October 31
An open letter to marketers: Don’t ruin Twitter
by Steve Mulder
Dearest Marketers,
BusinessWeek is now talking about it. So is The New York Times. Mainstream companies are jumping on board, including recent entry Dunkin’ Donuts. And a bunch of CEOs are too. But please, my friends: Don’t ruin Twitter.
If I had to sum up the most important thing to know about marketing via Twitter (or via any social media tool, actually), it would be this: Market with your customers, not at them. Twitter is not a channel for pushing marketing messages. It is a platform for forming relationships. It’s not one-way, and it’s not even two-way. It’s where multi-way conversations happen and, if you do it right, where authentic conversation (not marketing speak) can lead to awareness, engagement, and loyalty.
For Molecular’s take on how you can use Twitter effectively, check out our article on iMediaConnection. For a list of useful Twitter-related tools, also click to this comprehensive list.
Something like 95% of all email is spam. When so many voices are yelling at customers, they simply stop listening. Let’s not do that to social media tools too.
The An open letter to marketers: Don’t ruin Twitter by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
B.K. DeLong said on October 31st, 2008
There needs to be a way to mark followers as a contact, friend or family….and it’s getting to the point for many of us where Facebook-like custom groups that allow both whitelist and blacklist privacy preferences are important.
Marketing can do whatever the heck innovation they want but Twitter needs to put the power of what they want to see in the hands of users/consumers.