Microsperience

‘Is Twitter useful or is it just a fad’ is the current debate on a lot of marketing blogs at the moment. Teresa Cottam looks at how the telecoms community can benefit from using Twitter.

Okay I admit to being in the fad camp initially, but I’ve started to change my mind about Twitter thanks largely to Darran’s efforts. I’ve also begun to realise that there is a generational issue at work here. When my generation started using e-mail I remember older colleagues telling me a) it wouldn’t catch on and b) it would probably be the end of literacy, life, the universe and everything. Clearly this was not the case.

Next came SMS. So I text – of course I do – but I don’t belong to the texting generation. I think my thumb joints had already set a bit (well that’s my excuse), because I just don’t do the text conversation thing. I text as a time-shifting method of communication when I’m on the move. I’m okay at it, but I’d rather e-mail.

Now we have social networking and – most recently – the love child of the texting and social networking industries, micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter.

So if you only have 140 characters how can you possibly use that for marketing? Well the answer is you can if you think like an SMS marketer. In fact it can be incredibly useful to stitch together communities of interest. For example, we have set up the Microsperience site to twitter to our followers that a new post has just come out. And they can then check it out at their convenience.

In summary, Twitter is great for updating, directing and interacting with busy people. It’s a good way of directing traffic to your site or of getting people to interact with you. Another example of how this can work is that when we need help with research eg to get people to fill out a poll, then Twitter is a great tool to use. So this snappy, two-way interaction means you can get feedback more or less instantly, can ask for help, get ideas, tell people what you’re doing or share important snippets of information.

But is Twitter of any real use to the telecoms industry? Well yes! The industry is already there, in the background, making use of it. For example, there’s a certain US CSP you’ve probably heard of who is able to respond to any tweets that mention its name. If a customer is unhappy and complaining about it, a helpful member of staff can reach out to the customer in semi-realtime and engage with them. Is this scalable? Who knows! But they’re doing it, managing their brand and engaging with their customers now, today.

This is an example of a micro-blogging user community. So users can swap tips or inform their vendor when things ain’t right. In the case of the US telco, the comments can be both positive and negative. Such interactions are going to happen anyway, so why not take the helm and steer the interaction in the way you want it to go?

A lot of journalists are also now using the site to discover realtime stories as they’re emerging. So if you desire cheap PR then here’s an opportunity for you to get the attention of the world’s press. Or maybe you have a product you want to tell people about? Well here’s a ready-made medium for viral marketing. Another idea for vendors is a drip feed of tips – a bit like the ‘tip of the day’ feature – which you can use to educate your users in small bites that they can assimilate as they go along.

My advice to the telecoms community is: few of us have time to read anymore and some people just don’t have the attention span for bigger pieces! So this fast and responsive medium isn’t for everyone or everything, but it definitely has its uses and appeals to certain demographics. Telcos are already there, online and using it to engage with customers, so vendors take note! See Twitter as a way of engaging with both current and potential customers and of managing your brand.

So let’s get to some specifics:

1. Set up a Twitter account. Look you’re an intelligent person you can figure this out – go to twitter.com and follow the instructions. My only comment is choose your twitter name carefully.
2. Put a link on your website or blog to announce that you’re on Twitter and to help people discover you. This isn’t hard to do: structure it like this <a href=”http://twitter.com/username”>Follow me on Twitter</a> Where you substitute ‘username’ with the Twitter name you’re using (don’t just put in ‘username’ or it ain’t going to work!). Okay so now your customers, prospects and other interested parties are directed to you so they can start following you.
3. Use a widget. If your company or you are already using another social networking site such as Facebook you can add a widget that displays your tweets to your site (also works on standard blogs and websites – you get a Flash widget). The instructions to do this will be on your home page in Twitter.
4. Paste links into your tweets to your site, announcement or to interesting content you want to share. Great, but remember the rules of SMS marketing – you have to push this link by careful choice of marketing message that is keyworded and appealing (oh and less than 140 characters).
5. Hash tags. You want to let people discover your posts on Twitter so now you’re going to learn about hash tagging. Hash tagging is a way of indexing content – think of it as a keywording system to help search and group content. It’s easy to do you just put #tag into the body of the tweet. The key is to tag the content appropriately so others who’re interested in your type of content can search and find it. On your home page you should see a Twitter search box – click on here and put eg BSSOSS in and voila you will see BSS/OSS content. You can follow hashtags on Twitter and then hashtags.org will track your tweets and make them easy to find, but personally I find the search function works fine. And if you find that someone is regularly tweeting about stuff you’re interested in then you can, of course, start following them.
   By using the tags we as a community can start to aggregate our content. Obviously this means that we need to standardise tags and have a directory of appropriate tags to use – otherwise we’re not going to know what to search on or find we’re looking through a lot of stuff we’re not interested in! So we’ve put together a list which we’re hosting on telesperience. If you add a new tag and want to put it in the directory then just drop Darran a mail at dc@babworth.com. We’ll tweet out the new tags as they’re put in. If we try and organise it effectively then it will be more useful for everyone.
6. Set up a Twitter feed (see twitterfeed). This means that when you post eg a blog it will instantly be twittered.
7. Don’t over-tweet. Mum might want an update every hour but believe me your business colleagues don’t. If you’re tweeting every two minutes we’ll all stop listening! Keep your company tweets targetted and don’t overdo it. Better to have individual employee accounts and a separate company account. This is good for employees because they can gain their own following and profile (great for personal branding), but as a company you might want to think about your policy on  twittering because there’s the potential for brand damage from within your own company!

So there’s a few ideas to get you going, and here’s another quick list – a rundown of some of the things you can do with Twitter so you can consider which are useful for you:

1. Build your brand. You can use it to build both your company brand and employees’ own personal brands. If your chairman is the company face then he should have his own Twitter account; if you have a particularly brainy employee with a lot to say on some arcane subject (you know the type) then capitalise on that – make him MrInterconnect, MrDeviceManagement or whatever and he will attract others interested in these topics and establish you and your brand as domain experts.
2. Advertise jobs. Great to advertise vacancies and completely free. Direct people to your site where all the info is. As the community starts to build using the hash tags (see above) this will become even more effective. Incidentally if you’re recruiting or looking for a job you might also want to listen to James Huntingford from MBR Partners talking about the telecoms job market (see Telesperience 2).
3. Get feedback and opinion. Want to know what others think about your idea, message, product, new website? Want to get people to vote on your poll or comment on your blog? You can also target who the request goes to using…yes you guessed it…those hash tags.
4. Getting noticed. Twitter is still new so if you’re a small vendor with a big message you can really take advantage of it to build traffic to your site. You can also bring yourself to the attention of journalists, analysts, potential customers and so on.
5. Distribute news. Particularly useful if you need to get the message out very quickly! And for last minute reminders about events you have coming up (eg webcasts) or to remind people to visit your site because you’ve just posted something new (via Twitter feed).
6. Networking. Great way to find like-minded people. But just be a little cautious about ‘friends’ you might discover. Don’t tell anyone anything you don’t want to be made public! But great to network at events – if you’re at MWC and you want to tell people where you are, what’s happening or that you’re going to do a demo at 4pm then that’s a great use of Twitter provided it’s targetted (don’t bore people with the details if they’re not there! so tag it correctly!). I would strongly recommend you having at least two Twitter personae as I haven’t yet found a way of stopping your business contacts seeing your tweets to your mates about what you did on Friday night. Until they sort that one out get yourself a private personae and a public one.

I hope this helps get people started or at least able to think about whether Twitter is of any use to them. Don’t forget we just launched on Twitter so you can follow us. I’ll be sure to tweet out the hash tags as they’re added, but you can get the first version of the telecoms hash tags directory here and this will be updated monthly.

If you have any hints or tips for telecoms marketers then please share them with us and we’ll post them. We’ll also be doing a feature on NG marketing in an upcoming issue of Telesperience - looking at how folk are managing all these new phenomenon like social networking platforms and Wikis. So watch out for that one. Yes I’ll tweet when it’s out!

Postscript

Feedback from Cerillion‘s Dominic Smith who’s been trying out the hashtagging on Twitter is that symbols don’t work, so just be aware of that when setting up new hashtags. Dominic has changed the BSS/OSS hash tag from #BSS/OSS to #BSSOSS and this is now working properly. If anyone else finds little tips like this then please drop us a line so we can share them. Thanks Dominic!

Readers might also like to see this article from The Guardian which says Twitter is turning out to be a male-dominated social networking site.

And here’s a great article on hashtagging and what you can now use them for from Meredith at March PR.

Find out more about the telecoms experience at Telesperience.