Twitter for Dummies (31 page)

Twitter provides all users access to influential journalists, bloggers, writers, and people from all walks of life. If you use it consistently and well, you can find powerful, inexpensive ways to share messages that help solve people’s problems and gain visibility for your work.

Customer service

Big name companies, such as Comcast and Dell, use Twitter as part of an overall strategy to reinvent their reputations for poor customer service and turn things around for their brands.

How did they do it? Or, more importantly, how can
you
do it? Both companies set up Twitter accounts (
@ComcastCares
and all the Dell accounts listed at
http://dell.com/twitter
) as hubs for public customer-service responses. They got in the trenches of social media through Twitter and engaged their customer bases by facing criticisms and complaints head-on, and by showing a desire to help and respond quickly without making excuses or shifting blame. Better yet, Twitter users around the world can witness this transformation and watch the companies respond to others’ complaints, improving the company image for even more people.

By listening diligently for mentions of their companies and quickly extending a helping hand, Comcast and Dell have generated substantial goodwill (not to mention, press coverage). Even when the products and services sold under those brands elicit unpleasant reactions from the public, having a real person reach out to help in a public forum can do a lot to prevent or dissipate consumer anger. Used artfully, one-to-one contact via Twitter instills a sense of hope that the people behind the company walls aren’t leaving customers hanging. Presence and timely response on Twitter can make the difference between a firestorm of complaints and a quickly-managed situation.

Here’s the caveat: No one has yet figured out whether Twitter-based customer service will still be such a great shortcut once Twitter grows even bigger and more popular. If the company’s customer service system has fundamental problems, remaining in closer contact with consumers alone will not fix that. Customer service on Twitter allows businesses to catch consumers in their moments of frustration and help them right away. But Twitter alone can’t fix back-end customer-service infrastructure problems such as overloaded call centers or poorly trained representatives who have no real power to help.

You don’t need to be a huge company (and you certainly don’t need to be suffering from a bad reputation) to create an effective business presence on Twitter. Twitter provides a great customer-service channel for small and medium-sized businesses, too. If you’re at a small company, Twitter can broaden your ability to reach out widely and listen carefully at almost no expense (only some time and possibly tools) while saving you the cost of having an entire customer-service department. Having a Twitter account for your business can make your business more accessible, not to mention let you help people in real time who have real problems and see instant improvement in how consumers perceive your business.

Zappos (
www.zappos.com
), a sweetheart of the Twitter-for-business world, models an almost perfect implementation of the ideas laid out in
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual,
by Christopher Locke (
@clockerb
), Rick Levine (
@ricklevine
), Doc Searls (
@dsearls
), and David Weinberger (
@dweinberger
)
(Basic Books). At Zappos, employees literally have a mandate to create delightful experiences for customers. The catchphrase? “Deliver happiness.” Each employee who may come in contact with customers is encouraged and empowered to do whatever it takes to help. This policy holds true throughout the company’s interactions, but the Zapponian culture of helpfulness absolutely shines through Twitter. Over 430 Zappos employees use Twitter, whether they’re involved in customer service or not, and they all take a share in the “Deliver Happiness” mission.

When you first dive into Twitter for customer service, you may see negativity about your company, particularly at first. Keep going. The best part about Twitter as a customer-service channel is how you get feedback when a customer leaves satisfied. Many satisfied customers send out thank-you tweets that all their contacts see, which gives you instant good public-relations buzz — and that kind of buzz is priceless. Letting go of control (you don’t necessarily have control anymore anyhow) of your brand and engaging publicly with dissatisfied customers can really get that goodwill going.

Networking on Twitter

Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned Rolodex, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively — or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently — Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network. Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people that are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses who share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians.

One of the most interesting phenomena on Twitter is the communication and collaboration that can occur while businesses network with one another in public. Twitter offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries. Take, for example, the CEOs of competing companies IntenseDebate (
http://intensedebate.com
;
@IntenseDebate
) and DISQUS (
http://disqus.com
;
@disqus
), two companies that build comment management software for blogs. Through a debate in Twitter, they collaborated on some cross-functional features in their otherwise rival products to make both companies’ customers happy and solve a problem.

Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector — it’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This movement towards a “Hire 2.0” culture (applying so-called
Web 2.0
technologies to the job market), creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, and introduce yourself — all in real time. Twitter also efficiently harnesses networks of loose ties — the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.

Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. We really can’t overstate how versatile a networking tool Twitter can be. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone whom you don’t want to.

Offering Promotions and Products

If you represent a company that has something to sell, you can find a unique home on Twitter. You may need to adjust your messages a bit so that you can shift from a hard-sell philosophy to an attitude of interaction and engagement that doesn’t necessarily follow a direct path to a sale. But after you find and flip that switch from “talking at” to “talking with” potential customers, people on Twitter can interact with and respond to your company’s information ideas and products in ways that often lead to benefits for both sides.

You can sell-without-selling just about anything on Twitter. Whether you want to sell something large (such as used cars) or something small (such as shoes), you can probably find people on Twitter who need and want them. These potential customers have questions for you about your item, your company, your staff, and
you
— and you can let them talk to you on Twitter about their concerns. You’re in business because you solve problems and fulfill needs for people. Spend your time on Twitter being useful and informative about the types of problems you solve, and the rest really does follow.

One of the most popular examples of products and how Twitter can help sell them is
@Zappos
. Zappos has been a pioneer in business microblogging because a large number of its employees all use Twitter and all, in their own way, promote the brand and its products. Having more than 400 employees active on Twitter has improved communication and connection between Zappos’ employees, increased its visibility and reach, banked large amounts of
social capital
(potentially valuable connections with people who know you and care about your work), and led to extensive press coverage and speaking opportunities.

Zappos is fronted by CEO Tony Hsieh, who tweets about his life, including his schedule, his company, and his personal thoughts — he even operates a separate Twitter account for his cat. The Twitter community embraced Tony and Zappos early on, and in return, Zappos periodically offers Twitter-only bonuses to its followers, such as free shoe giveaways.

But Zappos isn’t the only company finding sales success on Twitter.
@DellOutlet
is another Twitter success story. We talk about Dell as a company that used Twitter to start reversing its reputation as a struggling brand with a poor customer image in the section “Customer service,” earlier in this chapter. But Dell, like Zappos, has also started offering Twitter-only promotions, tweeting links to deep discounts that have generated over $1 million in revenues. Most notably, you can attribute more than $500,000 in revenues to less than 1,000 followers — demonstrating that the coupons not only got passed along on Twitter, but that they probably also got passed along via e-mail to people not even on Twitter. The airline JetBlue (
@jetblue
) has also had great success advertising deals on Twitter: A special $14 cross-country flight offer was snapped up by Twitter users almost instantly, and retweets helped spread the word. This past winter, it was estimated that more than 1,500 coupons and offers appear on Twitter every day. Dozens of coupon-aggregating accounts (like
@dealtaker
) and even Web sites (
http://www.coupontweet.com
and
http://www.cheaptweet.com
) are emerging to organize these coupons and find the best ones.

Two women making exceptional use of Twitter for discovering gift-givers in need are Melanie Notkin (
@SavvyAuntie
) and GiftGirl (
@GiftGirl
). Those who sell any kind of gift resource can use Twitter to reach their audiences and magnify their impact. Notkin and GiftGirl have found unshakable niches with their custom gift-finding service. How to find the right gift for loved ones for birthdays, weddings, and anniversaries is actually a pretty commonly tweeted question. The advice these women provide on their Twitter accounts and the commerce they offer through their Web sites (
http://savvyauntie.com
and
www.giftgirl.com
), place them squarely in Twitter’s elite when it comes to product sales and knowledge contribution.

You can replicate their success be keeping these tips in mind:

Be interesting.

Be accessible.

Be genuine (mean what you say).

Be yourself.

Don’t hard sell.

Don’t link spam.

Follow the 90/10 advice — 90 percent unselfish tweets to 10 percent promotional tweets.

Promoting Bands and Artists

If you’re in any way in the business of creating, whether it’s art, music, film, photography, or what-have-you, Twitter can become a home away from home. Twitter users are incredibly receptive to creative people who tweet — just ask MC Hammer (
@MCHammer
). The former rapper turned preacher turned producer had a terrible image: bankruptcy, bad decisions, and excess. But he joined Twitter around the same time that he co-founded a new Web startup, DanceJam (
http://dancejam.com
), and conversing with followers on Twitter let the world see another side of him.

MC Hammer is a pretty cool example of how you can use Twitter for rebranding, marketing, and self-promotion as an artist, but Twitter can also help relatively unknown people make it to the top for the first time.

Twitter also helps artists such as Natasha Wescoat (
@natashawescoat
) increase their prominence in the art world. Westcoat’s work is finding a home in art galleries, movies, and more, and she can attribute some of that increasing reach to contacts that she made on Twitter.

So, how can you (as an aspiring musician, artist, photographer, or other person who makes a living in the creative industries) find success on Twitter if you aren’t already on the level of Dave Matthews (
@DaveJMatthews
), MC Hammer, Ryan Adams (
@ryanada_ms
), John Mayer (
@johncmayer
), Ashton Kutcher (
@aplusk
), or Oprah Winfrey (
@Oprah
)? Here are some simple tips that you can follow: