What’s the point of Twitter?

Why do I need to use Twitter?

Why do you use Twitter?

What am I missing by not using Twitter?

What do you want to do with your life Twitter?

The reason so many people are having trouble figuring out the value of Twitter is that they haven’t chosen to use Twitter with a particular goal in mind. They have chosen to use it out of curiosity, or because they wonder what they must be missing.  Some of my friends and colleagues resemble that remark, and given the recent mainstream media attention thrust upon Twitter, I expect the number of curious people trying to figure out what the fuss is about will continue to skyrocket.

So they create an account, follow some of their favorite celebrities, follow some of the news sources they already read elsewhere, follow the friends they already talk to on a regular basis, and sit back to wait for the magic.

In order to score, you need a goal

Other commenters on the aforementioned LinkedIn discussion (and elsewhere) mentioned some great goals that you might set for yourself as you start using Twitter:

• market research
• brand monitoring
• customer community building & interaction
• personal “brand” building
• subject-matter networking

If none of these activities are things you are already trying to do well, or are embarking upon as something you want to do well (with or without Twitter), then perhaps Twitter is not a tool you will find valuable. If you’re not trying to bid on merchandise that you’re going to buy sight-unseen and have shipped to you, then eBay probably isn’t for you either.

Goal-oriented Participation Creates Value

With Twitter, the reason knowing your goals is so directly related to the value you derive from using Twitter is that those goals influence your own activity and participation. Those goals will also influence the tools you choose (there are many different Twitter applications available, both free and paid).

The crux of Twitter is that it is a conduit for infinite conversation. Think of it as a giant ball of millions of strands of yarn. Some of those strands are people, some are topics, some are companies. It takes a little while to:

1. build your own strand for people to follow if they choose to, and
2. tease out the strands that you’d like to follow.

But ultimately, you need to do both: contribute value through constant development of your own strand, and derive value from the strands of others.

Don’t get your knickers in a knot.  The ‘revolving door’ metaphor isn’t suggesting that your prospects and customers will be coming and going.  It is a nod to the types of messages and tactics you should be using as a B2B marketer these days.  Your department’s revolving door should be spinning off its hinges with simultaneous inbound and outbound marketing activities to acquire and nurture new prospects.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re either:

• already doing this to some degree, and stand to benefit from some smart, easy-to-use, well-priced marketing automation tools that would make your inbound and outbound marketing life easier; or
• in the shoes of a B2B researcher/buyer yourself, and trying to find a marketing automation tool that will help you with both your inbound AND outbound marketing plans; or
• a vendor in the marketing automation space doing your homework. (A for effort!)

Point #1: the market for marketing automation is shifting, and the vendors need to catch up

There are so many new marketing automation tools out there tackling pieces of the puzzle, and none that I’ve found are doing a great job of the entire picture yet. Given the sheer number of new and old tools out there, I know I haven’t seen all of them.  But I *have* done months worth of searching, so the ones I haven’t found yet aren’t doing a very good job of making themselves easy to find.  (As the avid Twitter users might say, #fail)

What’s more, pricing seems to be all over the map, and I think the industry is in for a bit of a shake-up as small and medium businesses become  key target market segments for these vendors.  For some of the long-time (i.e. 3-5 years) leaders in the space, sky-high implementation fees and per-seat user fees have priced them out of the SME business as they have built their revenue model around the enterprise customer opportunity.

This post is not  an evaluation of marketing automation solution providers.  That’s what we pay the industry analysts for.  This is one B2B marketer’s perspective on where the solution vendors should be aiming their product roadmaps and pricing strategies based on the needs of the small and medium business segments that have massive appetite for smart, value-priced, on-demand marketing automation tools.

Point #2: inbound marketing and outbound marketing necessarily co-exist in B2B

The first important recognition is that most small and medium businesses that are marketing and selling to other businesses need to do both inbound and outbound marketing.  In fact, doing one without the other usually doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Outbound Marketing is essential for any company that needs to nurture leads as a key marketing activity.  There are very few companies that could successfully make the case for every new lead being a sales-ready lead.  The nature of B2B buyers is such that they do a lot of research and analysis prior to making a purchase decision, and the buying cycle can be weeks or months.  So if you’re doing a good job of capturing leads, you should be capturing them at various stages of the buying cycle, and probably 70-80% of them aren’t ready (or interested) in talking to a salesperson.  That means your salespeople aren’t interested in talking to them either.  Outbound Marketing is also critical for companies that expand their footprint and revenue potential inside existing customers over time.  Mining your accounts for new selling opportunities is something that can be executed far more efficiently with well-planned marketing campaigns that identify new revenue opportunities for your account managers to pursue.

Inbound Marketing feeds the funnel.  If you aren’t generating and capturing enough new leads, you have nothing to nurture.  Today’s business reality is that B2B buyers aren’t traveling to trade shows like they used to, nor are they answering their phones as much.  They aren’t even reading very many unsolicited emails, because many don’t make it through the junk filters, and the ones that do still sink to the bottom of the inbox.  So the lead generation tactics of old are far less effective than they were even 5 years ago.  Most buyers and researchers are doing their homework online. Forrester recently reported that 91% of B2B buyers are using social media tools.   Inbound marketing tool vendor HubSpot recently published an interesting report on the The State of Inbound Marketing [PDF] that digs into the shift in marketing spend towards more inbound lead  generating programs.   B2B marketers are looking for ways to participate and add value in the B2B buyer’s research process.  What tools, content, and advice will strike a chord with B2B buyers who are considering your offering?  How do you get in front of them, into the information stores that they consider credible?  Then, when you do, how do you turn them into leads.  That’s where the new Inbound Marketing tools come in.

Point #3: the solution vendors already know the deal – you can see it in their offerings

I think the solution vendors know deep down that they need to offer both inbound and outbound capabilities, and there’s some evidence of this knowledge in their existing feature sets.

Leading inbound marketing automation solutions focus their features on SEO and SEM marketing activities with tools for keyword analysis, page ranking analysis, link analysis, and content optimization.  The good tools also include a lead capture capability that sits on top of a marketing database.  Once that’s included, it is a no brainer to also include on-site activity logging for prospects such as pageviews, form completions, search history, and more.  Secondarily, the inbound marketing focused solutions typically include some very (VERY) basic outbound functionality.  They may have a notification email blast feature so that prospects can ask to be notified by email of new content and resources that become available.  They may have a rudimentary broadcast email function that allows the administrator to send a generic, untargeted message to all prospects in the database.  So there is clearly recognition that the marketer using their system has the need to a) build a prospect database, and b) communicate with that prospect universe after Lead Capture and prior to passing to a Salesperson as an Opportunity.

On the other hand, leading outbound marketing automation solutions focus their features on profiling and segmenting prospects that are loaded into the marketing database, then running very targeted outbound campaigns to nurture, activate, or cross-sell/up-sell those prospects.  There is significant feature overlap of some outbound marketing solutions with inbound marketing solutions in the areas of lead capture and activity tracking.  Secondary features for these outbound marketing solutions consist of basic keyword analysis from your website data, sometimes integrated with a web analytics tool.  But there’s very little in the way of useful reports, metrics, or tools for identifying SEO and SEM opportunities, or for optimizing your existing and new content to win those SEO and SEM results.  It’s largely up to you to sift through other tools like web analytics and SEO analytics software to figure out for yourself how to get more new leads into the database so you can nurture them too.

Point #4: the agencies and service providers are further behind – you can see it in their offerings

There are a handful of service providers and agencies who have listened to the market and evolved their engagement models to better meet the needs of B2B marketers in search of expertise and outsourced manpower.  The big PR firms have started to roll out Social Media practices, some more productive than others.  Some boutique PR and marketing shops have beefed up their content creation capabilities and added social media and search engine expertise, but their industry-specific experience is limited to that of their client roster since it is expensive to bring in good content producers before you win the business.

Some of the marquee agencies seem to have more holistic offerings, but  they’re far too overpriced for most small and medium businesses.  Many of them won’t even pick up the phone for less than $100k/month over a minimum 1 year period.  They have tooled themselves to serve the big budget B2C clients who need to interact with millions of target customers who will each spend $1-$10,000, not the B2B clients looking to build relationships with hundreds or thousands of target customers who will each spend $10,000-$1,000,000.

However, the majority of agencies and service providers I’ve come across so far are still focused on one or two pieces of the puzzle and have yet to pull it all together in a meaningful way: SEO, content creation, interactive development and design, traditional PR, social media monitoring and participation, etc.

Point #5: this is what a B2B marketer wants to pay for

In a perfect world, I would be able to find all of these tools and services playing nicely together with a minimum number of vendor relationships to manage.  Perhaps one technology vendor and one service provider, but even more ideally would be a service provider who has done the homework on the tools and comes to me with an informed recommendation.

Inbound marketing components

• keyword analysis to identify SEO and SEM opportunities and feed my content/activity/editorial strategy
• content generation services of varying degrees of client participation (depending on available internal resources and expertise) to create multi-format content (blog posts, digital/physical documents, presentations, videos, podcasts, web seminars, etc.)
• social media monitoring to identify opportunities for participation, engagement, and moderation

Outbound marketing components

• lead scoring and segmentation based on both implicit and explicit criteria
• automated campaign rules
• email and direct mail fulfillment (with necessary whitelisting, deliverability measures, etc.)
• full integration with popular CRM systems for bi-directional data transfer and reporting

Common components

• progressive/conditional form fields for initial and subsequent visit lead data collection
• multi-user content management tools for creating, storing, merchandising, distributing, sharing, and measuring interaction across all relevant content distribution channels (website, blog, social networks, media dissemintation networks, email campaigns, etc.)
• marketing database that syncs with sales CRM
• individual-level activity tracking (web visits, email actions, forwards/referrals, file downloads, etc.)
• system-wide metrics and analytics so that measurement can span the full marketing and sales lifecycle
• low/no up front costs — small and medium businesses test-then-invest
• no long term commitment — retention should be value-driven, not contractually obligated

What have I missed?

Please add your thoughts in the Comments as to requirements and factors I have overlooked.  The sooner these tools and services become readily available, the sooner we can get back to focusing on marketing programs.

As it turns out, Day 1 of the campaign couldn’t have picked a better social media property to feature as it’s homepage. Nobody loves to gossip and spread the wildfire word more passionately than Twitterers. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that they maximized their Day 1 exposure by featuring Twitter first, instead of Facebook or Digg or YouTube or _______.

The brilliance of the strategy starts to become a little more obvious now that the flash-in-the-pan craze so common on Twitter has faded, and Skittles.com Day 2 is featuring the less frantic Facebook page as its homepage. A little less rapid-fire, a little more dialogue (with ‘Skittles’ posting responses to comments on its own wall). They’ve used the 24-hour Twitter stampede as kindling for a fire that is now burning bigger today than it was yesterday.

This is the inverse of peeling back the layers of the onion. They’ve recognized the lifespan of buzz on various social media outlets, and are chaining properties together in the campaign to leverage one property as a build into the next.  This is a great example of leveraging the Snowball Effect of social media to make the overall impact of the campaign greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitterverse, don’t be so quick to evaluate the merits of this campaign. You are merely the first pawn to be moved in a much longer, more strategic game of chess.