June 3

Is Twitter the next marketing channel?

by Steve Mulder

With many new online products and services, value isn’t clear at first glance. The value of a new site comes less from its positioning or intent and more from how people end up using it. And this value can take a while to emerge.

Twitter is currently in the throes of this gray area of value evolution. Some people swear by it as social glue they couldn’t live without. Some people are bored by the mindless trivia of what their distant acquaintances had for breakfast. Others have no idea what to think about Twitter’s relatively fast growth (despite serious lingering performance issues).

Like any new communications platform that becomes popular, Twitter is under the increasingly curious gaze of marketers. Companies such as JetBlue, Dell Outlet, and Salesforce are dipping their toes in the water to see if this could be another effective marketing and communications channel. On the one hand, it offers the ability to distribute short, attention-grabbing messages that can engage consumers and keep your brand top of mind. On the other hand, it requires real effort to create a Twitter stream that has real value and that opens up an authentic dialog with customers.

We’ll all be paying attention as marketers begin to play in this space. But one truth seems guaranteed: Those who treat Twitter as a platform for true two-way conversations are more likely to succeed than those who think of Twitter as merely one-way messaging. These new communication channels are not about pushing your message out – they’re about engaging and interacting with customers.

Twitter has the momentum, but copycats are trying to push this concept further. Check out Plurk as an example.

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The Is Twitter the next marketing channel? by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Web 2.0 & Social Media 2 Comments »

Comments

  1. Tim Lynch said on June 10th, 2008

    One of the more interesting (and engaging) Twitter accounts I’ve been following is the Mars Phoenix Lander (from NASA). While it isn’t marketing per se, it is an interesting and engaging use of Twitter. First, it gives “voice” to an inanimate object or dull process (and even interacts with other users by answering questions). Second, it gives this voice a personality that makes its tweets more than just status updates and brings complex processes to an understandable level. I sense this taps into a similar phenomenon that bonds people to their Roombas…and could be a nice way to “humanize” products or processes.

    Related to your point about Twitter being most successful when it is used as a two-way medium, ReadWriteWeb had a nice post comparing Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s use of Twitter with that of Barack Obama’s. The gist being that because Clinton followed zero people, she was using the medium to be heard…not with at least the appearance of listening.

  2. Craig Andrews said on August 13th, 2008

    The thing which really bothers me about Twitter is I don’t see how it can last. It has no revenue model, and it hemorrhages money at a rather astounding pace (SMS fees alone for the site are well into the millions of dollars per year!). Given its total lack of revenue model and extremely shaky financial situation, it seems like something drastic is in Twitter’s future, that Barack Obama, NASA, JetBlue, et al may not like, such as random advertising inserts, paid subscriptions, or something else. Plus, with it’s extreme downtime… is that something these organizations really want as part of their brand images?
    Jumping on the Twitter bandwaggon seems like a very short sighted, risky position for these organizations to take.

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