The June edition of Time Magazaine has a fascinating article on how Twitter is changing the way we live and interact with each other. In my opinion, as social networking evolves, companies and sales reps will have to adapt to stay ahead of the pack and at the top of their game.
But, hey, don’t take my word for it!
Excerpt:
“Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from “passed links” at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.”
“Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google’s system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google’s search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That’s a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it’s not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the “super fresh” Web.”
Make sure to checkout the full Time Magazine article here — it’s a must read!
What are your thoughts about Twitter? Do you see it evolving into a sales tool, a place to prospect, or is it just a waste of time?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article Chad!
There are countless services sprouting up that will do things like email you a digest of all tweets that include certain keywords. So, if you sell a hot new alternative to Lucky Charms, you could tweet your site to anyone who mentions their Lucky Charms habit, etc.
@Craig- You’re right on here with your comment — there is a wealth of information on Twitter that can be mined for sales opportunities and conversation starters. There is some debate as to whether Twitter is a platform to sell, but if your customers are hanging out on Twitter you need to be there too. I like Twitter Search the best and I keep track of a few different keywords myself so I can monitor the conversations taking place about me and subjects I’m interested in — Sales 2.0, Personal Branding, etc.
I think Twitter is a double-edged sword. It can be an incredible marketing tool, but it has uses beyond marketing that can begin to weigh on the populace. TIME had an article similar to this a few years ago about MySpace…and then Facebook. While one of the two former examples is hugely successful, the fear of Twitter collapsing onto itself like MySpace should keep business owners wary of using Twitter or Facebook as a primary marketing tool. As a supplemental, the programs work great: they aren’t the reliable piece of marketing so if a destruction a la MySpace were to occur, it could be safely removed from the marketing strategy without a serious impact on getting your brand out there.
I agree with Mr. Klein: if your customer base is on Twitter, than you need to be on Twitter. But how many people will stick with a program that’s sole existence is a quasi-egotistical infatuation (for the Tweeting author) and a quasi-stalker infatuation with the subscriber? As the TIME article states, you could pass a great news article on, or talk about what cereal you had for breakfast. If a business creates a Twitter account and begins to plug and market itself, the populace of Twitter will notice, and could become turned off–the account serves as a giant binary megaphone to which most people associate to a TV commercial. Twitter’s success with marketing comes from the CONSUMER which is why it works as a tool. Those passing the links along do so because THEY support the product they are linking to.
What’s my point? Simply put, Twitter reinforces marketing fundamentals: Its about the consumer, always. If you can connect with them, they will market for you….with whatever is available to them.
@Steve- Thanks for your awesome comment!
Twitter is a revolutionary way to reach more customers, have conversations with them, keep them engaged with your brand, and eventually a place to mine and gather prospecting information — InsideView a Sales 2.0 company is already exploiting the information available on Twitter and making it available to sales reps.
As the uses for Twitter expand and it becomes another type of search engine the importance of it for actionable information to increase sales will grow.