information to their customers. Where twitter however has been used as part of a campaign, from what I have seen it has invariably not been successful. Here is the reality for some of those brands that have been lauded for their campaigns on twitter:
Marmite – LoveHate Martmite
The write up
This is a good idea for the Unilever brand in a sector where new marketing strategies can be difficult to get off the ground. Continuing its love/hate theme used across all channels, this Marmite/Twitter mashup has created two hashtags (#lovemarmite and #hatemarmite) that it then collates. The key thing here is that Ollie Parsley and Paul Randall have matched Marmite to micro-blogging in a way that’s appropriate for the brand, but that doesn’t blindly follow the convention of having a Twitter account. Like Skittles, this uses Twitter without having to tweet about an FMCG brand – something that may be of limited interest. This is an unofficial Marmite campaign that Parsley says he and Randell created in four hours and demonstrates what FMCG brands could do if they devoted even a little time to social media (via Revolution)
The reality
Love Marmite mentions – 18
Hate Marmite mentions – 12
The write up
Vodafone announced the launch of its free Lenovo laptop with a campaign that was Where’s Wally? meets social media. Consumers followed Liveguy through blogs and Twitter as he travelled through UK cities, blogging and Tweeting about his surroundings. The aim, for consumers, was to find him in real life to win a Lenovo laptop. This went beyond the standard Twitter models that most brands adhere to, and as a campaign, highlighted a new product in an innovative way. It was more daring than most Twitter brands and built a nice amount of buzz. Vodafone has now wrapped up Live Guy and has turned VodafoneUK into an interactive feed, suggesting that a conversational tone is set to become obvious throughout its Twitter presence.
The reality
244 followers
There have been some successes on the campaign side but personally do not think that this is going to be the main purpose of twitter for brands. Irrespective I do not want to criticize these brands for trying as it is probably only going to be through trial and error that brands are going to find their true voice in this environment. The important thing is that when they do choose to play in the space that they remain authentic, true to their values and be interesting.
Forrester have just released a new research report called looking at how companies should organise to best deal with social media, which as well as giving the data above, answers the questions “Which roles do we need” and “Which department is in charge”.
They recommend that the best approach to organising for social media is for companies to form “a cross functional team that includes representatives from different departments and groups and is responsible for social media strategy and implementation”
Via We are Social
Obviously we completely concur and it exactly what we have done with The Hive and much of the advice we are giving to clients is to help them internalise social media into their business. It was extremely satisfying today to find out that a blogger outreach guide that we had put together for one of our clients has helped them build better relationships with their audience.
An interesting follow up to Uniqlock (thanks Peter for the heads up). A very simple calendar / screen saver with blog parts link, although with random views of the world going on in the background and an easy to listen soundtrack you can spend hours just watching it. Another example that keeping things simple, but executing brilliantly, will produce some of the best work. Does not quite it the heights of Uniqlock though.
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Twitter – enough already
Okay let me be clear, I love twitter. I love it for a number of reasons. It allows us to express ourselves (we are all a little narcissistic after all – see Social Media as a Venn Diagram); it provides me with an extremely rich source of information – I never really did work out how to best use RSS feeds and, in fact, I get far more value getting information from people I know, or people I am connected to, who appear to be like minded; it has enabled me to understand more about my fellow Proferians – it is amazing how much you can learn through twitter; it has allowed Profero to recruit an intern and I definitely see our twitter feed becoming far more important in the recruitment of talent; and finally, the fascinating creativity it has enabled through its API has been really inspiring (some of my favourites are Floxee, Twistori, Twitterfall)
What I probably find most exciting, however, is that we still do not really know where its value truly lies. In reality it still has a very low penetration (most of my friends out of the industry call us tweeps ‘twatts’ and actually have no interest in getting involved) and no-one has really found a way to use it effectively in an advertising (see Unpopular brands can buy twitter followers)
However, the volume of chatter around twitter has become ridiculous (Wired referred to this phenomenon as a “twittergasm”). Even just looking at the number of articles we have tagged through our delicious account proves this with the top 5 keywords being:
• Cool – 247
• Advertising – 127
• Twitter – 114
• Socialmedia – 91
• Website – 66
In fact, it was reported that Twitter has generated over $50m in free publicity over the last 30 days as media coverage of the microblogging service remains frenzied. Sadly, what seems to have got lost in much of this coverage is any form of context. You just need to look at some of the stories that have been covered over the last few weeks:
• Morgan Stanley issues a report that apparently gave the shocking insight that twitter is not for teens. Not only is it amazing that they feel they can make such an announcement off the back of a sample size of one (they asked their 15 year old intern to write an essay), but it is not particularly revolutionary. The latest stats show that only 7% of the global tweeps (say 35 million) are under 18, 10% come from the UK, and with only 30% of tweeps being active, then this would imply that in the region of 75,000 of this age group are currently active in the UK. It is, therefore, no surprise that this particular youngster is not one of them. Also is it not the fact that it is the older (more affluent audience) that is getting involved that is getting marketers interested?
• Best Buy Seeks applicants with 250 twitter followers. No they didn’t. They were looking for a senior manager with emerging media marketing experience and simply added activity on twitter as an additional filter in the recruitment process. The reality is that if someone really wants the job and is not even on twitter yet, if they understand social media it would not be hard to get 250 followers (see here for some basics tips and here for 10 ways of not doing it!)
• I read in AdAge about the campaign for launch of the NissanZ. In order to promote the launch they decided to start a twitter account in which they posted 370 reasons why you should be excited about the launch of Z. Here are some of the reasons: Reason #33 – Business from the back; Reason #37 – ZNA.; Reason #47 – A built body. OK, firstly I fail to see why the agency ever thought people would be interested in this (the only comment I saw on the blog which kind of sums it up was ‘370 reasons Zzzzzzzzzzzzz – sorry did I miss something? Who do they think they are marketing to – Flash designers?’). Furthermore, what is worse is that the campaign was deemed a success by the agency because ‘with more than 800 followers on twitter, we have a ready made fan base to talk when the campaign breaks’. Come on, this is just lazy. It makes us all look bad.
We will undoubtedly continue to cover more stories and be delighted by some really creative uses of twitter in the future, but I do hope that people start putting it into the context of the overall challenges that marketers face across their business. There is no doubt that as a minimum they need to be using twitter to discover what people are saying about them, but beyond this it needs to be integrated into a wider social marketing strategy which is undoubtedly going to incorporate some internal change management. In the meantime feel free to follow us here and we would love to hear your thoughts.