Social media and brand engagement strategies are being tested to the maximum in the beginning of 2009 with the high emergence of the
micro-blogging website Twitter.com. The website enables real time connection between individuals, organisations and even Meerkats!
Web 2 and engagement has always been a hot topic and tough decision for brands across the world and it is only going to be further strained in the coming months as savvy players are identifying twitter as a resource for customer services and also driving considerable amount of traffic.
Twitter like other social media websites such as Facebook groups allow brands to display their identity to their loyal customer base – it allows full engagement from one to many and more increasingly one to one conversations to the extent that I’ve heard various Social Media consultants claim Twitter to be the new customer services or company phone as it has become such an extremely dynamic form of communication.
I’d thought I would take a look at some brands that I respect and see their engagement.
ASOS.com – http://twitter.com/ASOSThe successful pure play fashion retailer ASOS.com has set up an official twitter account with close to 500 people following. Judging on the current updates it appears this has had a high degree of uptake within their organisation as many of their employees are now listed and starting conversations.
Starbucks – http://twitter.com/StarbucksQuoted by many following the emergence of brands appear to be using Twitter as a notice board to update their customer of various deals and offers. Starbucks currently have close to 50,000 followers and have tweeted close to 1,000 times.
e-Consultancy.com ExperienceThe guys and girls last week launched
a fantastic little experiment based on the recently over-crazed twitter.
The team reference that the micro-blogging service is the fourth largest referrer of traffic to its website and as a result are now investigating areas to further embrace twitter with the newly redesigned e-consultancy.com. Well last week they pinged an email and launched twitter on their homepage with results promised this week.
What's certainly apparant was the amount of spammers instantly adding "econsultancy" to their tweets in aid to "build their own brand" - two I am sure you can spot below (haha) as it was a twitter conflab between a close friend Femi Omoluabi (Head of Search at Zed Media) and myself.
My OutcomeMy personal take on this is that smart brands are the ones that are in the trenches; watching and listening to what the general public say about them. The world is now totally digital and those who choose to ignore it will be left behind and unaware of what the public perception is about them but whilst the evidence is there to suggest great positives on twitter, still there have been many factors which defines non-effective use of such websites, especially when resource and accountability are key!
Ultimately though brands cannot purely take this as a means of acquisition and should full plan, strategize and understand they need to provide value added content not just about their new products or services but also their given vertical, location, department or even competitors! Brands which allow their employees should ensure they have a document in place with ensure they do not write content they don’t want either their boss or mum to see! But it wouldn't suprise me if today's
Email Marketing Managers are tomorrows
Company Twitterers!
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