You can't fail to communicate…

I was extolling the virtues, and otherwise, of Twitter the other day to a contact who runs an online business. He was aware of it but couldn’t quite see the point, which is I think a familiar reaction for most of us. I offered to set up an account for him and articulated in some detail how it might be used in his business and so thought it might be useful to encapsulate my thinking here too.

Twitter is above all a ‘permission’ based messaging system, by which I mean that only those people who choose to see your messages, or Tweets, will actually see them. If you have ever spent a few moments on the live public feed, where every tweet from around the world shows up for all to see, you will know that it would be impossible to use unless users were able to limit what they see to the messages that are likely to appeal to them.

Thus we have the concept of ‘following’, whereby you choose the messages you’d like to see, and ‘followers’, those users who have opted to see your messages.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool, that is the messages are limited to 140 characters, about 15 – 20 words, so brevity is of the essence.

So Tweets are short and to the point, but why would you bother? The reason, to an extent, is precisely because they are so short. A tweet, seen on a mobile device, or a PC, will take seconds to read – in effect every tweet is simply a headline – so there’s no decision to be made about opening it or not. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve read it and it’s gone. Hopefully, it was useful, and if it linked to an article you would like to read later, or to a web site which intrigues, then you know how to find it when you’re ready to go back and read it in full.

People are using Twitter in many different ways;

For celebrities, it provides a direct channel of communication to and from fans, uncluttered by media spin and often refreshingly honest because of it. Clearly, for some, having a direct feed from their favourite TV face can be compelling, particularly if they reply to you. Stephen Fry now has over 1m followers who get not only an insight into his daily grind, but links to anything he finds interesting or outrageous. For building a personal brand the system delivers enormous benefits.

If you love to chat and enjoy telling people what you’re doing at every moment of the day, then Tweet away, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get many followers beyond your immediate circle. Then again, keep it witty, charming or useful and you might be surprised!

My area of interest though, and I guess yours, is in using Twitter in a business context and here it has a number of distinct advantages over other media. To be able to deliver short brand building messages, service announcements, information on updated or new products, or special offers, to a receptive and willing audience makes your brand stand out.

We’re all in the reputation business and clearly anything we can do to enhance our reputation with our key audiences is a good thing, particularly if we can achieve that without becoming annoying or repetitive.

The trick then, is relevancy…if you can provide timely and relevant information to your customers, then they are likely to be interested enough to follow you. When they do that, you then start the process of turning them into fans…

In the case of my friend with the online business, he can now provide a regular stream of product information, he can set up special offers more frequently and for a shorter period of time, because he knows the response is going to be immediate, and overall he can build his brand in customers minds.

And as we all know, being front of mind is all…

Clients often come to us with a specific requirement in mind, but when we drill down to objectives, delivery mechanism, budget and timescale we often find that an issue or communication need can be resolved more successfully in a different, and often less expensive, way.

This blog post then is a plea to ask us for our thoughts earlier in the process, and preferably before you have decided exactly what you need – there are likely to be other, better ways of killing your particular cat.

I always try to uncover what is behind what is being asked for, but when, as happened this week, I’m confronted with an apparently clear requirement, it doesn’t seem appropriate. The frustration in those circumstances is that what could have been a conversation leading to the development of a bunch of workable ideas, becomes a simple costing exercise.

So my learning point for myself this week is to remember to delve a little deeper every time, to try and get to the heart of the issue.

And it’s so much more fun when clients are open to a discussion much earlier in the process. I love to chat through different approaches, often bringing something out of left field and sometimes even finding that the right solution means we have no further involvement.

In an age when everyone seems to be desperately clinging on to every piece of business no matter how small, this might seem strange, but we need to enjoy our work too. And a client who goes away happy with a free solution is a client who’ll come back one day.

So if I ask an irritating number of questions next time we speak, I’m just delving. Remember…it’s more fun if you ask us ‘How?’ rather than ‘How much?’.