Although it's been around for a few years, the last six months has shown frenetic growth for an emerging social media platform known as Twitter. And it's a platform that has tremendous potential to help marketers better understand and interact with their customers -- leading to improvements in new product development and innovation.
Many may be skeptical of this claim. In fact, you may not have even heard of Twitter before, but if you question whether it is becoming mainstream, consider that the Wall Street Journal has published no less than 30 (as of this posting) different articles mentioning Twitter since September of this year -- including an October piece that headlined, "Twitter Goes Mainstream." A pretty bold statement.
What is Twitter?
Katherine Boehret wrote a "Mossberg Solution" column in the Wall Street Journal explaining the service: "In short, Twitter is a free social-networking tool that keeps people connected with one another and with sources of information. Twitter users submit updates about whatever they're currently doing, and these updates cannot exceed 140 text-based characters."
Some refer to it as 'micro blogging.' Basically, you write updates on what you're doing, thinking about, seeing, etc., in real time, and the sum total of these items is your Twitter stream (your micro blog). People then choose to Follow your stream, and vice versa, much as you would via the RSS stream on a blog. It's very stream of consciousness, which from a marketing research standpoint is very intriguing.
How can it can it help improve customer insights?
Twitter has tremendous potential for garnering customer insights, and in fact many businesses, including Comcast and Ford are already engaging in Twitter-moderated interactions with current and potential customers.
Some normative examples include:
- Ethnographic observation of Lead Users,
- Customer sentiment tracking and
- Live, real-time interactive focus groups.
There also have been some great recent articles and blog postings on this topic -- pointing to using Twitter for engaging with customers.
> Observing behaviors and actions: Chris Wilson, who writes The Marketing Fresh Peel blog, posted a recent presentation in which he focused on how businesses can use Twitter for customer insights. "I stressed the importance of understanding people’s behaviors and actions," he notes on his blog, "because no matter what happens to Twitter years down the road, behaviors will be the same."
> Making dialogue two way; not getting caught up in the medium: On my own Propelling Brands blog I posted a response to a blog post by Tony Hung on the Conversation Agent Blog in which he commented on the role of Twitter in brand management. He points out that the key is to facilitate what is a two-way dialogue with customers, and he argues that brands using Twitter should "really listen to customers, show your commitment to participating in direct dialogue and identify and interact with true thought leaders." My additional thoughts, which I posted in my response, were that, "[t]he issue is that too often the medium becomes the message and as marketers we forget the role each channel plays in the ongoing dialogue between brands and customers. Also, all too often, we treat these mediums as a chance to shout at customers but never to really communicate with them."
The key to using Twitter for garnering customer insights is to keep in mind that it's just another tool in our arsenal. As marketers and marketing researchers we should have an objective in mind, first, and then assess whether Twitter is the right venue for communicating with our channel.
But this is the case for any social media technology. I presented on this topic last week, together with some other colleagues at the Wisconsin School of Business. We looked at the role of social media in new product development innovation, including providing points on how to assess whether any given platform is the right fit for the type of insight you wish to garner. You can check out the presentation on SlideShare here.
How can you begin using Twitter?
Set up an account, follow other's Twitter feeds and give it a try!
A quick addition to my post.
The Ten Commandments of Twittering:
http://denuology.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=127:twitter-commandments&catid=48:blog&Itemid=89
A must read for any marketer that plans to use the medium for garnering customer insights.
Two questions:
1. Are there any tools or statistics that could profile the users of Facebook vs. Linkin vs. Twitter? These online communities are useful tools only if the marketers can find their target consumers there.
2. How to measure the effectiveness of these tools? I heard from a seminar that the marketing people talked about they didn't really taking online community as a tool as it's not measurable yet. However, also some marketing researchers in CPG said they actually go to facebook frequently as a source of consumer information, but it's more like knowledge searching instead of using as a formal research methodology.
I am a user of both facebook and link-in but find it's really time-consuming... A good tool to navigate and aggregate information may be important for a researcher if we really want to analyze from the sea of information in facebook or twitter.
I guess the challenge for Twitter's sustainability is to find its own differentiating and menaingful space in people's busy lives. With the thousands of existing blogs, Facebook,My Space, Linkedin, etc, it represents a difficult challenge to create the buzz and sustain the momentum of a new application of this nature.
@ Andres - Yes and no. What I am finding is that some platforms are superceding others. Twitter is one with the potential for displacement. MySpace is a platform I believe is getting displaced. Also, there are new technologies such as FriendFeed that tie them all together -- another way to handle potentially being overwhelmed by the technology and fitting it into people's lives.
Notwithstanding, the reality is Twitter is happening and growing quickly. As marketers we need to become smart about mining it for insights asap!
When adressing social media, I think mobile devices will be integrated in all solutions and enter sense and solution techniques in years to come.
The main lessons l learned while working on this in my Internship this summer is that people are looking for simple solutions that work where they are. They should not need to change device, but perform the task they want regardless of the device they have to their dispose.
Nokia is a mobile company that are looking for mobility in every part of our lifes. They recently launched Nokia Data Gathering, a tool to do research on mobile devices.
Check it out at:
http://www.nokia.com/datagathering
Adam, I'm curious about your thoughts on the motivation of consumers in participating in social media, and Twitter in particular. As a "Johnny Come Lately" to these sites, I can see the value in participating and the value for marketers in monitoring participation. The only problem - participation takes so much time!!! One could spend their entire day doing nothing but letting people know what they're thinking, what they're doing, who they've been talking to, where they shopped and what their feelings are on recent news stories. As someone who did not grow up with these sites, I have the (perhaps incorrect) perception that most people regularly contributing to these sites are not the "average" consumer marketers might be aiming for.
Interestingly, you and I are the same age - neither of us were regularly on the Internet until later in our education. I wonder why some in our generation such as yourself got so active this format and other like me have lagged behind. What is it in consumer motivation that causes more than casual participation, and, more importantly, what lessons can marketers glean from that distinction to help them mine the myriad data available on consumers actively on Twitter, Facebook and similar sites?
I found the one of the interesting aspects of twitter to me is the way to interact with the people who share the same interest with you but who are strangers. not like factbook, to keep in touch with you friends, by using twitter you communicate with people you don't know and then make new friends... that's awesome...