Mike MacLeod

Why Twitter Followers Don’t Matter

// January 19th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Twitter is not a broadcast medium.  So, there is no need to make an effort to gather as many followers as possible.

If you try to broadcast your marketing message via Twitter, a few things happen:

• Only a small percentage of your followers will see an individual message.
• Some of those will be turned off and stop following you.
• To account for the above, you could broadcast more marketing messages and increase the frequency.
• You’ll reach some more followers and some of them will again be turned off.
• You will be seen as a 24/7 commercial. Followers will see less benefit in following you and stop.

Twitter is best used as a conversation agent. As in any conversation, it’s better to listen than to speak. You learn more that way.

Use Twitter to gather information. To do this, you will need to focus on following, not gaining followers.

Use Twitter to share useful information. “Buy my product” is not useful.

If you do this, followers will come on their own (I REALLY wanted to use a “build it and they will come” quote here, but deemed it too cliche) and your ego can be satiated.

Twitterize Your Market Research

// January 12th, 2009 // Comments // Journal

Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) has reached out to Twitter users to get a quick assessment of his new ad spots.

Should this replace the formal ad testing that most companies perform? Of course not.

But it will give Barry a pretty good estimate of what’s good and bad.  If a specific ad gets a brutal response from the Twitterverse (ugh, that’s a bad term. I promise to come up with something better) then he could save some research dough by trashing it early.

Use all the information you have available to you – especially if it can be obtained quickly and cheaply.

What are People Saying About You?

// December 21st, 2008 // Comments // Journal

Who is talking about your company or your brand? Or better yet, who is talking about you? And what are they saying?

Startup SamePoint plans to provide just that information by aggregating results from social networks, Twitter and blogs. It also attempts to hilight positive and negative discussion about a topic by identifying complimentary and critical words.

User-generated discussions are typically not indexed by major search engines, such as Google, as they do not reside on static pages. SamePoint converts these discussions into permalinks and organizes them within a tag cloud.

Displayed here are some results from a search on WPP, who has had a lot of press lately about their acquisition of TNS.

SamePoint has a long way to go in features and aesthetics. However, this type on social media data mining is on the verge of exploding.