Chapter 25

We Earn the Relationships We Deserve

Twitter and social networks in general are luring users into a Web of both interconnected and extended connections—forging potentially valuable relationships with the individuals we know and those we admire, respect, and one day hope to know.

The race to extend one's social graph across the statusphere is laying the groundwork for a more formidable platform to share one's thoughts, opinions, observations, messages, and agenda. This is as true for individuals as it is for marketers, sales organizations, and brands.

EARNING THE THREE FS: FRIENDS, FANS, AND FOLLOWERS

As Twitter's civilization personifies the natural tendency to extend the connections that strengthen the network, individuals also share the desire to participate in the expansion. As such, we, as a dedicated online society, grow in prominence.

As personalities, the path between where we are and where we would like to be is defined by our actions and the practices we embody. We have a choice to increase our congregation organically or through prescribed measures. Brands too, face the same crossroads.

Trend and keyword marketing or hashtag exploitation are two very different tactics that attempt to yield similar results. Trend and keyword marketing are usually reactive in their composition. Reactive campaigns are rooted in the discovery of online conversations related to particular keywords, for example:

Someone within the marketing or service departments for related or competitive organizations invests a portion of the day identifying these target conversations and then replies to them in the public timeline with a response aimed at providing resolution, answers, or direction. This practice aims at generating goodwill, advocacy, and, hopefully, new followers and customers.

Companies who do this extremely well include Dell, Comcast, Southwest Air, JetBlue, Virgin America, H&R Block, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Sprint, Home Depot, Cisco, Panasonic LiHD, and many, many others.

However, there is a dark side to this practice and it is usually driven by shortsightedness, underestimation, greed, lack of respect, or naïveté.

#HASHTAGS

Hashtag marketing can assume either a proactive or reactive model.

Hashtags or tags are keywords or terms assigned to a piece of information. This type of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.1 Hashtags are also used for forming groups, such as #engagebookclub, or for expressing a state of mind, thought, or observation, such as “I am so tired after work, what to do? #timetorelax.”

Similar to the reactive nature of conversational or response marketing, reactive hashtag marketing seeks to solve or uncover dialogue related to user-defined topics. While keywords are somewhat similar, #hashtags are user-introduced subjects specifically tied to a theme. For example, if you are having an issue with your cable service, you could tweet, “Ugh, my cable service is out again in Providence. #nameofprovidersucks.” If others who are experiencing similar issues see your tweet or update, they could also express frustration and include the same hashtag at the end of their post.

As we've seen over the last two years, @comcastcares has actively monitored conversations related to keywords tied to or around Comcast, with priority given to those keywords and hashtags such as #comcastsucks or “hate Comcast,” to help them solve problems and ultimately convert negative experiences into neutral or positive results. It's this shift in perception that quite possibly converts antagonists into advocates.

HASHTAGS: A PROACTIVE APPROACH

Hashtag marketing can also assume a proactive approach when brands deploy campaigns designed to trigger word of mouth around a keyword in the attempt to garner rapid and extensive momentum that earns a spot in Twitter's coveted list of Trending Topics.

Moonfruit, a free website creator, stirred things up on Twitter and the blogosphere when it announced a Twitter promotion to celebrate its tenth anniversary. The company announced that it would give away 10 Macbook Pro laptops in 10 days to selected individuals who either retweeted the suggested message proposed by Moonfruit, “Celebrate 10 years of Moonfruit and win a MacBook Pro http://bit.ly/96bxC #moonfruit,” or creatively used the #moonfruit hashtag in a tweet. All entrants were encouraged to tweet often to increase their chances of winning. The caveat? They had to follow @moontweet to find out if they won.

This program is referred to as a “Tweet to Win” campaign and it's straddling the line between spam and fair game.

Not only did Moonfruit become a trending topic, the account skyrocketed to more than 40,000 followers almost immediately and ultimately increased visibility for its Web design services. Did it also increase sales? Yes, it did. The account now hovers just under 30,000.

According to an article in ClickZ,2 a news and expert advice resource for digital marketers, Moonfruit founder Wendy White was overwhelmed by its success. The promotion resulted in a 600 percent lift in site traffic and doubled user sign-up for service trials in just a few days. “The response has been beyond belief, far more effective than other marketing channels,” White reported.

In this case, the company not only amplified its community and potential reach today and in the future, it also extended its value proposition across the social graphs of trusted individuals who opted to tweet as part of the contest. Friends become a powerful catalyst for extending the reach by applying a filter to content. But they can tarnish friendships and potentially erode confidence if their tweeting is misused. This is something for both brands and individuals to consider—as their participation in these campaigns can have negative impacts on their connections, inadvertently straining relationships by causing an imbalance in the routine that defines an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.

No matter if it's a “tweet to win” or a “tweet to insert action here,” campaign, gaining friends and followers through a public timeline strategy is a finite strategy without a long-term strategy in place.

OFFERS AND SPECIALS

When it comes to earning friends and followers by offering specials through Twitter, no one leads the way quite like @Delloutlet. In June 2009, the company reported more than $3 million in sales directly tied to tweets promoting specials available solely on Twitter.

@delloutlet currently boasts more than 1.4 million followers seeking exclusive deals available only on the microcommunity.

However, it's not just the big boys who can brandish authority on Twitter to the tune of tens or even hundreds of thousands of new followers and millions in new sales. Small businesses are demonstrating the power of Twitter and the rewards for giving back to the community as a way of earning friends and followers.

One of the most often-cited examples of a small business cultivating relationships on Twitter and building a vocal and loyal community is @NAKEDpizza. Backed by Mark Cuban, Naked Pizza is an all natural and “good for you” pizza joint in New Orleans that bears the motto: “Doing it one day at a time. We care. We really do.”

Naked Pizza has earned each and every one of its roughly 5,000 followers on Twitter by tweeting interesting information (related and unrelated to pizza), recognizing customers, answering questions, and listening to local conversations relevant to their business. Based on listening exercises, Naked Pizza followed the right people and, in turn, many followed them back.

In an interview with Advertising Age magazine, Jeff Leach, Naked Pizza co-founder, explained, “Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful. Sure, there's the brand marketing and getting-to-know-you stuff… . But we wanted to know: Can it make the cash register ring?”3

Indeed, it did. On April 23, 2009, the company reported that Twitter accounted for 15 percent of total sales that day.

When Naked Pizza is discussed as a small business that's blazing the trail on Twitter, Berry Chill (@YogiJones) isn't far behind.

Berry Chill has three locations in the Chicago area and uses Twitter to send out “sweet tweets” to draw new and existing customers in the door. Typically, the special requires the recipient to show that they're followers on Twitter, and as a reward they can receive discounts or even a free yogurt. One such promotion recorded more than 1,100 yogurt giveaways.

Michael Farah, founder and CEO of Berry Chill, attested that Twitter was increasing the customer base and attested to Twitter's use as an inexpensive acquisition tool: “Our last big promotion gave away $5,500 worth of product—but sales were the same as the day before. The people who were existing customers standing in line attracted people who hadn't tried it.”

PAY PER TWEET

Izea debuted to both accolades and controversy its Sponsoredtwts (@spontwts), a Twitter advertising/pay-for-tweet service that complements its other sponsored conversation, Pay Per Post blog offering. Izea is credited with creating the sponsored conversation market in 2006 with nearly one million conversations funded to date. The company defines sponsored conversations as a social media marketing technique in which brands provide financial or material compensation to bloggers in exchange for posting related content about a product, service, or website on their blog, and now on Twitter, too.

Sponsoredtwts has effectively experimented with several public campaigns that have achieved the goals set forth by the brands that sponsored conversations on Twitter and has helped many companies achieve their objectives and happily serve as referrals to other businesses.

If it's anything similar to its blog program, Izea plans to recruit Twitter users in droves and reward them with monetary compensations or product incentives.

Brands that have successfully used the pay-per-post service include 1-800-Flowers, Beaches Resort, Black and Decker, Bumble Bee Tuna, Disney, Ford, Hamilton Beach, Hewlett-Packard, Kmart, Microsoft, MTV, Overstock, Paramount Pictures, and Universal Music.

Izea is not alone in this market. Twittad connects peers and friends of friends with advertisers through creative ad campaigns rooted in paid tweets.

In one campaign, Craftsman Tools turned to Twittad to drive sign-ups and buzz for its NASCAR VIP Pass Giveaway. Craftsman ran the giveaway through multiple advertising channels, and even James Eliason, president and CEO of Twittad, is the first to remind people that the pay-per-tweet model should always be used in conjunction with other forms of online and offline advertising.

Twittad came up with 15 different tweet messages that users could select. This number helped ensure variation in the messages, so that followers wouldn't see the exact same message from multiple users. Each Twittad user sent three tweets during the week-long campaign. Twittad and Craftsman saw multiple retweets and sharing among friends who were fans of NASCAR. Click-throughs were fast and furious for the first five minutes after a tweet was sent and then tapered off from there (as a result, Twittad wisely spaced out accepting users into the campaign, to smooth out the traffic pattern over the seven days).

As for hard results, the numbers are impressive. The Twittad campaign reached 1,575,000 followers on Twitter. And Craftsman saw approximately 4,000 sign-ups as a direct result of the Twitter campaign, as well as growth in followers to their @Craftsmanclub account.

Another pay-per-tweet solution is Ad.ly, a self-service platform for celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, and Dr. Drew. It helps advertisers and marketers looking to leverage the social graph of these celebrities connect brands with fandoms. Tweets range from the low hundreds to several thousand per tweet. Ad.ly CEO Sean Rad is quick to stress the importance of matching the right publisher with the right advertiser. By selectively targeting appropriate celebrities (and their audiences), Ad.ly tweets can successfully tread the line between advertisement and relevant content (although they're always disclosed as paid advertisements).

There are risks involved here that any brand manager should consider before being lured by the promise of word of mouth, celebrity association, and prosperity. It's the differences between visibility and presence, hype and realization, and earned versus paid. Granted, as in any celebrity endorsement campaign, including Weblebrities, a product and brand benefit from the value of association. But since we're referring to words, we must choose them carefully—as well as the voice used to share them, regardless of the stature.

The Federal Trade Commission is monitoring this activity closely to ensure that disclosure is readily visible and comprehensible, whether it's a post or a tweet. The penalties for not properly disclosing that these conversations are sponsored is not only damaging, it's very public.

As a result of the evolving level of influence inherent in the Social Web, the notice incorporates several amendments to the FTC's guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising and blogging, which address endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities, as well as the disclosure of important connections between advertisers and endorsers.

In October 2009, the Federal Trade Commission released its final revisions to the guidance it gives advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with the FTC Act. The guides were last updated in 1980.4

In the end, we earn the relationships we deserve.

NOTES

1. “Hashtags,” Twitter Fan Wiki, http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags.

2. Douglas Quenqua, “MTV Plays Telephone with Twitter,” ClickZ (May 1, 2009), www.clickz.com/3633603.

3. Abbey Klaassen, “Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Businesses,” Advertising Age (May 18, 2009), http://adage.com/digital/article? article_id=136662.

4. “FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials,” Federal Trade Commission (October 5, 2009), www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm.