I was having my usual day, you know, googling stuff, checking email, reading tweets, 
, and I came across this blog post on the Blue Jam & Toast site, via tweet from Jim Quillen (@ConnectSocMedia).
In his post, entitled Is Twitter For Serious Marketers, Tom Davenport takes a crack at arguing the case that twitter isn’t a serious marketing tool, and that it’s a fad, a gimmick that’s here today-gone tomorrw after a quick rise to fame (apart from the fact that it’s been around for a long time in reality and only went exponential quite recently when people like Jonathan Ross (@Wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) jumped on-board, certainly here in the UK at least), and that as a “serious” marketing tool, it’s not to be bothered with.
Tom compares Twitter to the virtual world Second Life, which had a similar rise to the spotlight, with many brands jumping in feet first and setting up spaces, before falling by the side and becoming less popular. It’s still going – it’s just not this year’s killer app.
So, I read his post, and he makes a good enough argument, but for me the big issue, and where his argument breaks down, is treating twitter as a be-all and end-all marketing solution to all brands and because it fails, in his eyes, to be of value that it’ therefore worthless.
Because, in my opinion, Twitter’s just another channel we have within our digital tool kit (all be it a very new, highly popular, talked about in the press all the bloody time one), and as digital marketers, we need to make sure that, like all technologies, channels and other tools we can employ on campaigns, we use the right tool for the right job at the right time.
Is twitter the right tool for all brands? Of course it isn’t. For some it’s just plain stupid and you would be crazy to even suggest it in your pitch document.
But twitter is a very good tool for some brands, in certain situations, and it’s this that needs thinking about. Look at how innocent smoothies use it (@innocentdrinks) , look at celebrities (who are brand’s by themselves after all!) use it, like Jamie Oliver (@jamieoliver) and @wossy, and then also look at major corporates, like Dell, (@delloutlet) who are using it also.
For all of these brands, and many more, twitter enables them to talk directly to a core audience of customers, often people who are extremely loyal to a brand and passionate about what it represents, on a personal, conversation-like, pseudo one-to-one level – it makes you (me!) the consumer feel like that brand, that I am so involved with I am willing to actually click the FOLLOW button and choose to hear from them, like I am having a direct conversation with them, and that makes me feel special – and therefore, it makes me more likely to spread the word about that brand far and wide.
Twitter isn’t a broadcast medium in the traditional sense – you’re not talking about hitting 1,000’s of people in one go and hope that 0.12% of it sticks or clicks-through. This is powerful, targetted, small-scale marketing, but the value of talking to such involved and dedicated consumers, people who will talk in a positive light about your stuff to others people who in turn trust them, is well worth the time and effort it takes to set this up and do it well. That’s something a lot of marketers get wrong when they look at some of the new digital channels to have emerged in recent years and dismiss them as a fad or too small audience-wise to work with.
The confusion between mass, large-scale, generic audience, and focused, small-scale, passionate audience, leads some marketers to think that these channels don’t have value – but they do – because everyone you’re talking to wants to hear from your brand – and that’s the value – they actually want to listen to what you’ve got to say, and they know you’re trying to sell them stuff with it! But they don’t care – because they like it.
Twitter isn’t a short-term, instant win approach either – it might seem like it because it’s free, and anyone can setup an account in minutes – but to get the most out of it, like any social media/network strategy in fact, it takes a lot of time, patience, and dedication to the channel within which you are taking part. You need to tweet – lots – to get the benefit, and if that’s tweeting core messages that are interesting to the audience and are going to make more people want to follow you, then you’re going to have to be interesting and put some thought into what you have to say. starting a twitter account and then saying “hello” once a week isn’t going to get you to that million followers (unless you’ve got a Hollywood actress from the brat-pack for a wife I guess).
Is Twitter for serious marketers? Of course it is. (One could argue that in this day and age if you’re not at least considering Twitter as a channel you shouldn’t regard yourself as a serious marketer any more because you’re missing some of the opportunities to get your message out there?) It’s a channel you should consider when you’re planning your campaign as much as you should consider any digital channel.
But does that mean you should use it in all cases and it’s always going to be right? Nope. Not at all. But then that’s not the case with any channel – on or offline.
Howard (@howard_scott)
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