Twitter is very popular now – getting mentions on daytime talk shows,  spurring celebrity competitions, and even receiving governmental uptime requests. People and companies are jumping on to the service because everyone else is. But should they be?

The answer for most companies is probably no.

Using social media isn’t about checking a box or matching the competition. It is about finding new ways to enhance a company’s relationship with its customers, whether is it just listening to them, giving them more information, or truly engaging them in conversation or even brand development. Twitter is a medium that can enable this in a low cost way, but it may not be the right place for your company.

Here are some reasons why not:

• You don’t know if your customers are actually on Twitter. This is pretty simple to find out – go to search.twitter.com, and run some searches with your company name, your brands, and other keywords and it should be pretty obvious whether your customers are talking about you. You might also search for your competitors – are they getting mentioned? If your customers aren’t there, then try to spend your resources somewhere they actually are.
• You haven’t committed time and resources. Social media takes time, and Twitter is no exception. A good Twitter strategy would involve daily searching and interacting, production of useful content, effective resolution of issues, and a plan for incorporation of useful feedback. If your company isn’t prepared to allocate these resources and commit to following through day after day, then your Twitter outreach is likely to fail.
• You are just checking a box. People can sense a lack of authenticity. Oprah’s total of 5 tweets in June have turned the positive feelings of many supporters into disillusionment. The negatives of a ghost town far outweigh the benefits of just having an account.
• It doesn’t fit into your marketing plan. You need to have a plan to make your social media efforts succeed and it needs to be part of your overall marketing plan. If everyone isn’t moving in the same direction, it is likely that your social media efforts might contradict or change the effects that the general marketing plan is trying to achieve. It is much better to get everyone lined up under the same set of goals, and use each medium to its full potential to reach those goals.

If you don’t have the issues above, and are ready to start, but don’t know how – don’t let that stop you. It is better to start and have an open mind to learning and adjusting than to wait on the sidelines.

The Other Side Group recently wrote a blog post about Keeping Social Media Social. She said that people can get to a state with social media where they subscribe to a large number of people, but filter out everyone but a select few to compensate for the information overload. Participation with the masses goes down, and results in one-way conversations that are no different from traditional marketing.

I think there are two benefits to social media that are different than traditional media. The first is listening – companies now have the ability to hear what people are saying in ways they never could before. Blogs, forums, Twitter search, and Facebook status updates all create a stream of searchable content that companies can use to get feedback and keep abreast of perception shifts. They can do this without creating accounts or participating.

The second benefit is engagement with customers. This can affect product cycles, help with PR and marketing, increase sales, help identify trends, decrease support costs and empower fans to help spread the word. Engagement also provides an answer to the question “Is anybody listening?”

A common perception of many of these social media outlets is that they will be a gigantic time drain on already strained resources. This can actually be true – truly listening and interacting with customers can and should take time. That is why it is really important to understand up front what a company’s goals are and what resources they have to commit to the process. Everybody hates finding out that companies aren’t truly involved; that they aren’t really interested in putting in the effort, but are merely checking a box. Lack of authenticity leads to outrage and abandonment. Sites become ghost towns.

Just listening to customers is a great first step. It helps companies to understand how and where they might engage in the future. However, it is important to let people know that you are gathering feedback and it also very important to have a plan to address that feedback, even if that doesn’t happen via social media channels. Customers will appreciate this and will be happy to know that someone is hearing them.

We’ve just received an update from the Hewlett Packard ProLiant team after two months with their new Facebook Public Profile and Twitter account.  Below is a summary of the process we went through in creating their strategy and implementation and how they’re doing so far:

What HP Wanted

The ProLiant team had previously created a Facebook Group as an attempt to get into the social media space. However, there wasn’t an overall strategy for how this Group would fit in to their marketing plan and it wasn’t being maintained. They had also noticed activity on Twitter related to their brand, but had not yet created an account to respond. The team wanted an overall strategy detailing which social media outlets they should be involved in, how they should be interacting with their customers, and how to integrate the huge amount of content they produced for their web site.

What We Found

Facebook Public Profiles offered companies an opportunity to deliver information and engage their customers. Twitter offers real-time updates well suited to covering events and responding to feedback. Many of ProLiant’s customers have both Facebook and Twitter accounts. By enabling communication between Facebook and Twitter, it would ensure the customer, whichever platform they are using, receives the most current information. Additionally, the ProLiant team’s interactions had to be more than just re-broadcasting information. They needed to provide specific content for each platform that would engage their audience and attract new ones.

How We Executed

We created a Facebook Public Profile for ProLiant that showed off their brand and a Twitter account that enabled them to respond to their customers. In order to deliver relevant content to all the platforms, there has to be a seamless flow of information.  Implementing a web 2.0 content syndication model allows communication across all the social media outlets. The blogs on the HP website are fed into their Facebook Public Profile, and enable Facebook users to read the posts, play the podcasts, and watch the videos.  The Facebook status updates are automatically fed into Twitter, and any Twitter update is automatically fed to the Facebook Public Profile.  This allows information to be updated from either account, and to be displayed on both. The Twitter feed was also shown on HP.com.  This now allows a single user to contribute to the same interaction via Facebook, Twitter, a blog post, or text message.

Results

By implementing the above techniques, ProLiant was able to streamline their updating process, and offer more frequently-refreshed content, which resulted in an rapid increase in Fans on Facebook, with spikes in page views corresponding with posting new material.  Currently, the number of interactions per post is growing, and post quality is improving.  This indicates that fans are becoming more involved and are staying active and interested. Their Twitter account also has attracted many followers and has become a key part of their launch events, with team members and company vice-presidents taking turns to comment and respond.

Late last year, Twitter was abuzz with people talking about The Twitter Secret. Only some knew it, and they weren’t telling unless you followed them, paid them, etc. It turned out to be nothing more than a bug at twitter.com that allowed sending Direct Messages longer than 140 characters. The hype was way better than the reality.

People are still looking for the real Twitter Secret – how to “succeed” on Twitter. Some say it is to get as many followers as possible and offer tools and tricks to enable this like HummingBird. Some say it is to make sure that the number of people following you is always equal to or greater than the number of people you are following. Some say it is about how influential your followers are, or what your grade is on one of the analysis tools.

The problem is that those aren’t real measures of success. Those are metrics, but they have to map to real goals. If your goal is to talk to your customers, then having 5,000 people who don’t care about your brand following you isn’t valuable. If your goal is to have meaningful connections with people, then following 5,000 random people just pollutes your feed with noise and drowns out the very people you want to connect with. Aaron Brazell had an excellent article about how friendship on social media has become a quest to get friends rather than connect with friends.

I think the real Twitter Secret is to know why you are there in the first place and then to act accordingly. To have real goals and use metrics to support them, not just to focus on the numbers for the number’s sake.

What do you think the Twitter Secret is?

Gary Vaynerchuck’s post – You Down With ROI?…Yeah You Know Me – says that it isn’t the social media companies that will be affected by the current financial environment, it is the traditional media companies like radio, newspapers and magazines. Spending large amounts on print ads or radio ads will not produce the ROI it has in the past, as people move out of those media.

One alternative would be to create a company Twitter account to follow and interact with real customers. Hubspot ran a recent webinar about using Twitter and pointed out some great examples such as Zappos, Comcast, Amazon and Whole Foods. Comcast apparently watched for 2 months before interacting with their @comcastcares account and now offers support via Twitter. Amazon offers new deals with its @amazondeals account. Zappos shows off all employee tweets at What are Zappos employees doing right now? Whole Foods lets customers interact, check inventory, and discuss experiences via @wholefoods. This whole operation could be staffed with several interns or some full time employees and could totally change customers views and appreciation for your brand.

Instead of print advertising, companies could place ads on related blogs for rock bottom prices and track the actual results. Impossible with traditional media.

The market may be down, but the shift to online media continues to accelerate. Now is the time to get going with Social Media. Ask us how to get started.