This is a guest post from Edward Boches and has been reprinted from his blog with permission.
The more time I spend on Twitter, the more excited I get about the creative opportunities this amazing platform affords brands and agencies.
While there are plenty of brands already using Twitter – GM, Comcast, JetBlue, Dell, and Starbucks to name a few – many of them are simply applying old media applications to one of the most exciting new mediums to emerge in decades.
Consider that Comcast and Bank of America use it for the most basic customer service. Starbucks does little more than announce offers and engage in some dialog with customers about those offers. JetBlue microblogs special deals and weather updates. All of these serve a purpose, but are they as inventive as they could be?
Instead, maybe brands and their creative teams (and by the way, that includes the folks from PR, technology and media, not just the writers and art directors) should start with what Twitter enables: the chance to connect with, learn from, influence, and maybe even mobilize like-minded people who in and of themselves comprise the best free medium anywhere.
Sure, you can do all the things you did in other media on Twitter. But isn’t the real opportunity to do something as new as the medium itself?
Here are some suggestions to get you thinking. Hope you’ll share your ideas, too.
Lowes (just 200 followers and eight days between tweets) could start a grassroots movement to rebuild America. Using search.twitter.com and other tools, they could identify community activists interested in constructing playgrounds or fixing schools, announce a contest to provide supplies and know-how, solicit proposals, announce winners, and tweet on the results and impact. In the process, they’d generate thousands of followers and plenty of positive press.
Barnes and Noble could tweet an announcement of a new partnership with 826 Valencia to teach literacy skills to at-risk kids. They could identify all the writers on Twitter, promote volunteer opportunities, connect willing tutors with one of the 826 chapters around the country, and in doing so, endear themselves to a community of writers, readers, and teachers. A hashtag could collect the experiences of everyone involved, possibly even generating enough content for book in and of itself.
Barnes and Noble would get credit as a brand that cares. They would attract the loyalty of followers who share the same values. And finally, for those who still believe in the value of long term thinking, they’d be inspiring a future generation of readers.
UnderArmour could build a following of athletes and tri-athletes and then foster a dialogue and exchange of training tips, resources, and diet information to help athletes improve their performance. They could even host and moderate a weekly panel using tinychat.com.
Some of the advice could come from UnderArmour themselves, but much of it would come from the willingness of athletes given the chance to participate. In the process, UnderArmour would position themselves as a training authority and acquire even more faithful followers.
Nearly 2500 brands have taken the initiative to tweet and connect. But as with any technology, the art isn’t in what Twitter does, it’s in what you do with it. What will it be?
Edward Boches is chief creative officer for Mullen, one of the country’s leading integrated advertising agencies. He’s a writer by craft, a social media enthusiast, and an aspiring children’s book author.
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Hi, co-founder of Tipjoy here. I’d love to get creative with some companies and help them launch campaigns on Twitter.
For example, Starbucks could run a Twitter campaign called “Tweet your friend to a drink.” Tipjoy would provide a custom widget for the Starbucks website where users can pick the drink they want to give, and then a message would tweet out like this: “p $4 @abbyxmix for a tall latte, brought to you by @starbucks to help RED. Tweet your friend to a drink: http://starbucks.com/twitter ” Starbucks could make a small charity donation to RED for each drink that’s gifted and paid.
We could do something similar for just about any company out there, with or without the donation angle. Companies, please contact me at abby@tipjoy.com if you want to launch a creative campaign involving payments, gifting, coupons, charity, etc on Twitter.
Tamar,
I am so with you. I think we’re in early days, similar in ways to the early days of TV. Who then would have foreseen reality tv, or 24 hour news, multiple-angle sports coverage, or American Idol? TV programming then was by-and-large an adaptation of shows formatted for and successful on the radio. We populate any new medium first with the content of the medium it is replacing.
I’ve been talking to brands using twitter, and the benefits are often quite personal to the person handling their twitter account. From the public’s perspective, brands look and feel more personable and approachable if their twitter account is used not just for broadcasting announcements, offers, and news, but if they contain a lot of @replies and conversation.
However, those are non-scalable and pretty time-consuming approaches. Can, or should brands, budget for twitter-based public customer service? Perhaps yes.
But what you’re talking about is very interesting. I’ve explored it with PR firms and the challenge is often one of complexity. Many brands use twitter to monitor their own presence online and in the twitterverse. They put out and then use tools to track uptake and distribution. Old school, as you say. But also what they know.
For a full creative effort to succeed on twitter it would take a new kind of agency — a creative agency capable of fashioning interactive, participatory, conversational campaigns. Story lines that might unfold over time. Points of interest taken from within the organization, or sourced over twitter, that are more relevant to users and thus more conversational. Transparency — as you suggest — whereby brands create several facets of interest to the public. Their nonprofit support, their product development, their concerns as corporate citizens.
Brands need to realize that when they use a tool like twitter they’re joining the user’s world. This is not a medium in which to simply push out a brand image (“here’s who we are, now like us!”) but need to engage with users on their terms (“this is for you, because we like you!”). Less effort spent on the image and message of the brand, more on the facets of a brand that customers relate to.
Things that customers relate to will be naturally more re-tale-able — more worth talking about and sharing. If brands want to find ways to scale their use of twitter and other social media, it’ll be that way, I think: by leveraging the many interesting points of connection they can establish with customers.
It’s not an eyeball medium — it’s a talk medium!
Thanks for making this point, and please share more insights with us as they come in!
cheers,
adrian
Edward and Adrian, very well said. I think the opportunities for brands on Twitter are infinite. But like Adrian said, we are the infancy period and most companies do not have the time nor the inclination to invest in this conversational or talk medium. And the agencies that serve them, don’t really understand it either, at least not in the way that you guys describe. As a result, most brands use the medium for listening or broadcast. We’ve got a long way to go.
Enjoyed this resourseful article. I agree. I love to reply to tweets even though it is time consuming. I’m hoping the receipient enjoys the reply just as much as I enjoy replying and receiving replies from my tweets. If only blog visitors would comment.