Rich Kirk: Twitter For B2B Websites
Like everyone in the digital marketing space, here at Chameleon Net we are twitter junkies. Even our table football has its own feed! The phenomenal growth the service has enjoyed over the last 5 – 6 months means that Twitter is the platform switched-on marketers are buzzing about right now. However, as with any service growing at an exponential rate, there are problems. This recent article warning of a “Twitter bubble” summed up some of our fears about the service and the industry springing up around it. The challenge Chameleon faces is to make Twitter part of the range of e-marketing services we offer to clients, in a way that can best guarantee a good ROI for both our clients and ourselves.

Many of our more forward thinking clients have expressed an interest in developing a Twitter account, and as a result this week we launched Drivers Jonas on Twitter. DJ is a commercial property consultancy turning over nearly £100m per year and employing over 700 staff, yet they remain remarkably agile when it comes to marketing their website. We're excited about this project because we feel that with the right aims and expectations, a B2B Twitter feed can easily harness all the best aspects of Micro-blogging.

As a B2B company Drivers Jonas is using Twitter to provide the company with a more human face than their corporate website can, as well as develop their reputation as a ‘thought leader’ within the property industry. We believe that in time, being active on Twitter will help Drivers Jonas unearth business leads, connect and interact with potential new recruits (especially undergraduates), as well as doing more routine things like publicising DJ events. One thing Drivers Jonas recognises is that Twitter isn’t a marketplace in which to sell, it’s a watering hole at which they can meet their stakeholders; something I believe is vital to good big-business tweeting.

We’ve also envisaged that in the absence of a DJ blog (which would be time consuming and difficult to operate in line with internal compliance procedures) the Twitter feed could be used as a rapid response in the case of a major PR event. This flexibility is something many B2B companies would love to have; for some blogging is the answer, but for marketers at larger companies getting sign-off for a controversial blog post is ‘worst nightmare’ territory. Twitter restricts you to 140 characters, and at the same time, restricts the barriers to getting a message out into the public domain.

I hope to blog again with more on this project as it develops, as I think it will provide some interesting insights into ‘corporate tweeting’. In the meantime, if your company thinks they could benefit from being on Twitter, but want a helping hand building a business case and launching an account, get in touch.

3/6/2009 11:27:39 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

 


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