One More Comment on Twitter

In the video The Point of Twitter one really important point was made about how large corporations are having to adjust their customer service approach because of Twitter. The example of Toyota is given for a company that at one time received a lot of poor publicity about product recalls and so on. The speaker in the video says that Toyota didn't bother to respond to the customer complains through their twitter account. That responding to customers through twitter and on a one at a time rate is not something that large companies are used to doing or dealing with. Traditionally large companies have offset poor publicity or customer complaints by flooding the market with positive attributes about their company. The problem with this style of marketing, marketing features and attributes, is that it is become less effective as customer are now more interested in overall company sentiment.  It will be interesting to see how large companies respond to this change. My feeling is that some will be too large and slow to respond to the change.

Week 3 Completed Tasks and Review

It's already week 3. The topics I viewed this week were:

• Read The Origins of Social Media
• Read The Death of Segmentation
• Watched How to Get Ideas Spread
• Listed to the posted podcast
• Watched The Moment When Social Media Becomes News
• Read The Long Tail
• Listen to The Point of Twitter
• Completed Twitter Branding Assignment: @United

Interesting Points from This Week and Thoughts 

The main point that emerges from this week is that the speed with which information travels and spreads via resources like Twitter has changed the way we get our news and power it can have in forming opinions.  The Origins of Social Media touches on this phenomena with its blog swarm example and how AOL faced a firestorm of customer dissatisfaction due to news about their products via bloggers. I feel this is a good thing but also the scary part about the blogging and online community. In one sense it's great that information can travels fast and to thousands with the click of a button. But, on the flip side mis-information travels just as fast. Also, at least in my opinion negative comments and mis-information are far easier to dish out on a business or individual when hidden behind one's computer desk. As a business owner I know that sites like yelp, though not technically a blog, have given customer an unfair forum to post negative comments about my business from time to time.

The video The Point of Twitter also makes the same point in discussing how Twitter with its real-time impact and speed to can actually drive the stores that new outlets choose to pick up. In one part of the video the journalist mentions how often times he uses Twitter to find the beat on a new story as Twitter knows what's going on prior to the major news networks. 

In the video The Moment When Social Media Becomes News the speaker discusses how our news being formed twitter posts and various bloggers. He states that though one blogger may only have a small piece of the story, but when taken together with multiple blogs and combined a full story starts to form. He comments that this is a positive change and has improved the depth of the stories we receive as viewers. However, he also cautions that this phenomena leaves bloggers and the articles they product open to a follow the leader type of attitude even if the information turns out to be false. He uses the example of lost ant to better explain. One lost ant may find itself followed by a string of blindly following ants much the same way a blogger, reporting the wrong information, could develop a list of followers all reporting the wrong information.  

I agree that this is a possible downside to the blogosphere,  but if we're looking at the mainstream media I wouldn't say their reporting of the news anywhere close to 100% accurate. I read and hear stories all the time from the mainstream media that turn out to be false, misreported, or skewed. So I don't know that blogs should be seen as any less reliable than traditional sources. In fact I see blogging as possibly more accurate than the mainstream media because users can quickly and openly comment, re-post, revise, and view from different angles. The sheer size of the blogging community acts as a filter that gives use little slices of the news that we can then put together to form the full story.

My Company is Failing on Twitter

I have to admit I’m not the social media person in my company, though this class is fortunately forcing me to start looking at these marketing sources.  We currently have an office assistant that takes care of all our Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin updates and outreach. The current Twitter assignment made me curious to review my current Twitter program and followers. To my disappointment I found that the majority of “followers” my company has are other plumbing and HVAC companies, non-local people, and personal friends. In terms of actual buying customers we have virtually no followers. Obviously competitors, non-locals, and a couple friends here and there does little if any good for my bottom line.

Additionally I found our Twitter posts to be boring and run of the mill. A lot of the things we’re tweeting about are the same thing other plumbers are tweeting about. Things like change your filters, don’t put grease down the drain, reduce energy usage. These are all things that even as a plumber I don’t really care about so why would my customers. Tying back to Seth Godin’s video How to Get Your Ideas Spread we’re doing an extremely poor job of engaging and communicating any real unique message.

In response to these finding I did a little of my own research on how to improve my current Twitter marketing efforts. One blog I stumbled upon is Tracy Gold’s post How To: Get More Qualified Followers on Twitter. Tracy suggests that being less self-centered and instead try to tweet more about others and local events. I agree this might be more attractive to followers as it’s easy to become bored or turned off by people and companies that only talk about themselves. Blogger Liz Wright seconds this suggestion at the tail end of her blog. She states that most tweeters aren’t maximizing their follower based because their tweets are too self-centered. That to gain a strong following one really needs to engage and make the conversation about others. I agree with both of these authors and am curious to try in my own business.

http://socialmediatoday.com/tracycgold/260118/how-get-more-qualified-followers-twitter

http://mashable.com/2012/03/16/gain-twitter-followers/

Finding My Own Purple Cow

I just finished viewing Seth Godin’s How to Get Your Ideas Spread video. I agree with Seth on the idea that marketing can be extremely different because so much of what we see now a days looks the same. The question of how do I get my customer to take notice of me and care is a question every marketer would love to definitively answer. In his video Godin states that ideas can spread when customers with almost cult like geek devotion to a product take notice and spread the product among their peers. I agree with Godin on this; however my one comment is that it can be difficult to formulate how to actually make your product different and get that geek like devotion and work of mouth referral to spread. 

My company recently signed a deal with Costco and OSH to sell HVAC and filtration equipment out of several locations. While watching Godin’s video I couldn’t help but think how can my company stand out inside of a 100K square foot Costco building filled with hundreds of products more attractive than HVAC. What’s going to be my purple cow when all I have to display is small kiosk and a couple HVAC products. I feel like the setup I’m getting in both Costco and OSH is just the standard run of the mill kiosk. To make coming up with a solution even more difficult Costco and OSH are extremely strict in terms of what they’ll let us display inside the store. This restriction by Costco and OSH on what I can and can’t display within their stores goes against Godin’s main points; businesses need to be different, the old style push advertising and traditional branding are no longer noticed. 

In all I encourage others to view the Seth Godin video and please if you have any purple cow suggestions for selling HVAC equipment I’m all ears.