Twitter notes

In December I went to a lunch held by the NZ Marketing Association where 3 twitterers spoke about their experiences using Twitter as a marketing tool, peppered with their advice on how to use it. I think the audience were generally intrigued by Twitter and judging by some of the questions I was asked before the speeches started when people at my table heard I ran a corporate Twitter account, were there to hear about how to use Twitter in business.

I wrote down some of my thoughts at the time (was very pleased to see that I already thought/did most of this stuff myself esp with regards to the Xero account) and have meant to record them here since then – great holiday job to get done! As I’ve just using our Xero Twitter account based on my own ‘rules’ I’m still in a phase of being totally paranoid that I’m doing/saying the wrong thing and in sponge mode when it comes to seeing how others are approaching it.

Speakers were: Anthony Gardiner (Web Content Admin, NZ Army), Andy Blood (Exec Creative Director TBWA) and Duncan Blair (Brand & Comms Manager, Orcon).

• Not just teenagers & young techies – actually biggest age-group seems to be 30’s
• Generally people who already blog were the early tweeters
• Judging by the level of whinging you can see on Twitter people either expect that their relative anonymity makes them comfortable doing this or that the immediacy of tweets means that someone will see it and do something about it
• General feeling is that if you want Twitter to build an audience or create a community for your company you should use it for conversation and value, not brand blasting
• Twitter needs a human voice if you’re to building any kind of audience – audience=trust+reputation so it’s no good getting an agency to tweet on your behalf or use any kind of animated response – the one exception to this might be to announce blog posts depending on how prolific your blog is. And how do you get the reputation and trust – be relevant, be interesting, be honest, be there.
• A lot of large companies are using it to build brand and sometimes by the obsequiousness of their tweets and give aways I sometimes wonder if it’s to save brand face more. In that regard, it does give you a quick way to change people’s perceptions which can be pretty powerful on a one-to-one level when word of mouth is still a huge factor in brand choice
• All feedback your company gets needs to be acknowledged without getting into the teen-phone-trap of who hangs up first, you don’t always have to have the last word and you don’t always have to comment back and say ‘thanks for tweeting about me’ etc so you need to develop that knack of knowing when to leave it alone, when to take it to email, when to admit you’re wrong
• Occasionally it’s OK to tweet inane observations, if this goes towards showing your personality, and people on Twitter are used to a sea of this
• Be honest & transparent (that’ my already famous orange presentation slide!) – whatever the principles of good customer service are you can’t beat old fashioned product knowledge and honesty, even it this means you’ll find someone else to help or you don’t know. And you definitely need to have a tough skin to deal with bad feedback and criticism (and having said that I’m not sure why I’m in this job HA! although it’s amazing the acceptance/forgiveness when you find the right way to agree/commiserate without putting down your own product)
• Twitter is not a fad – everything is moving online and there are growth stats for Twitter that suggest it will be around for a while, perhaps not in it’s current form but as part of some larger converged online service
• Twitter doesn’t have to have one objective or be used for one stream – if your brand or you are included in conversations or have questions directed at you on any topic, then that’s where you’ll go. This might take the form of general Q&A, sharing useful information for value-add or building personality, informal market research, entry of your brand into a competitor’s space and sometimes promotion
• In an age of satisfy-me-now it’s not surprising that modern attention spans mean that 75% of people that rushed to get a Twitter account have tweeted less than 10 times, and without the staying power of building an audience and interest have an average 42 followers
• And lastly … there is a difference between Facebook and Twitter – Facebook is a stream from your life (what you are doing/eating/wearing/feeling) and Twitter from your mind (what you are thinking/working on/delivering/researching) <– haven’t quite figured out how to explain what I mean here very eloquently, trapped in my head somewhere!

Interesting to note that no-one was ‘live-tweeting’ the presentation meaning that everyone was there to find out what it was – at Wordcamp (blog conference) I went to earlier in the year there was a constant tickertickerticker of laptop and cellphone keys as people tweeted snippets constantly as presenters were talking; sometimes verbatim, sometimes their own interpretation