My guest blogger today is Lubor Ptacek. Lubor joined Open Text in 2008 and as the Vice President, Product Marketing. He is responsible for overall product marketing activities for the entire suite of Open Text enterprise content management products. His responsibilities range from messaging and market intelligence to analyst and public relations.
In case you missed these posts from earlier in the week -- there were some Feedburner problems.
8 Things You Need to Know Now That You Are Out in the Real World Looking for a Job
8 Business Use Cases for Twitter
Twitter can be a powerful business tool—if you can get past the initial thought of blasting your messages to a trusted audience waiting for every word from your corporate news room. The rules of Twitter have been well documented – keep it personal, don’t spam with useless info, keep it interesting, and so on. These rules apply to each of the use cases described below, which are the most common use cases for using Twitter and other microblogging services as business tools:
1 -- Thought leadership.
When your key employees actively engage in conversations with other players in your industry, sharing their thoughts, opinions, and favorite information sources, they begin to attract followers. You are not a leader if nobody follows.
2 -- Competitive intelligence.
Following the key employees of your competitors is a great way to gain competitive information about the technologies and trends they are paying attention to, what conferences they attend, what products they are launching, and so on. Even more information can be gathered by following the key players in the competitors’ ecosystems – those who don’t work for the company directly are usually much more open in their tweets.
3 -- Sentiment analysis.
When you mention a product in your tweet, you often gain another follower – the company that makes or sells that product. Smart companies have realized that they can monitor the overall sentiment or mood around their product by following people who talk about it. They often use specialized software to do this monitoring in a way that allows them to do sophisticated sentiment analysis.
4 -- Surveys.
If you want to quickly check the opinions of your followers on a particular topic, use a tweet with your brand as a hashtag. This doesn't yield statistically relevant results, but still provides useful feedback in most cases. For everything else, there are tools like SurveyMonkey.
5 -- Customer communities.
Twitter allows you to respond to your customers’ questions publicly. You can demonstrate that you care, you can engage with your customers in a dialog, and you can continuously educate them about your product capabilities. Thanks to its informal nature, your customers might be much more willing to contribute to conversations on Twitter than on other media. They can and will participate by sharing tips, answering each other’s questions, or simply commenting on their experience with your product.
6 -- Networking and expertise location.
Do you want to find out who matters in your ecosystem? Start following some of the key players you know and start watching who they follow. Soon, you’ll meet many experts you’d otherwise not know about. It’s not their title or profile that makes them experts; it’s what they do and say. Twitter is a great audit trail of a person’s activities. This is different than using LinkedIn, since Twitter is based on unilateral relationships – the people you follow don’t always know you.
7 -- Event coordination.
Twitter is being used on mobile devices at conferences for networking and comments within the participant community, but it can also be used effectively for coordination – such as for last minute agenda changes. The same concept can be applied to the coordination of projects and emergencies, such as accidents or natural disasters. As we’ve seen recently in Iran and Thailand, Twitter and other social networking services can be used to great effect in organizing political protests.
8 -- Marketing communication.
Using Twitter for blatant marketing propaganda can be a major turn-off, but when used with subtlety and in combination with other tools—such as a press release, material posted on a website, or a webcast—it can be a powerful addition to your marketing mix. The beauty is that Twitter obeys the rules of permission marketing since your followers are following you of their own accord. Just make sure it stays that way – do not abuse them for your marketing goals.
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There are certainly other business use cases of Twitter out there today and many more will be developed in the future. Feel free to tweet me if you’d like to comment:
Some other posts about social computing and ECM that may be of interest...
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