Harnessing The Power Of Twitter
I attended “Harnessing The Power Of Twitter” in London last week, a conference organised by Internet World. It brought together an array of digital marketing specialists, twitter pioneers, and business owners.
3 presentations particularly got my attention.
From the online Woolworths launch to 10 Downing Street, 5 fundamentals to comply with
The first presentation took the audience behind the scenes of the launch of Woolworths as an online only retailer by Glue London. The presenter reviewed how the agency had dealt with taking an old high-street brand into the online space only, and creating a momentum in the run up to the official opening of the site. Twitter is one of the social media tools that Woolworths is using to build an online audience, along with blogs, Facebook, and Youtube.
The second presentation was by Daren Forsyth, web entrepreneur, who made some interesting comments on the specifics of Twitter, particularly about how brands can grow their audience on Twitter.
The last presentation was by Ian Green, who manages digital communications for 10 Downing Street. 10 Downing Street has been using Twitter on two levels, to “broadcast” information, and in a conversational way since August 2008.
Despite the 3 speakers coming from different angles, they were all fairly agreed on the 5 fundamentals that brands should pay attention to:
- Prior to setting up any social media strategy, it is advisable for a brand to measure their current buzz (buzz monitoring).
- Define a strategy for each social media outlet, e.g. how will the brand engage, what type of messages will the brand send on each of them?
- Create a social media personality for the brand – this relates to branding and tone of voice
- Determine who is talking for the brand – the brand voice (s) – and what topics they can tweet about (advice that the furniture retailer Habitat will forever remember).
- Identify good twitterers in the organisation
And then, how to grow a Twitter audience?
It seems obvious but a brand should start by identifying and following people who are already talking about it. The next step is to identify /follow people who are talking about the product range, or type of service a business operates in. Using twellow (the twitter yellow pages) can be very handy in this process.
Once the conversation circle is in place, tweets should attempt to be of genuine value to the people they are directed at, as well as written in a manner that will encourage a reply.
In order to build good relationships and preserve brand reputation, replies and tweets @thebrand need to be monitored and reply to very carefully and by the right people in an organisation; for example a customer complaint should be passed on to the customer service team.
To conclude, all panellists insisted on the fact that brands need to closely monitor their social media activity. As far as Twitter is concerned, there are lots of very useful tools out there that can be used such as topsy, twitalyzer, and useqwitter.
Overall I found the conference to provide fascinating insights into how brands are currently experimenting with Twitter. The general consensus was that eventhough it is still very early days, Twitter certainly carries a lot of potential, such as Dell recently demonstrated in making their first 1$ worth of sales using Twitter.
