A “Twitter” Eye-Opener

You listening to me?

At a meeting today with a prospective client, the discussion turned to Twitter.  The client said: “I don’t believe in all of that social media mumbo jumbo.”  I expressed my surprise given his background in marketing.  His suspicion was that Twitter and other social media platforms didn’t add any value — especially to a B2B technology company.

So I asked him to participate in an experiment.

We went online to Twitter and did a search on his company name.  There were several threads of discussion about the company:

• A customer complaining about his company’s primary product – and blaming it for web performance problems (that in reality couldn’t be true, so the customer was blaming the company for a problem it wasn’t responsible for).
• A partner talking at length about his experience implementing and integrating the company’s product.
• An industry analyst giving his opinion about the company.
• An employee who was complaining about a recent downsizing.

And this was just on the first page of search results.  I watched as the client’s face went pale.

“Now imagine,” I said.  “If you were monitoring Twitter.  Not only would you know about all of these conversations, but you could have participated in them.”  And, in at least one case, corrected some errorenous information now floating around about the company.  Needless to say, he’s now interested in learning more about Twitter.

All companies should be monitoring social media channels – and participating (but not without a clear strategic plan in place).  People are talking about you.  There are discussions about your products, your services, your pricing, your employees, and your business.  Don’t you want to know what they are saying?