Brands were in the minority at the recent 140 Characters conference. All sorts of people were there with no single tribe majority.
Chris Brogan looked into the audience and declared, "...this is the makeup of Twitter...." With maybe 30 million people on Twitter I am not sure that statement is true but his intent was correct - there's a diverse collection of people and tribes on Twitter. This diversity made the conference more interesting than many of the social media marketing conferences out there.
I ran a session with smart marketers who are using Twitter and social media in their business and trying to figure out how to expand that use. We had:
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Kodak: Jennifer Cisney aka Chief Blogger
- Marriott: John Wolf - Senior Director,PR
- Time Warner Cable: Jeff Simmermon - Director Digital Communications
Each is actively on Twitter. They all shared some common experiences:
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The demand to use Twitter internally came from below not from above. While that may not be surprising, I would expect that by now plenty of CMOs and CEOs have felt the peer pressure to get their brands active in this space.
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Everyone has made mistakes on Twitter and survived. When I asked the audience who had made a mistake on Twitter a vast majority raised their hands. Most people there see Twitter as a forgiving universe where those who behave like human beings will earn acceptance from the heterogeneous community.
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Measuring ROI on these efforts lies in the future for now. While each company may be at a slightly different place in terms of adoption of socila media marketing as a core strategy, their twitter handles are embraced as a 'must-do' experiment.
Marriottintl talks at the corporate level (lots of sub-brands in the Marriott universe) with travelers interested in the brand. Often they offer deals or reminders of services. (like Marriott's free night promotion at 300 hotels outside North America)
Jennifer Cisney tweets about all things at the intersection of photography, social media and Kodak.
She has been with the company ten years and as her title suggests is very active in social media on behalf of Kodak.
Jeff and others at TWCable are trying to be helpful to customers by directing them towards customer service solutions while at the same time develop a communications-driven dialogue with customers.
Brands Must Proceed With Care
Earlier Peter Fasano from Coke commented on his own challenge driving social media inside the brand - "How do you steer a big ship with the agility of a personal brand..."
Via Twitter @macala made a point that I thought was dead on: "... More brands will try Twitter & create noise for visibility." We need to be careful how we use the platform. We cannot fall into the trap of just counting "mentions" of our brand in Twitter. It's teh quality of those mentions and teh conversations they are a part of that is valuable.
Some folks at the conference piped up that brands shouldn't be marketing at all and shoudl focus on just delivering great customer service. Many more people seem okay with brands on Twitter as the followers of major brands reveal (we do "choose" to follow, after all)
Brands want to build real relationships with people for benign self-interest (being good to customers is good for business), or because they are actually staffed by people who want real, authentic relationships and see the transformative power of social media. That's who was on our panel. Yes, they want to achieve a business goal but they also respect the personal and trust-based nature of social media.
RESOURCE: Twitter for Business
We relaunched a new version of Twitter for Business: 6 Ways Brands Use Twitter. It features a presentation and a deeper-dive How-to guide that are very useful.
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