« RIP Direct Mail | Transpromo-Live »
I finally gave in last week and signed up on Twitter. For those of you who aren't familiar with this emerging community, it's a free micro-blogging service that gives users up to 140 characters per post to answer one simple question: "What are you doing?"
Twitter posts, or "updates" are displayed on the user's profile page (here's mine) and delivered to other users who have chosen to "follow" them. Users can send and receive updates by SMS, instant messenger, third-party services (i.e. Facebook), or direct from the Twitter Web site. To learn more about Twitter and how it works, you really should check out the helpful video featured at the bottom of this entry. While you may ask "but who would want to use twitter"? it's actually interesting and useful to hear what others are up to. What's more, I believe Twitter could be set to transform VDP as we know it.
How? Well, a few reasons. Firstly, it provides another channel. You want to reach your audience using the most appropriate channel that they read and respond to every day, right? Well, most Twitter users are reading updates at least once and often several times a day. In some cases, it's even replacing email—they use Twitter to send direct messages to others and reply to them. So how could this work in a direct marketing campaign? Well, if you knew the recipient's Twitter username, then you could "follow" them and send them customised "direct" messages (messages that are sent only to them). Twitter provides a simple response mechanism too, it's really easy for users to reply to a message. It's a bit like receiving a marketing message over SMS with a response option (e.g. "reply 'yes' for more information"). But unlike SMS, users can choose how they want to recieve messages (e.g. only on the Twitter Web site and not SMS).
Secondly, VDP is all about the data, after all we're talking about variable-data publishing. Everyting you know about your audience is in your data—and no matter how much data you have about your audience, it's probably not enough. But what if you knew what you're audience were reading, doing and thinking, right now? What if you knew their political views? Likes and dislikes? Well, Twitter lets you do just that. Twitter provides a goldmine of data about their users, and it's public for all to see (users have an option not to share their posts, but few do). Armed with one little piece of data about your audience; their Twitter username, you could crawl their Twitter page to find out what they're up to, what time their last post was and what they are currently up to.
While this type of data analysis is impractical to do manually on any large scale, it could be automated through mashing up Twitter with a semantic tool that indexes Twitter pages and appends it to your existing data. This really breaks the paradigm of databases as we know them today. Databases are never up-to-date or contain enough information. This type of mashup will enable you to deliver highly relevant messages and offers that are driven by business rules based on the current information you've indexed from Twitter. OK, maybe I'm a bit "out there", but I really don't think I'm out too far. Just watch this space...
P.S. If you want to track what people are saying about your product or brand, then you should get on to Twitter. Now. Twitter lets you track specific words that appear in user updates (e.g. your company name). Check out my comment on marketingmag.com.au which explains how this works.
Posted on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at 8:46 AM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/154
Hi Elliot,
Fantastic website and resource for VDP ideas. I share your ideas on the social networking sites been an excellent data mining source, the level of up to date information is huge.
Talking about "out there" the ultimate personalisation would be for companies to employ "web-socialites" to discreetly promote there products to indivduals directly in these communities!
Posted by Tim Ball on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at 6:03 PM
Hi Tim, thanks for the kudos. Yes, social communities are rich with data, marketers just need to start mining them effectively. Your suggestion really isn't too "out there". I recall when I was at Adobe we employed a handful of full-time 'Web Community Specialists' back in early 2000. Their job was to hang out on user forums and other online communities, evangelising Adobe products. Cool job. It was effective too, but when a lap of redundancies came around they were the first to go, which is unfortunate.
Posted by Eliot Harper on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 at 9:05 PM
So thats why all my money went on Adobe products!!
Posted by Tim Ball on Thursday, 19 June 2008 at 6:59 AM
Eliot,
I've been needing a reason to try Twitter. Thanks for the inspiration. Follow me at stewtrekk.
Jeff
Posted by Jeff Stewart on Saturday, 21 June 2008 at 7:45 AM
Interesting thoughts Eliot. With the centralization of social networks you'll eventually be able to link names, identities and contact information through one portal. I'm sure as this happens however standards and laws will be put in place to help regulate spam. I think the idea will not so much be about personalized marketing via social media but influence in preexisting conversations to increase brand awareness viraly. Rather than using social media as a tool to sell, I think it is an even stronger resource to learn about your target audience. Kind of like what Starbucks did with http://mystarbucksidea.force.com and Comacast on Twitter with http://twitter.com/comcastcares
Posted by Jon Bishop on Monday, 23 June 2008 at 10:13 AM
Hi Jon, thanks for your comments. I get your point, sending marketing messages over twitter (or "spamming") probably won't get too far. But what about using the data in a larger VDP campaign? Imagine if you solicit your audience's Twitter username at the data acquisition stage (along with name, address, etc) and then use their username to semantically gather data from their Twitter page and build user profile information, then target those users through print and other media. I don't think this use of social media could be regulated. After all, Twitter is a 'micro blogging' service, any update that you post to a blog or micro-blog is instantly in the public domain (unless you've restricted access)...
I agree that this could also be used to drive brand identity through a moderated social community. Thanks for sharing those examples and your thoughts!
Posted by Eliot Harper on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 at 9:40 PM