Recently Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter, posted the following message: "If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)"
This seemingly benign Tweet, which has since been deleted from Payne’s Twitter stream, resulted in storm among third party Twitter developers - and inspired a revisit of rules marketers should keep in mind as they use this medium to promote their own companies and products.
1) Watch what you say - even an expert poster can have a misstep and be surprised by the resulting storm. Payne’s comment did exactly that among third party developers for Twitter, writes Tac Anderson at New Comm Biz. "Twitter has grown to the size that it is because of third party developers. Twitter has obviously made a decision to compete more and more with the very developers that helped make them popular. That single tweet tipped their hand and surely caused Twitter a flurry of phone calls, emails and headaches right before their first developer conference."
The conclusion third party developers drew, GigaOm wrote, was that Twitter would be implementing features that might compete with third-party Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic. Payne quickly apologized - and in fact, Payne shut down his blog in part because of this episode, according to GigaOm. Apparently Payne had been thinking about it before this happened because, ironically enough, he was tired of how easy it is to have Tweets misconstrued - such as with a Tech Crunch article about what the comment could mean for third-party developers that was widely panned by Twitter employees in their own Tweets.
2) Apologize when necessary as quickly as possible. In fact the customer service culture on Twitter that has developed all but demands that companies do so. Southwest Airlines rushed to soothe actor and director Kevin Smith when he was asked to deplane because of his size on Twitter - despite the airline’s policy that people of size purchase two seats.
In this case Payne used Twitter to stamp out the fire. "@al3x as a developer, i’m not sure how to take that looming tweet….," wrote developer Chad Etzel (who actually used to work part-time at Twitter). Payne immediately repsonded, "@jazzychad I don’t mean that developers won’t be able to compete with the site. We still release most everything API-first, of course." (via TechCrunch)
3) Anybody can be listening and probably is. Granted, it’s hard to give away the corporate farm in 140 characters, but Twitter can be a surprising gold mine for competitive information. Gathering competitive information this way is perfectly legal, says Bob Fox, head of a competitive intelligence program for Canadian entrepreneurs.(via the Globe and Mail).
One way to gather it is by examining public statements by company staffers - especially if they are inconsistent - that can point to new initiatives under way. He advises firms to monitor competitors' comments in the media, on industry blogs, at conferences and, yes, on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
For those companies looking to pick up their own competitive data, digital marketing expert John Jantsch offers the following: While most companies set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition "I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with - not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa." - from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.
4) Twitter is also good for identifying new search terms. You don’t have to be gleaning corporate data about your competitors - there are other ways to use Twitter as a research tool if you are a marketer. Social media research can yield long-tail keywords appropriate for deeper pages on your site, writes Norm Elrod, a digital media consultant. "The incremental traffic these pages attract is likely the most targeted and potentially the most valuable. And you never know. Maybe a sea change among consumers is bubbling under. Such research conducted in real time (at least more real time than last month’s analytics) will help you plan for it and keep you out ahead of it."
