The Software Abstractions Blog

Why You Should Market Your Brand on twitter - NOW!

twitter has been an emerging phenomenon for a little while now. There were some very public performance problems and outages in the beginning, but the company seems to have moved past those now. twitter usage seems to be gaining critical mass, crossing over from the technology early-adopters to non-technology leaders, companies and celebrities (imagine Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart of Comedy Central bantering about twitter on Election night).

There has been much discussion and debate recently about whether it is appropriate and worthwhile for businesses to spend time marketing their brands on twitter. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the advantages of doing so.

Given the ongoing dramatic growth of twitter usage, and if twitter adoption has indeed crossed over to the mainstream, then it seems inevitable that brand marketing will eventually catch up with it on a large-scale; adding twitter marketing to company budgets will become an increasingly easier decision once "everyone is doing it". However there are compelling reasons why you should consider starting your twitter marketing efforts right now rather than wait until there is a herd.

So if you need to convince your boss to let you spend time on this activity - promoting your brand on twitter - here is a list of reasons to get into twitter-marketing now:

Early mover Advantage

Years ago Seth Godin's book, Permission Marketing, launched a revolution in brand-customer interaction. Imagine if you had gotten into Email Marketing at that time, when it was first getting started - it would have been so much easier to get and hold consumer attention, make your brand stand out, and establish a solid position. In contrast, getting the same level of attention today using email is almost impossible, since practically every company practices email marketing; consumers face email fatigue and get deluged by spam, and are reluctant to give out their real email addresses to companies.

For twitter marketing it's not too late, however - it is still in its early stages, and this time you do have a chance to jump on it before most of your competitors (as @Southwest Airlines, @Whole Foods, @Baskin Robbins and @Zappos have already done), gaining momentum as it becomes mainstream.

Influencing the Influencers

A common argument against the twitter marketing strategy is that many of the users of your non-technical product may not yet be twitter users, and you should always market where your users are. This seems like common sense. However, it overlooks a fundamental truth: users often tune out the direct messaging coming from a company anyway, and instead use indirect sources to help them make decisions.

In Malcolm Gladwell's influential book, The Tipping Point, he describes how word-of-mouth influences brand popularity, trends and buying decisions. If you can get some of the super-connectors and influencers to adopt and evangelize your product, then interest in your product spreads like wildfire and demand soars.

How do you reach these influencers? In today's world, it's a safe bet that the influencers are heavy users of new media methods like blogs, social networks and twitter, even if your field of interest is not particularly technical. twitter is especially effective in encouraging and responding to these highly-connected users; the medium gives you direct, instant access to even the most popular of these folks at all levels. (For example, here are the twitter accounts for publishing guru Tim O'Reilly: @timoreilly, VC Fred Wilson: @fredwilson, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver: @jeffpulver, and even celebrities like Shaquille O'Neal: @the_Real_Shaq and Lance Armstrong: @lancearmstrong ). By connecting with them and interacting directly, you have a much better chance of getting mentioned on blogs, in forums and discussions, and being highlighted in their media outreach.

Customer Engagement

More than any other medium, twitter allows you to connect directly with your users and engage them in a direct, immediate, two-way information exchange. You can get timely feedback: users with negative comments can be heard and their concerns addressed; users with positive comments can be encouraged to become evangelists. You can even learn of alternative ways your product is being used, or discover new markets that can be targeted.

This strategy of connecting with individual users and building a "long tail" following nicely complements the previous strategy of targeting "influencers". Some studies contradict Gladwell's conclusions, showing instead that users trust recommendations from peers and friends far more than those of a few super-connected individuals; the safest bet is to court both types.

Low Cost

In general, twitter marketing is very cheap and easy, and shouldn't have any significant impact on spending for your other Marketing programs; important, since cost is a major concern in the current challenging economic climate. Success in connecting via twitter takes time and authenticity, not a large budget!

And if your company still doesn't buy it? Create a personal account on twitter (hey, it's free) and start connecting! You can begin engaging others in your field and thought leaders in other fields - by engaging at a personal level, you can start to build your own network of followers.

Oh, and if you'd like to connect with me, you can find me as @nitink on twitter - I always follow everyone back!

For further reading, here are some great articles on twitter Marketing:

Great Examples of Corporate twitter use - Jennifer Laycock
Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities - Dawn Foster
How to use Twitter as a Twool - Guy Kawasaki
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet - How to pick up followers on twitter - Guy Kawasaki
Free (but welcome) advice on the corporate use of twitter - Elliot Ng
A User's Guide to Twittering - Wall Street Journal
Professional Branding Comes to Twitter - Svetlana Gladkova
Why I Love Twitter - Tim O'Reilly

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The Online Marketing Funnel

I've been reading a lot about Online Marketing lately, and there seems to be a clear pattern: it's the standard Marketing sales funnel, specialized for the Internet - turning the sea of unqualified online users into prospects, qualifying them for your particular niche, and then focusing on converting those highly qualified prospects into customers.

One area that most of these online marketing books do not seem to address is the recent emergence of community behavior: blogs, social networks, social bookmarks and the wisdom of crowds. Updating the standard funnel by adding these elements into it gives  the following diagram.

As new technical and business models come up, they fit naturally into the various parts of the funnel; the core sales funnel model is truly timeless!

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Marketing 2.0: The Zen of Email Marketing

A few days ago, a leading software company sent me one of their regular marketing emails. This missive is full of information about them: news about their latest triumphs, a message from the company, new product features, support information and so on, interspersed with a few special discounts and items for sale. After a quick glance to look for deals that interested me, I deleted the email and moved on. As I surveyed my overflowing email Inbox, I briefly wondered whether to unsubscribe from their mailing list; perhaps next time.

This got me thinking. Like most other Americans, I now suffer from "E-newsletter fatigue". Email marketing has come a long way since Marketing guru Seth Godin first popularized it circa 1999 in a landmark book, Permission Marketing , and is far from dead, even in the face of competing new technologies like blogs and RSS feeds. Today, the MarCom department of practically every reasonable-sized business spends a significant amount of effort churning out these electronic messages, most of which are virtually indistinguishable from those of their competitors.

Perhaps the time has come to take Email Marketing to the next level!

Engaging the Reader

Ideally, a multi-email campaign is like a good blog; each communication must engage the reader. There is no reason the reader has to read your email, any more than there's a reason that the reader must read a blog post; you must attract readers with interesting and valuable content.

A good example of engaging users, albeit in the offline world, is the Trader Joe's newsletter that shows up regularly in mailboxes around the country. Although hardly cutting-edge technology, the printed version is quite entertaining - it's full of fun facts, bits of history, useful recipes and nutrition information, and of course, references to Trader Joe's offerings. The online version is authored in the same vein: the example below highlights a single product in a fun and interesting way, and provides some additional tidbits that change the whole tone far away from "hard sell".

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Another example is the Hitwise Intelligence blog, which comments on interesting meta-trends observed in Hitwise data - such as whether the McCain web site appeals to Independents, or if Heely's are making a comeback. The media, industry observers and customers watch these reports closely and then immediately start discussing them, in public forums, conferences, blogs and around the water cooler.

Of course, trend data is Hitwise's business. But anyone can do the same thing. You can highlight information and trends of customer interest, from data that you already have. What are the latest trends in Spring fashion? Is the rising price of gas going to affect the cost of groceries? If you're a grocery chain, how do you plan to react and help keep prices down?

Or you can provide useful information that, even if it doesn't directly sell your product, helps your customers and users. But it has to be specialized information, that only you can provide; for example, informing readers that daylight-savings time starts this weekend is useful, but not particularly compelling.

If your Marketing emails are full of the cool new features you've recently implemented in your product or awards won by your company, then that's only mildly interesting to readers. For most products, only a small fraction of customers care about all the bells and whistles anyway. Let's take Microsoft Office - assuming that you use it, do you know all its features? Do you even care? What about the "advanced" features of your TV?

Most progressive companies have recognized the significance of blog marketing, which sets a new, higher standard for engaging customers in a two-way conversation. This new standard applies equally well to Email Marketing - only the transport mechanism is different. Similar to a blog, most readers will tolerate some level of self-promotion (yes, "special discounts" count as self-promotion) and even some off-topic content; but overall, the signal-to-noise ratio must be very high from the perspective of the reader, not the email sender.

The reality is that most readers are perusing the email thinking - How does this help me? What can I get out of this?

Compelling Content

So imagine the mother of three, logging in for ten minutes early in the morning, before the kids wake up; the hotshot lawyer checking her emails between appointments; the harried Executive at his son's baseball game; the teenager checking his mobile phone on-the-go; or whatever your target demographic is. In the 5 seconds that it takes the reader to scan your email: is your content compelling enough to make them want to remember it, to go back and learn more when they do have time, when they get back to the office or at home?

To take it one step further, is it an email that they're eagerly waiting for? Why not?

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