At the beginning of the Twitter revolution, many of our clients swore that Twitter was a huge new channel opportunity – and they were going to tweet their way into millions in new sales. Their plans were buttressed by Dell’s announcement that it had sold over a million dollars worth of products using Twitter. (Today, Dell claims it’s two million http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/06/11/delloutlet-surpasses-2-million-on-twitter.aspx). Since most articles touting this claim are long on self-congratulations and short on hard metrics, we’ve remained Twitter skeptics.
Given that press stories have focused on how Twitter will keep you up to date on the minutae of what your favorite celebrity (or potential cyberspace friend) is doing, it’s been hard to see how Twitter could be anything more than an open party line in cyberspace — much less a serious marketing or sales channel. But underneath all of the chatter about Twitter’s entertainment value, we’ve had the nagging sense that Twitter may, in fact, be a huge paradigm shift for marketing and sales.
These unrelenting messages have led us to explore Twitter’s potential as a useful business tool and track how Tweeple are using Twitter for business. Can using Twitter improve your business, even when you aren’t a household name? Is Twitter becoming a mega marketing and selling channel that no company can ignore? Is Twitter a marketing tool, a social networking tool — or both?
We’ll be looking for the answers to these questions as we go through our own journeys on Twitter, and will be posting our experiences here. Let’s just say that, thus far, the results have been intriguing.
We welcome your experiences and questions as we report on our own. Let us know what you think!
Interesting and informative. But will you write about this one more?
Absolutely! In fact I was speaking to another siteIQ analyst over the weekend about his experience with Twitter and will be prodding him to add to this discussion. Thanks for the feedback!
[...] received several pings from readers that wanted to hear more based on Kenna’s post about tweeting for business. After three months in the Twitter box, I’m ready to weigh in on my observations — and [...]
[...] received several pings from readers who wanted to hear more based on Kenna’s post about tweeting for business. After three months in the Twitter box, I’m ready to weigh in on my observations — and [...]