Twitter CRM? – Marketing WTF?
We’re currently conducting a survey of B2B Marketers inquiring about how the economic downturn has impacted their budgets and activities. As part of this survey, we’re also probing for what types of social media activities are being tested by these Marketers. Some of the results are not surprising (blogging), but there are a few surprises (which you’ll have to wait until we publish the final report to find out about). Some B2B companies are experiencing or interpreting success with their company blogs and even Twitter participation. The latter is of particular interest, especially since finding a way to monetize corporate participation on Twitter appears to be a leading candidate for Twitter’s “how do we make money off this” strategy.
As most of what I see on Twitter (and even blogs) seems to be people mass-emailing the types of random, quippy things that we used to put up on our Yahoo Messenger status, the true relevance of content circulating about Twitter falls into a fairly classic signal-to-noise ratio problem as depicted below. However, as the Post Office makes it increasingly less attractive to do direct mail marketing and technology makes it more difficult to do email marketing, it will be interesting to see how those who Twitter on their employer’s behalf will fare in their experimentation with this. Done craftily, I could see CRM systems build on top of Twitter, similar to what this company is doing. Those who don’t grok it so well will unleash upon us a brand new epoch of spam….several times a day, 140 characters at a time.
One Response to “Twitter CRM? – Marketing WTF?”
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February 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Jason, Fun graphic! Did you Shel Israel’s take on our successful Twitter program? We actually have two rather large sales deals in our pipeline right now from Twitter. Shel is writing about a number of Twitter B2B success stories in his new book Twitterville. You can get an advance look at what we’re doing here:
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/01/twitterville-notebook-breakingpoints-kyle-flaherty.html
Excerpt: “On Twitter we get to talk with journalists, analysts, partners, prospects, customers and even competitors. Has there ever been that sort of instant focus group available for B2B marketers? When I look through the folks that are following us and I realize the company they keep I’m always amazed that more B2B companies haven’t figured this out yet.
The community of people we now have on Twitter has become extremely important for us, not simply as potential business leads because that cannot be the reason to get involved, but more as a sounding board and an early alert tool to the latest industry news and needs. It takes the form of a person live Tweeting a BreakingPoint product demo in Paris, hearing about the latest security vulnerabilities, reading about what people think of our competitors products or simply sharing the latest blog posts with each other. Using Twitter BreakingPoint gains an additional level of insight into our business, but in this case it is from an outside and independent perspective; something companies never before could obtain so readily AND be able to respond to so efficiently.
When I look through our Twitter feed and the conversations that we’ve had, our value is in bringing folks highly-useful information about network equipment testing and security testing, but never relying solely on our own content. We make a concerted effort to share different viewpoints and promote the ideas of others…if it is of interest to us while reading, we will share it with our community. I know we are providing value to our community when I see folks retweeting the links we are sharing and posting up pictures of the posters that we sent along.”