Josh Kerbel

Anyone who knows me, knows that I abhor most forms of “social marketing” or whatever buzzword you want to describe the latest fad as.

It’s not that I dislike the concept, It’s that I dislike the content.  Most forms of social marketing focus around mindless blurbs of self serving information or simple “Me-Too’s”.  Whether you Tweet (or is that Twit) about your breakfast or the great deal your company is offering, its blatantly self serving and just a waste of electrons………in fact, if Tweets were physical objects, I am sure Greenpeace would have rammed Twitter with its boat in an effort to stop the endless pollution.

Tweeting about the 40% discount your company is offering on its entire product line is not using social media effectively, unless of course your goal is to devalue your business.

In fact, its gotten so comical that when I saw a friend of mine on Linkedin join a bunch of job searching related groups, I sent him an email to find out if he was looking for work and if I could be of help.  His response was:

No, not at all.  I just hired a consultant to teach me about social media in order to help me build my business.

Well, since he isn’t in the recruiting or job placement business (or anything close) I can only imagine what sort of advice he was getting, since he was clearly giving off the message he was looking for a job.  But you can clearly see that any moron can harness social media to send out a message, you just need to understand what message you are sending out.

So what it really comes down to is can you use Twitter in a way that just isn’t ‘Net pollution.  And since anyone can be a critic (Definition of a critic: Someone who knows the way but can’t drive the car), let’s see if I can come up with a plan to use Twitter productively.

And just to clear things up………you will not be getting regular 4Square updates from me every time I go to the toilet or decide to eat.  That’s just absolutely annoying.

Step 1: Set Up a Twitter Account Determine What Objective I Want To Achieve With Twitter

What would be a reasonable objective for me to aim for with Twitter?  How about these two:

• Download of my E-book;
• Subscribe to my blog feed (This means I need to get the feed up and running finally).

We are going to track these outcomes with Google Analytics.  I think it is important that you be reasonable, yet specific in your goals.  Let’s set this up right now.

Step 2: Develop A Strategy/Plan for using Twitter

Notice that we still don’t have an account yet (well, we do, but we aren’t going hog wild with it yet).   Twitter is just a tool, much like a hammer or steam shovel.  You don’t randomly wack things with a hammer or dig assorted holes with a steam shovel, you start with a plan of what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, who you are going to do it to, where you are going to it, why you are going to do it and how you are going to do it.  If you are a news geek, apply some who, where, what, when, why and how rules to your Tweeting before you start.

Now keep something in mind, although my objective is to get people to subscribe to my blog feed and download my E-book, first I need to become a trusted source of information.  I also know that I can’t be all things to all people, so I am going to confine my tweets to 4 silos – electronics, construction, automotive aftermarket and personal financial advisers.  Once I get going, I may find that this is just too much work and I may have to cut down.

Starting out, I have decided that I will not simply re-Tweet (say that 5 times fast without sounding like Tweety Bird) what some talking head or Internet personality has said, but rather I am going to broadcast news and information relevant to the sector/silo.  Nor am I going to blast everyone on my Facebook and Linked in accounts with my thoughts.   That is exceptionally annoying and may be the true definition of Internet Narcissism.  My goal is to find people who are actually interested in a topic and engage them (And this means ignoring my own business needs for a while……or does it?)

Automation is the key to the Internet, so I am going to register for a free Socialoomph account and see what part of the process I can automate.

Step 3: Execute and Measure

My plan is to put out 10 to 20 tweets a day for the next month and see how it comes back to my KPI’s for this little project.

The goal of this project is to objectively determine if I can monetize Twitter rather than just using it as an Internet exhibitionist

Story at 11

Twitter, which only a short while ago was considered the WAY to talk directly to your customer might be creeping into the realm of brand marketing.  Which means if you are focusing on building a results accountable marketing system, a system that produces a predictable amount of profit for every dollar you invest in it, you might want to think twice about spending too much time and effort on Twitting or Twittering or whatever the experts call it

Want proof, consider this story

B-to-b marketers still looking for return on tweets

BtoB’s survey of nearly 400 U.S. marketers found uneven satisfaction with Twitter’s ROI as a marketing channel. Nearly half the respondents to the “Twitter in B2B Marketing” survey, which was conducted late last month, said they are dissatisfied with their return on tweets. That’s despite the fact that nearly 70% said they spend less than 30 minutes per day managing their Twitter stream. Four of five marketers also said they could not directly attribute revenue to micro-blogging.

……

“It’s the cheapest form of wide- spread advertising you can get,” said David Pittman, senior director of marketing communications at Initiate Systems. “It’s extremely difficult to put a value on that, but we think it’s high.”

……

One interesting paradox of the ROI equation is that so few respondents have figured out how to calculate it. In fact, “tracking ROI” was identified as the most challenging variable in the Twitter equation by a significant margin.

On the other hand, marketers who report high overall satisfaction with Twitter don’t seem to care too much about ROI metrics. In-depth interviews revealed that marketers who describe themselves as satisfied with Twitter’s overall value also say they aren’t paying significant attention to measuring returns.

“We can’t attribute any hard-dollar sales to Twitter, but that’s not the point,” said Patrick Kusior, social media manager at Analog Devices. “We’re building the image of Analog as a responsible organization.”

Any time someone starts tell you that you can’t track the ROI of a marketing channel, but you should spend money on it to build your “IMAGE”,  your bullshit detector should start going off.  Especially if you are a smaller business.

It’s amazing how many Internet marketing experts still don’t get the fundamental fact that the Internet is about direct marketing.  Do yourself a favor, forget the fads and stick to the basics of direct marketing until you develop a way to track their performance.  Chances are, your customers don’t really care about your Twits, no matter how much you tell yourself otherwise.

Direct marketing is not about doing something for the sake of doing it or doing something because everyone else is doing it.  Direct marketing is about doing something because it has a proven profitability model for you.