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You Had Me at 2.0
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DISCOVER
THE MANY "ATTRACTION" SECRETS of the Marketing Elite that
generate flash floods of traffic to your web site,
explode your sales of products and services - and
elevate YOU to "Rock Star" status as The Authority
in your industry! 
Where’s the Marketing Meat in your reasons to Tweet? by Jerry Hart
9th
Where’s the Meat in your Tweets?
Results of a recent survey put out by marketing intelligence specialist WebTrends found that only 2% of businesses are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Only 2% - can you believe that?
Unsure of how to proceed?
Start from “What’s in it for this Twit I just connected with?” Think teamwork when you send a direct message and be sincere and give some love all with the teamwork attitude of expecting nothing back. The world has changed and those that choose to keep score and market from a self-centered intention will become exhausted and continue slandering the joy and profits that social media provides. Hey, I have proof it works!
Don’t do social media just to do social media. Know why you Tweet to grow your business. If a company doesn’t know what they’re trying to accomplish, then there will be nothing to measure and no way to determine success.
Remember look for the Meat and stop resisting the value of Tweets. Meat, in this case are your success events you can create from using such a powerful tool like Twitter.
A successful Twitter experience may not initially yield the bottom line, “I made a sale”, or “I was written up by XYZ.com”. You’re doing the same relationship building with your campfire of followers and those that follow you that you’ve done all your life among the circles of people you’ve connected with.
Define what success is for you? Might be as simple as, start with whose following you on Twitter that are like minded professionals and send them a message showing appreciation for what they do or who they are. That’s not techo “hoobie doobie”, rather, just plain ordinary marketing that is so organic it’s almost surreal when you’re Tweeting.
It’s clear that to many people out there, this information is incredibly new…and intimidating. All of this social media information causes anxiousness and often unnecessary stress. The tension and nerves are similar to when you’re in an uncomfortable environment and later on, wonder why you were all worked up over something so natural.
But Don’t Be Afraid to Try even on days you want to sleep and tell all of us to “Twit THIS!”
Here’s some good advice Sarah Milstein gave at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo out in San Francisco. At her session, “Effective Twitter,” she recommended that companies consider the following questions before diving in:
* What will be different in 3, 6, 12 months as a result of our Twitter account?
* Who are we hoping to connect with?
* What kind of information is interesting to them?
* What might go wrong? What expectations might people have of us?
(Her session also had a number of other good resources - you may want to check out the PDF summary here.)
During Milstein’s presentation, audience members were furiously scribbling down her every word as if this was the first time they had ever heard this information! Of course, it probably was. Although the right and wrong ways to use Twitter and the tools that can help you use it better may be old hat to some of us who live and breathe this stuff, but it’s clear that to many people out there, this information is incredibly new…and intimidating.
This is uncharted territory for a lot of companies and many of them are just now beginning to think about their strategies and levels of involvement. You could literally see this trend in action at the Expo. There, some of the top sessions, the ones so jam-packed that it was standing room only, were specifically about social media and marketing. Twitter, Facebook, community building, etc…people just couldn’t get enough.
This makes us wonder if 2009 be the year that social media really goes mainstream? Or, will the experimentations continue? It’s possible that it will be both. Companies will try new things using social media. Some will succeed and some will fail, but in the end it will be these experimentations, led by the big brands, that will help push social media further out into the limelight than it is now.
I have a bold question for you. If you’re disparaging social media, my recommendation is please recognize the difference between true success and just scraping by in business. Ouch, that hurt:)
Thanks Sara Perez from Read Write Web for play by play from Web 2.0 Expo in my hometown.
About Jerry
* Founder of Jerry Hart.com, Your Social Media Explosion.com and Hart Creative Marketing.com
* Author of Blueprint to eMarketing, (Blueprint Press, Sept. 2006) Printed in 7 languages
* Morning Show Radio Personality in major markets, including including KISS FM in San Francisco
*Brother is the drummer of the “Grateful Dead”, Mickey Hart. Father was the manager.
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Comments
Jerry:
While 2% of companies surveyed indicated they use Twitter for marketing purposes, what percentage indicated they use it for other purposes? And more important, what percentage understood the question they were answering?
Broad strokes surveys like this are typically misleading. My hunch is that a far greater percentage of businesses benefit (at a marketing and sales level) from their employees using Twitter. It’s reasonable to believe that businesses with have sanctioned marketing programs that employ Twitter would be fairly small.
I would like to know — “What percentage of the 98% that don’t use Twitter have employees tweeting about their employer’s brands and products?”. Ironically, it shouldn’t be difficult to measure this type of influence.
Cheers! –bf
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