Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

Twitter Works, but Is It Working for Your Brand?

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

(This is a special guest post from Douglas O’Donnell, Possible Worldwide Associate Director of Measurement & Analytics. The other day we were trading emails about how many brands fail to think about how to use Twitter the right way, and he took the initiative to write up the following point of view. Please enjoy and reach out to Douglas directly on Twitter, of course.)

Most brands have no business on Twitter. They apply traditional push marketing strategies and spend large amounts of money on irrelevant content that annoys customers. Most are on Twitter because it’s cool or to be on par with their competition.

The problem is that brands do not humble themselves for the new medium, nor do they consider how their strategies might affect operations challenges. My favorite southern saying is, “Big hat, no cattle,” and it applies here. If you don’t connect with customers in a human way, they won’t buy what you’re selling.

6 Rules of Humanizing Your Brand

  • Be human and humble (this should come naturally).
  • Follow the 80% (value add content)/20% (marketing) rule.
  • Establish Twitter-specific objectives, strategy, and measurement, and optimize.
  • Seek out your advocates and follow them first; don’t make them find you.
  • Interact with customers, like you would with a friend in a coffee shop.
  • Be relevant to their interests, be available to address their needs, and embrace negative comments as opportunities.

(Bonus rule: Fire your legal and editorial departments–unless they are solution biased.)

The Issue

Your brand is a snob. It expects that people will automatically love it. This approach doesn’t work in the social media space, especially on Twitter. The whole premise of Twitter is real-time, relevant interaction, and this is where brands drop the ball.

Let’s talk some psychology and consumer science. Your brand wants to be loved and talked about, but this does not happen in a vacuum. People like exclusivity. Access is the reason Twitter a la Southwest or Zappos (or Lady Gaga) is interesting. It’s an opportunity to peek behind the curtain of a company (or celebrity) that interests you. This plays to social media’s other strength, voyeurism. It’s the direct connection to someone or something you otherwise have no access to. So make it interesting. Who cares about your new product push? But it might be interesting if you tell me you’re the VP and post a picture from the manufacturing plant while finalizing the “new product” nobody knows about yet. For your followers, it’s a ticket to the party.

Twitter vs. Facebook

Brands struggle with Twitter because the people pitching content do not typically use the medium. Twitter is a completely different mind-set than other social media platforms. Twitter is public as opposed to Facebook’s walled garden. Twitter is about the conversation, in real time. On Facebook, conversations are fragmented over time based on when you access and check the posts within your social circle. A community manager on Facebook will have a planned strategy, a content calendar, and some guidance on occasional real-time interactions. A community manager on Twitter should be on call, like a doctor. This doesn’t necessarily equate to high-maintenance or time-consuming tasks. But Twitter must be monitored consistently for it to work as intended. Some brands such as @DellCares actually put the hours up of their social media outreach team on their Twitter profile, which is completely acceptable.

Provide Valuable Content

Nowhere is an 80% value-add and 20% marketing approach to content more important than on Twitter. If a brand is churning out coupons and a weekly pre-planned “buy our stuff” Tweet, they should not be on Twitter. If a brand is not committed to interacting frequently, each week with their customers or fans, they should not be on Twitter. If a company’s legal department can’t get over itself and its 1970s processes, the company must either educate legal on a real-time communications tool or not be on Twitter. In short, being on Twitter badly is worse than not being on Twitter.

Who does this well? There are good case studies and they’ve been exhaustively covered so I won’t rehash. But I will say that @southwestair (customer service strategy) and @zappos (transparency strategy) are two of the best. They are directly and intimately connected to their customers. They actually know them. They study them–not their ComScore profiles–but the actual customers and what they discuss. Also the “tweeters” are actual human beings, not mascots or faceless brands.

The Human Touch – @RoadID

In 2009, I launched Road ID on Twitter, a maker of identification gear for endurance athletes. We built a following by first seeking out and following people already interested in the brand or common interests that aligned with Road ID offerings. Engagement was instant and in six weeks we had more than 1,000 high-quality followers. Road ID is smart, tracking promotions to the sale so they truly understand how Twitter interactions influence sales. And they do.

Here’s the key. The account was attributed to Edward Wimmer, the cofounder, not a mascot or a brand. Ed is a human. The company and the content match the personality of the customer. He posts relevant content about sporting events, sponsorships, and highly engaging contests tied into Ironman or Tour de France races. Content his followers appreciate. He also interacts regularly when people tweet about his product, thanking them or taking on a customer service role if there is an issue. When you execute the 80% well, people accept the 20% marketing because it’s genuine. Transparency is key.

Paradigm Smashing


“It isn’t about who follows you; it’s about who you follow.”

This process works well on Twitter, but is completely counterintuitive. You must seek out and follow your customers first. Likely, people are already talking about your brand. Find them. Not with a social listening tool, although those can be helpful (Radian 6, Crimson Hexagon), but manually. Get intimate. See what people say over a few weeks time (content is different each time, as this is real-time search). Follow those people. Interact with the ones who say something clever or relevant.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Why should I follow a brand? Offers? Coupons? That creates a pretty shallow relationship with your customer and you condition them to expect “deals.”

However, if I get followed by a brand the reaction is: “Interesting, Brand X just followed me, cool!” Especially if it was in connection to an @ response to something I posted. You got my attention because you didn’t sell me something. Instead, you engaged with me and thanked me, you told me what I had to say was interesting, or you acknowledged my frustration, humanly. You reached out to me in context and for that, I’m more likely to follow you back, brag to my friends, or even defend the brand. The brand must humble itself as a new kid in town. Get out and meet people!

“Remove traditional editorial and legal barriers.”

How many lawyers understand that that offensive tweets do not appear on a Twitter brand account, like they do on a Facebook page? The problem is editors and lawyers do not use the mediums they police. The premise of Twitter is real-time human interaction wrapped in authenticity. Timely interaction is what makes the ecosystem hum. Tweets that require legal review or editorial proofing before posting are useless. The opportunity has passed. If you’re a brand that cannot let go of editorial and legal control to an expert community manager you hired for their expertise, cancel your account today. Being human requires human attributes, like trust.

“Negative comments are opportunities. Embrace them!”

This is rooted in public relations and referenced frequently by David Meerman Scott, author of Real-Time Marketing & PR. Acknowledge issues as they unfold in an authentic way and you have the potential to convert a bad customer experience into a great one or an annoyed customer into a fan. It’s powerful when a brand directly contacts a customer who has an issue via Twitter (instead of requiring the customer to contact the brand). Goodwill is extended to the brands that try.

“My brand must be followed by important people to gain clout!”

If by important people you mean your customers, then yes. There is much talk about clout, or Klout the social influence aggregator. Both are nebulous, subjective, and changing daily–just like judges’ scores at the Olympics in figure skating. I have a striking example of clout on Twitter, Sarah Slowik.

Sarah (@lovelybutton) is a nice girl from Michigan and was randomly chosen by Conan O’Brien to be the only person he follows on Twitter. Conan has nearly 3 million followers. He follows one person, Sarah, who originally only had a few dozen followers. When Conan followed her, her followers increased to more than 45,000. So her clout by association is substantial. There’s value in being followed (or endorsed) by an influencer, but that rings true in life as well. And influencers are more likely to endorse you if you have something relevant to offer. Again, human rules apply.

So take a step back and truly understand why Twitter would make sense for your brand from a business standpoint. Then align that with the needs of your customers, humanly. Are you committed to establishing a long-term, meaningful relationship with them? If the answer is yes, then Twitter can be a powerful tool to improve your brand’s business performance.

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Posted in Social Networking, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Crispin’s New Site Shows Smart Branding

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

crispin beta site

My buddy and our agency’s President, Jay Woffington, is a master of comparing diverse data and figuring out how they add up to a common issue or opportunity. One of his favorite sayings is, “Two points make a line,” meaning that there can be a direct link between seemingly unrelated data or events. Well, it seems that we have another genuine trend on our hands, as now there are three prominent examples of companies that have turned over their websites to open social-media input by featuring unedited Twitter comments, Wikipedia entries, Facebook friends, and blog posts. First was Modernista!, an advertising agency, and next came the Skittles brand. Both experienced a mainly positive burst of buzz. The third example comes from another ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which has a live beta site that is attracting attention. Although the trend seems real, the questions linger: Is it meaningful… and it is worth the risk?

On the first question, I increasingly believe that adopting social media into your home page can be a powerful positive for customers. I say “increasingly” because the social-media space is evolving with the new digital social norms that are still self-organizing before our eyes. It is clear that already people are using social networks to judge any brand that they come across, whether it is posting a question to friends on Facebook, reading a review on an e-commerce site, or using Google, which often draws from personal reviews on blogs and discussion boards. So at the same time that people are visiting your brand’s website, they have a few other open browser tabs with this information. For forward thinkers such as Modernista!, Skittles, and Crispin, the logic is that they might as well go ahead and showcase this social media on the home page. So in this basis alone the approach is meaningful marketing.

The biggest marketing benefit can come when the brand website visitor first arrives and sees several positive stories, tweets, and blog posts. People judge a website and brand within microseconds, and some trusted, impartial comments on the home page can make a big impact. Instead of cluttering this moment of truth with ad copy, why not defer to the more-trusted comments of other customers? That’s what a billion-dollar brand that I used to work on, Tide, figured when it recently launched a home page redesign featuring actual user reviews front and center. And Juicy Juice is testing a banner ad that presents live tweets from moms.

But what about the risk and bad stories and comments that might appear at this moment of truth? Well, Crispin saw just what that looks like last week. First, it lost the Volkswagen account, which led to a rash of negative tweets and stories. It’s never fun to lose a big client, and worse to see the news everywhere. Second, the company took a lot of heat for running a contest in which it invited designers to create a new logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo for a $1,000 top prize. Many in the design industry felt that this was undermining and cheapening their craft. Again, another round of negatives has filled its beta home page. In fact, the very public space and open ability to add a negative comment likely invites a much more negative response than one would otherwise see. It’s the chance to hold a virtual picket sign on the company’s front lawn.

So Crispin would call this a failure, right? I don’t think so. They are smart enough to have anticipated the negatives that can happen and I believe they fully embrace the haters. Even negatives can end up being positive in this case. First, it shows that the company is in the center of the action and they matter. This falls under the age-old line that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. The second benefit is that this open acceptance of hate media actually helps them attract the right clients, those who want to take risks and want to build a brand with a little controversy. Jason Bender, one of our top Creative Directors and leader of the team that recently won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a Pringles banner ad (that was somewhat controversial), said it best in our conversation about the issue:

“This shows people that Crispin is not for everyone, and that they don’t mind alienating the tight-asses they don’t want as clients. This helps them weed out the bad prospects.”

With this open site, negatives and all, Crispin as a brand is living and breathing the kind of marketing that it does for its clients. Brands such as Burger King, MINI, and Microsoft hired the agency in order to stir up attention, and they’ve all gotten what they wanted. In fact, Volkswagen chose to look for a new agency because it felt it needed to broaden its marketing to a wider audience. This will likely mean more watered down creative and Crispin wouldn’t want to do it anyway.

Interestingly, this Crispin story comes just as we at Bridge Worldwide have started to dabble social media on our Web presence. You might have noticed that we just launched our new Marketing with Meaning site, and on the home page we decided to feature a live feed of Twitter posts that include anyone who uses my handle, @mktgwithmeaning. We actually got to this idea in a roundabout way. We asked Ryan, our Web developer, to try to increase interest in our Twitter account on the home page, and he wrote an Ajax widget that brought in live tweets. We loved the idea, but I hated seeing my picture 15 times running down the screen. Someone mentioned that we could bring in retweets and other @replies. I immediately loved the idea because it would show the new visitor at this moment of truth that this is a popular topic that others are talking about. Second, I knew that the people who followed the Marketing with Meaning cause would appreciate that we were giving them at least a few minutes of public attention on our home page. And this in turn would lead to more tweets.

But what about the negatives of our modest effort? Jay and I actually had a long conversation about what could go wrong. Our agency recently got dinged a bit on something we shared publicly, so we felt the need to be cautious. We thought about the worst that could happen: Someone could, say, protest our work for a client and flood the site with negative tweets. If a client CEO with no social-media understanding (rare, I know) visited the site and saw this on our own home page it could be a huge negative. However unlikely, it is possible, so we made some plans to deal with it, but launched the tool regardless.

Bridge Worldwide is no Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We don’t believe that we need to embrace controversy to build brands. However we do have a very defined point of view on the kind of work we want to do for clients: Marketing with Meaning. This blog, the Twitter feed, the upcoming book, and more all are tools that we use to put ourselves out there for client consideration. When I speak with clients and prospects about this concept I say that sometimes our work will be interruptive and less meaningful if that is what is called for; after all, we exist first and foremost to serve our clients’ needs. But I quickly follow that this is our starting point for all recommendations, and that we’re going to challenge them continuously to move in this direction.

Just as Crispin has successfully attracted clients that follow its brand belief, I hope that our focus on Marketing with Meaning will attract more of the clients we want: brands that buy into our concept and are ready to buy meaningful ideas. The more public we are with this statement, the more likely we are to succeed.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, Social Networking, Twitter, book | 1 Comment »

Takeaways from the iMedia Breakthrough Summit #imediasummit

Friday, March 27th, 2009

After learning a lot at the Economist Marketing Forum in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to head in the complete opposite direction for the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Fort Myers, Florida. As usual, the iMedia folks hosted a great event that brought together people from the brand, agency, and media sides of digital marketing. Once again my notebook was full of some great insights and ideas that only seem to result from being there. Of course, my goal is to provide you, dear readers, with as many of those insights and ideas as possible in this blog—with a meaningful marketing spin, of course.

Overall, the two main focus area of the event were Twitter and mobile. It seems that the consensus from all was that mobile is close to going mainstream, while Twitter was the exciting new tool that promises to explode. Here are some of the specific takeaways that I collected from the guest speakers:

Christi Day, Emerging Media Manager, Southwest Airlines

I don’t think I have seen anyone who has a brand personality that better matches the brand she works on than Christi Day. Her goal was to make us smile as well as learn as she described how she got Southwest into the world of Twitter. She and her team in media relations first tried out Twitter on a lark in July 2007 and quickly gained a following. Eventually it became so successful and followed that Christi brought in people from both media relations and customer service. Instead of outsourcing Twitter responses to an agency or team, Christi takes the responsibility for herself, 24-7. Her tips for other brands joining the Twitterati: (1) Be Fun—connect to events, stories from real flights, and viral videos; (2) Be Real—show your personality and what’s going on in your real life; and (3) Be Relevant—provide information and notices, and promote fare sales. I was a little surprised to hear that Southwest is not tracking how the Twitter account leads to actual sales, but that is in the works. You can follow Christi at twitter.com/southwestair.

Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation, Kraft

Ed is the newest marketing rock star in my mind after hearing his story of the launch of the Kraft iFood app for the iPhone. It is already a huge success according to Kraft’s expectations, with downloads in a few weeks that met its three-year objective, and PR coverage valued in the millions of dollars. Ed talked about how the iFood app “brings us closer to becoming an indispensable food resource for consumers’ meal planning, preparation, and shopping needs.” This is a perfect example of how a great brand purpose leads to marketing with meaning.

I loved hearing some inside lessons about how Ed’s team got this remarkable innovation through the company by “keeping it under the radar,” and that a big key to success was leveraging Kraft’s database of 15 million consumers to drive initial awareness (another benefit of a decade of meaningful relationship marketing). Another huge help was Apple’s decision to feature the app on its App Store front page, which drove traffic “better than any paid marketing.” The tool is catching hold with new consumer targets including Gen-Y and Men (35 percent of users, “far above” the percentage in the Kraft database).

This is just the beginning for iFood. Ed alluded to upgrades on the way and said that it was built to be a platform for retail customers and even external marketers. Even working with competitors is possible, as Ed said that, “If we really want to fulfill our goal, we have to allow others in.”

Lara Green, Digital Marketing Manager, CoverGirl and Max Factor (P&G)

Perhaps the quote of the event was Lara’s claim that “mobile is no longer innovation” for her brands at P&G. In other words, it’s just the best way to reach the young girls and women that her brands target—and they have done enough experimentation to feel comfortable with this space. Another key to success is the fact that mobile has gotten a strong read in marketing mix modeling, which is the single best way to compare ROI across media alternatives. As evidence of the mainstream nature of mobile for CoverGirl, the brand actually has four mobile focus areas: (1) a strong WAP site; (2) a text-to-sample program; (3) a mobile CRM program; and (4) integration with other marketing activities. I was a little surprised to hear that a beauty product can “look good” in the small space of mobile screens, but its banners are getting 1 percent to 2 percent click rates, and when text-to-sample offers appear in print magazines, the supplies are exhausted in days. Another great example of meaningful marketing from CoverGirl in mobile is a ColorMatch tool that helps people make the right choice on the go and at the retail point-of-purchase.

Dr. Spencer Wells, Genographic Project Director, National Geographic

iMedia consistently mixes in pure digital marketing presentations with diverse speakers such as Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games. I specifically enjoyed the presentation by Dr. Wells, who is in the middle of a long-term project to categorize and glean human migration insights by sampling the DNA of thousands of men and women around the world. The Genographic Project is a long-term investment by National Geographic and partner brands such as IBM. It began way back in 2005 and is now starting to spin off insights. I loved the fact that National Geographic is funding the project and building personal connections by selling a $100 kit that allows anyone to submit his or her DNA and receive insights into family history. According to Dr. Wells, his management worried that no one would buy the kits, and hoped to sell 10,000; but more than 297,000 have been ordered so far.

So, another great collection of insights, some of which will make their way to my upcoming book. For more, check out the Twitter stream here. I hope to see you there next year.

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Posted in Conferences, Social Networking, Twitter, Uncategorized, mobile | 3 Comments »