When US Airways Flight 1549 ditched in New York’s Hudson River after a bird strike in January 2009, it was social networking site Twitter that broke the news to the world. “I just watched a plane crash into the hudson riv [sic] in manhattan,” wrote a user called Manolantern, a full 15 minutes before any of the mainstream media picked up on the news.
It may not be the most eloquent statement of all time but its significance cannot be underestimated. It cemented Twitter in the minds of people all over the world as a vital medium for communication, one that was as much a part of every day life as email, mobile phones and other social networks. Alongside the inane Tweets about the weather, last night’s TV and this morning’s breakfast are breaking news stories, finding a route to publication long before traditional media outlets can cover them.
Twitter’s story begins long before that cold day in New York. In 2006, software architect Jack Dorsey, entrepreneur Evan Williams and software engineer Biz Stone launched the micro-blogging service, which lets users to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less. It was during the South by Southwest music and film festival in Austin, Texas in March 2007 that Twitter really took off, as traffic on the site rose from about 20,000 Tweets a day to 60,000 during the event. The company placed two 60-inch plasma screens in central positions at the festival, broadcasting a non-stop stream of Twitter messages.
It seemed that almost overnight, Twitter became a huge part of everyday life and where consumers go, the enterprise generally follows as workers demand the same tools at work as they use at home.
Nothing new
Social networking in the enterprise is nothing new. Employees have long used company intranets to communicate with each other, but the explosion in use of external social network tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn has changed the way the tools are used. Instead of just being used for internal communication, they are also now being used externally – as a way of engaging directly with customers, releasing news, marketing products or simply as a way of raising a profile.
Dell – a company that has had its fair share of public relations struggles – is a good example of a company using social networks to its advantage. CEO Michael Dell posed the question, “Why don’t we reach out and help bloggers with tech support issues?” back in February 2006 and just a month later the company formed the Online Community Outreach Team, where tech support experts monitored online conversations before engaging with consumers and posting on blogs.
Later that year the company launched the Direct2Dell blog, opening up a direct line of communication between the company and its customers. Dell also extended its Outreach Team to beyond tech support so it could engage with anyone who commented about the company.
“Social networking is a growing role in company strategy,” says Richard Binhammer, Dell’s strategic corporate communications, social media and corporate reputation manager. “We’ve seen a 30% decline in negative comments and we’re able to solve more customer issues through social media.”
The company also gets a lot back from its social media strategy. Dell’s IdeaStorm is a site for customers and other people interested to submit technology and business ideas to the firm, with readers able to vote for their favourites. The company says that this can reduce costs associated with product development as well as provide a larger focus group to provide feedback on a development. Customers are also more likely to buy the product when it is released, according to Binhammer.
“It’s not just about customer support or driving sales,” he says. “It is also about technology innovation. Customers know what they want from a new product and we can use social media to listen to what they have to say and learn from it.”
Good and bad
Beyond improved customer relations and product development, what can businesses derive from social networking? Neither Facebook, with over 300 million members, nor Twitter, with an estimated 10 million registered users, are making money, but that hasn’t stopped Dell from using Twitter as an additional revenue stream thanks to its real-time search, which enables the company to constantly update its followers with the latest product news.
“When we have changes in stock at one of our outlets, placing an advert in a newspaper that appears days later is not really good enough,” Binhammer says. “With Twitter we can make announcements in real-time. We have added $2m in revenue through posting offers on our @DellOutlet Twitter page and another $1m through people who have seen our posts on Twitter and then headed to the main site.”
But hidden in the message of how best to use Twitter and other social networks to your advantage is one lesson about how jumping on the latest bandwagon and following the latest industry hype can backfire if it is not used in the right way. UK retailer Habitat joined Twitter in June 2009 and soon began marketing its products via links to its site and catalogue.
The company employed “hashtags” – related keywords added to the end of Tweets to improve positioning in search results – to boost their hit rate. While this is common practice on Twitter Habitat used hashtags related to the popular search terms at the time: iPhone, Iran election and Mousavi being the three most popular. Anyone searching on the site for information for the Iranian election was presented with a link to Habitat’s latest catalogue.
The Twitter community reacted angrily to the messages, with some accusing Habitat of spamming the site. The retailer quickly deleted the offending Tweets and issued an apology: “We would like to make a very sincere apology to any users who were offended by last week’s activity on Twitter. The top 10 trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to.”
The furore was blamed on an intern who quickly parted company with Habitat. But by then the damage had been done. “This could not have led to anything other than a consumer backlash,” Alex Burmaster, communications director at research firm Nielsen Online said in an interview with the BBC. “The bottom line is that it was a serious misjudgement. They have used a political and human situation that many people are concerned about, to market their products and services and that is not right.”
Staying in Control
Social networks, if used correctly, are a powerful tool that enterprises should not be afraid of embracing, according to Yann Motte, founder and CEO of Webjam, a London-based firm which offers an online platform that enables users to build their own social network site. “Brands should control the environment where they are being talked about,” he says. “They need to have a Twitter or other social networking account for interaction – it’s a must.”
Dell has strict guidelines to cover online interaction with customers. “The company put down a marker,” Binhammer says. “If you do something on Twitter you have to make sure you are clear that you’re from Dell.” He believes that this approach to social networking has enabled Dell to improve the perception of its customer service. “It’s become just another way we do business, like email or phone calls. I can’t follow a conversation between two Dell customers in Minneapolis but I can if it’s on Twitter. It produces a much more real-time interaction,” he says.
With social networks providing a real-time way of interacting with customers, it is no surprise to see the customer relationship management (CRM) vendors getting involved, helping customers to remain on top of online chatter.
Salesforce.com’s recent upgrade to its platform, called Service Cloud 2, introduced plug-ins that enable companies to monitor conversations online and engage with clients. Salesforce for Twitter enables employees to monitor the site in real-time and respond to relevant messages. The upgrade is evidence that the traditional call centre approach to customer service is being replaced by Web 2.0 technologies, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said at the time.
“With Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com is doing for customer service what we did for sales: proving that the cloud is a better way. The customer service market is being held back by traditional technology. With two-thirds of customer service interactions moving to the cloud and the popularity of social networks, it is high time for a change,” he said.
Rival hosted CRM vendor RightNow Technologies offers its customers Cloud Monitor, a platform that enables them to observe and participate in online conversations.
Having an online presence is just the first step, Motte says, as companies jumping on the bandwagon run the risk of driving loyalty to Twitter, not to themselves. “Companies need to make followers aware of the brand, not just the medium. The key is to get people from social network sites to the brand’s site. They need to move beyond the novelty and entertainment value to actually getting a return out of it,” he says.
CBR opinion
A recent survey by Pear Analytics revealed that 40% of all tweets were classified as ‘pointless babble’, which means that there is a lot of nonsense to wade through on the site. However, as Webjam’s Motte points out, there are great rewards to be found through a successful social network approach. The key to a successful strategy is planning; the Habitat case is a perfect example of a company diving in without taking the time to consider its tactics.
Interaction with customers is moving away from call centres and on to the web, so sooner rather than later companies will need to turn their attention to social networks. Ignoring them is not the way forward – social networking is far too ingrained in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people for it not to have a long-lasting impact on the enterprise world.
Tweeting CEOs
Evan Williams, Twitter
http://twitter.com/ev
Musings from Twitter’s founder and boss. Not too much promotion of the site but plenty of titbits about life at the web’s hottest site.
Choice Tweet: I forgot my belt today, so don’t be surprised if my pants fall down.
Yann Motte, Webjam
http://twitter.com/YMotte
A quiet page from B2B social network guru, with posts on music, golf and holidays.
Choice Tweet: UK government 20 pages to explain how to use twitter 140 char. messages shows twitter is more subtle than you think!
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems
http://twitter.com/SunCEOBlog
Mainly used by the ponytailed one as a marketing tool to push content on his personal blog.
Choice Tweet: (Another) Win for Open Storage…: Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited web sites.
Kevin Rose, Digg
http://twitter.com/kevinrose
A very busy page from boss of social media site Digg.com. Uses Twitter to promote Digg but also keep in touch with friends.
Choice Tweet: Spoke w/Obama today, he wanted me to mention to you guys that we have some job openings at Digg.
