Marketing Matters

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that lately I’ve been prepping for classes I’m teaching at NYIT on social media strategy and tactics for business.

The classes started two weeks ago and so far, I’ve only had two people fall asleep in class. To be fair, I don’t dress in anything with live Twitter feeds, so I understand completely.

Seriously, it’s been great (for me, at least), with insightful questions and good input. I’ve posted the syllabi for the two sections, the intro class and the advanced class.

What’s more interesting than the course outline, though, is the fact that they’ve begun blogging. In the intro class, there’s one class blog, Comm 350’s Blog.

Some in the advanced class are posting their entries here, but there are also some individual student blogs, like this one by Ed Speno. As more and more set up their blogs (it’s their homework this week) I’ll be adding the complete list to my blogroll. In the meantime, check them out and be sure to leave comments so this project can come alive in the best way.

Thanks to Chris Anderson, there’s a lot of talk lately about the true value of “free”.  Most people like the idea of “free” of course, but “free” is like most poisons – it’s ok in small doses. You can’t get carried away with free, though, because not only does it have a negative impact on the bottom line, but it’s messy, too.

As much as people like free, they don’t like messy. Messy things make it hard for us to feel at ease. There’s no peace in a mess. MySpace is pretty messy compared with Facebook, which is why MySpace is on the wane and Facebook is growing. Sure, you don’t have the ability to personalize your page, but the conversations are nice and tidy and can be followed more easily. Twitter is entirely messy – it’s hard to cut through the chatter sometimes to find the things you really want to know, so I fully expect to find it’s been replaced by something else in another year or so.

Free things are messy in the same way that Twitter is messy – there’s a certain amount of chaos in them and you need to feel at home with chaos to be able to make the most of it. The other day, some friends and I went to a restaurant’s anniversary celebration which featured free food. We got there about 5 minutes after the doors opened and found the line reached down the block. The line moved painfully slowly and once you got your food, there was no place to sit because everyone in town, it seemed, showed up for the free food. The restaurant hadn’t been prepared for the consequences of “free”. The food was delicious, but if you weren’t able to embrace the chaos, it was not a good place to be.

So before you leap on the free bandwagon, make sure you’re prepared to ride the wave of chaos it creates. It’s not for everyone. It’s messy.

There are a lot of reasons to follow me on Twitter if you care about marketing, compelling ways to tell a corporate story, or if you want to read about me writing my book. But from the look of the landscape, there are some good reasons not to follow me on Twitter, too, that warrant mentioning. Here are the top 5.

1) I care more about the brand than the brand’s products.
When I mention a company’s great branding initiative or a way they’re using social media or some new technology to communicate with their audience, it’s not a given that I’ll be talking about the same company tomorrow. If I write about Ducati, I’m going to follow the development of their new social media ad campaign as results become available, but I won’t write about how wicked cool their new model is or what it’s like to restore a ’62 bike. Apply that example to any brand you can think of and it will hold true for me and my tweets. If you’re really into a brand’s products but don’t care about how they voice their brand, I’m not your guy.

2) I only tweet when I have something interesting to say.
I follow PR and social media guru @sandrafathi and she recently noted that she loses followers when she doesn’t tweet for 24 hours. That’s crazy. She constantly has great content, so if a day goes by with nothing, there are still the other 6 days each week that have compelling content. I don’t tweet as often as her and have let more than that period of time go by without tweeting. So if you’re constantly weeding your list of people who haven’t posted in 24 hours, you’re probably better off not adding me in the first place.

3) When I do other things, I usually don’t tweet.
I follow a serious business leader who shall remain nameless who recently tweeted that “peeing is great twitter time”. He wasn’t kidding. I enjoy multi-tasking as much as the next guy, but there are times to put the PDA away or to not have your laptop on your lap. If you want me to tweet while I’m “busy”, I’m not your guy.

4) I’m not in it for the numbers.
I’m not on Twitter to be Ashton Kutcher. I’m there to talk about great brands and interesting marketing ideas. Not everybody cares about that and that’s fine. Accordingly, I don’t care if I have only 2 followers, as long as they’re the 2 right followers for me. Would I rather have 2000? Sure, but only if they care about what I’m writing. It’s better to have the right audience than a big but disinterested audience.

5) I’m not going to buy your Twitter tool.
“Millions! You’ll make millions!” I hear it every day. Paid content, paid followers, spam followers, games, toys – the list keeps growing. No matter how many times you want to try to convince me to place myself at the vanguard of social media marketing by letting Dell buy my every tenth tweet, I’m not going to bite. I don’t buy crap. I buy into great ideas. If you’re shouting at me in bad grammar in bold print or all caps, I’m not going to listen.

Thankfully, that’s not most of you, but it is a large number. Twitter is a pretty interesting tool and for anyone who gets exactly what I mean with this post, I look forward to seeing you there.