Using Twitter at scale

In three short years, we've witnessed the evolution of Twitter from a way to exchange "inconsequential information between friends" to a business communication tool with a US$1 billion valuation.

As Twitter's user base has grown into the millions, companies have followed their consumers onto the service and started participating in conversations. You're already familiar with companies like Comcast, JetBlue, and Best Buy, among the hundreds of companies with corporate Twitter accounts.

But many of these companies are starting to face the scalability issue; a single person can manage the communication channel to prove the concept, but moving beyond one person/purpose can be difficult. Companies, unlike individuals, need to think through participation strategies for channel migration, which requires process, culture, and technology support.

To that end, Dachis Group is pleased to be a part of CoTweet's Enterprise Innovators Program. We will be working with forward-thinking brands to help capture value from their Twitter activity. These companies have started moving beyond the proof of concept stage and are starting to measure their efforts to better manage outcomes. If you are interested in participating, you can request an invite.

Some of the experience we'll be bringing to the program comes from a project that we completed recently for a well-known B2C brand. The company has been using a combination of personal and corporate Twitter accounts on an ad-hoc basis for customer support, but needed to step back and formulate a strategy for making their efforts work at scale. In our research, we found that most businesses are still using home-grown approaches, which are near if not already at their limits. If your company could use some help with this issue, let me know.

Comments

[Adam Needles]

Hi, Peter.

A quick call-out. I am not at all playing down the importance of Twitter in B2C marketing, but I think it's important to point out that it also has had a huge and transformative impact on B2B marketing. I just gave a speech at Dreamforce on how the nature of the B2B buyer is changing and that this is having a huge impact on how we should market to the B2B buyer. In fact, I would argue that B2B marketing must become more pull (vs. push) than ever.

One of the top call-outs of this 'brave new world' is that B2B buyers -- especially those making very big, complex, expensive purchases -- increasingly use social media as a key part of their getting input from other users and those in their industry.

There is some great research from Enquiro, MarketingSherpa and Forrester that all speak to this. In fact, I did a round-up of these insights in a past blog post:

http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/nailing-down-evidence-that-the-nature-of-the-b2b-buyer-has-changed/

Anyway, wanted to share this research and also add this to the dialogue. Would love to see more focus around innovating the management of these channels in a B2B environment, vs. B2C.

Cheers!

Adam Needles
B2B Marketing Evangelist
Silverpop

Twitter: @abneedles
Blog: http://www.silverpop.com/blogs/demand-generation/