Blog posts tagged Online Marketing

Four things I learned at the Golden Twit Awards

In case you hadn’t realised, the Marketing Donut won two Golden Twit Awards for its Twitter feed last Thursday (26 November). My colleague James has already thanked everyone for supporting us (thank you!), so I won’t embarrass you with further grovelling. Instead, here are four things I learned from the Golden Twits award ceremony:

1)     Social media are becoming an essential customer relationship tool for organisations of all sizes. Nominees and winners included mid-sized charities (Action for Children), professional firms (Ralli Solicitors), arts organisations (Scottish Ballet), family-owned businesses (Adnams), small businesses (us!) and – yup – bigger businesses and corporations, too (Manchester City Football Club). Social media are a great leveller – if you’re interesting and engaging, you can stand out as much as any big organisation, and just about any kind of business can benefit. Heck, I even know a burger van with 1200 fans on Facebook.

2)     A meerkat may well be the future of corporate tweeting. One thing that really struck me was how Compare the Market.com is using its meerkat as the face of its brand on Twitter. I have mixed feelings about this; I admire their inventiveness, but I also know that, however spontaneous the meerkat’s utterances may seem, they are written by a team of creatives from a small agency every morning; the prospective tweets are then signed off by their boss and passed to the Compare the Market.com marketing folks, who amend, rewrite, reject, accept and sign them off again. Finally, much later in the day, they are posted on Twitter. The guys behind the character told us that a lot of corporates are now creating characters to represent their brand on Twitter. To my mind, this undermines the idea of Twitter as a medium for businesses to engage directly and spontaneously with customers. Is this controlled corporate messaging the first indication of Twitter’s loss of innocence? Of course, what it means for smaller firms is that you readily steal a march on your bigger rivals by being more personal and quicker to respond.

3)     When you put Twitter users in a room together, they will spend a long time tweeting on their phones before actually saying hello to one another. But they do say hello eventually.

4)     Online social networking will never totally replace actual face-to-face networking. I’ve been to three awards and a conference in the last month and absolutely the best thing about all of them has been meeting small business owners and other people from my industry and talking to them face to face. I now have more people to talk to on Twitter… @simon_editor