Tweet Your Way to Success

Believe that twitter is more than just a 140 character status update

             Your favorite workout deserves a tweet. Your favorite brand of cheddar cheese deserves a tweet. What about a concert? Or a bad experience? Twitter integrated the concept of texting and social media in a way that transforms the way we communicate. Some people argue that social media may be sabotaging real communication. However, I believe that Twitter and other forms of social media provide an alternative platform for communication and strengthen it rather than 'sabotages' it. If you are a newbie in the Twitter world, you may not have been impressed or care about getting involved. I want buy your attention now and attempt to prove Twitter’s worth. Li and Bernoff, in Groundswell wrote that if you use it right, Twitter could be a force for connecting with your customers with the five groundswell strategy objectives: listening, talking, energizing,supporting, and embracing.

Co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, said that, “Twitter was originally designed as pretty much a broadcast medium, you send one message, it goes out to everybody and you receive the messages you are interested in. one of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or specific message.” This proves that ‘listening’ to and ‘energizing’ your customers can ultimately help develop your product. Have I started to convince you that Twitter has so much marketing potential? Twitter has so much marketing potential that companies, like yours perhaps, need to take advantage of.

Begin by expanding your reach and richness. JUXT’s interactive billboard in Times Square NYC used Twitter in a innovative way to listen to their audience. JUXT was not selling a physical product but a concept or message. Their challenge: how to get customers to look at your media instead of others? Their solution was to make the audience the media and the Dunk Tank was born! The crowd-based gesture gameplay, social media and amazing creative features a camera on the crowd. The video feed and real time interactive elements to create media and draw crowds of people for the experience. The audience would use Twitter to vote for either the painted lady or the strong man, using either #dunkgirl or #dunkguy. The winner of the vote finds themselves on a diving board waiting to be dunked by the crowd that hits a beach ball into the Dunk Tank target. It exemplifies real time simple ‘listening’ because dunking decisions are made based upon what the audience want and are tweeting.

Special K is a food company that promotes healthy weight loss and inspires women to love themselves through their products. Special K energized the groundswell by integrating online marketing, Twitter, with real time marketing, a pop-up store. They took a risk people talk about their brand. Because of this, Special K received a lot of backlash from activist groups online targeting their use of genetically modified ingredients. Special K countered the backlash by strengthening their campaign with ‘The Tweet Shop’. It was a pop-up style store that turned social currency into real goods and positive sentiment. “Passers can walk into the store  sample the range of new cereal crisps and then tweet about them to buy a box to take home”. @Louinga said: ‘Having some rather nice SK Cracker crisps courtesy of #Tweetshop’ While ‏@CocoSchmitt: ‘OMG!!! You have to try Special K Cracker Crisps at the #tweetshop SOOOOOOOO good!!’ Each tweet from a customer reached their circle of friends, making it both a review and a peer recommendation. This is word of mouth marketing at its best! Tweeting for a box of cereal? Genius.

                  Twitter will be effective only if you choose a clear objective and develop a strategy to make progress toward that objective. Sold to Twitter for $15 million, Summize is an online Twitter search engine used to search and filter through any topics mentioned in tweets. Use this tool in your company to track your products, campaigns or services. Twitter works best when it is paired with other social networking sites. Have I convinced you that Twitter can do more than just let you update your status?

Please share any thoughts, comments or questions!