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Do UK businesses really value Twitter?

December 11, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Techcrunch recently picked up on a poll by Accredited Supplier of 1200 UK businesses who are currently using Twitter, and echoed the findings that ‘UK Business bullish in Twitter’.

Besides the caveat that the UK businesses that are so bullish are the ones that are actually already using it, there’s a little bit of interesting info in it.

Apparently 62% of UK businesses are using Twitter purely as a branding exercise, with 33% combining branding and sales, and 15% using it purely for sales (They might want to take a look at Dell making millions on Twitter for starters).

But then it goes on to reveal that just 14% of the businesses are tweeting daily, and 21% weekly. Which leaves 65% posting a monthly message or less – should that even count as a business using Twitter?

So there’s no surprise that 84% don’t think they’ve achieved a return on investment so far – but strangely more businesses would be willing to pay for ‘additional business functionality’ at 22%, than have actually claimed a return on investment (16%).

So maybe a better headline and summary would be that UK businesses are still mightily confused when it comes to Twitter. Some of them want more functionality despite not seeing any returns, and many of them claim they’re using it when they might log in less than 12 times a year.

They haven’t so much missed the point as built a dual carriageway bypass around it.

If you’re starting to use Twitter on behalf of your business, you need to have a quick think about what it is you’re looking to achieve and how it benefits your business – getting messages out there is somewhat useful in itself, but generally it’s expected that you might look at the rate of acquisition from a source, and the investment of resource it’s taken, and then weigh that against other sources of visitors/buyers/purchases.

Then you can not only determine the true level of ROI, but also potentially justify actually engaging on a regular basis and utilising Twitter as both a customer acquisition channel – but also as a customer retention channel. While new customers are great, it’s more cost effective to retain a current customer by increasing loyalty – and although you might need to interact and ask questions on at least a weekly basis, the amount of loyalty and customer service you can action can be measured as a definite return.

I suspect you could perform the same poll with most of the common tools – email, Facebook, Myspace etc, and you’d probably get similar results, because the same people have signed up without a plan after seeing the buzz, dabbled a little, and have no idea what they’re doing next.

Which means that there are big opportunities if you’re reading blogs like this, using Twitter on a regular basis and developing or following a clear plan with a decent amount of ROI.

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Filed Under: Monetising, twitter Tagged With: branding, Business, monetising, revenue, twitter

Making millions on Twitter

December 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

If you’re looking for an example of a significant financial return on Twitter, then Dell has long been used as an example – and you can expect it to be quoted even more often after revealing revenues have now risen to $6.5 million globally via Twitter.

Of course that requires almost 1.5 million followers for their main @DellOutlet account, Dell Canada, the $800,000 from @DellnoBrasil and over $150,000 from @DellHomeSalesCA , but it’s still a mightily impressive amount.

Key points for the future from Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca?

Streamline our presence in social media networks, create meaningful content for customers and continue to increase our connections with them in those places
Focus on building a tighter integration between Dell.com, Support.Dell.com, our Dell Community sites with our presence in social networks
Continue our focus on scaling support of social media initiatives into the Dell business units

There’s a few more bits on the Dell post worth reading.

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Filed Under: Case Studies, twitter Tagged With: cash, dell, making, money, profit, revenue, social media, social networking, twitter

Ads and Paywalls won’t save newspapers and magazines

June 3, 2009 By Dan Thornton 5 Comments

Numerous newspapers and associations of publishers are discussing the topic of paywalls for specific content or entire sites in an attempt to ‘create value by beginning to charge for it’ in the words of the American Press Institute.

Sadly for that plan, it’s not 1998 or 1898, and I’m not sure how charging for something creates value. The value that should have been created was lost when sales teams bundled online advertising as a free or low cost ‘added value’ bonus to print advertising, at a time when online adverts were capable of getting a decent click-through rate – and then not investing in helping advertisers to utilise new opportunities to better connect with their prospective customers.

The end result is that display advertising is generally decreasing in direct effectiveness and value (although there can still be branding benefits), and attempts to offer more innovative solutions generally fail because advertisers find it too much of a leap from simply booking the biggest reach at the lowest price they can negotiate. Those advertisers that are more innovative, meanwhile, have already started learning that they can create their own content and interaction directly with customers.

And the paywall debate continues to ignore the problem.

Instead it’s simply gouging consumers instead of advertisers.

I already have a paywall around newspaper content – which is one reason why I don’t buy print content. Every day I walk past racks of printed content protected by a cover price, because I can quickly access a wealth of equivalent content online, tag it and save it, interact with it, and often interact with the authors of it – whether bloggers, or increasingly mainstream media employees.

Want an example of ways to monetise a piece of content effectively – this is probably my favourite example of making the most of it.

It means investing in the content creators in your company who can connect and leverage levels of interest – whether they’re a celebrity columnist or an editorial assistant. It’s easy to forget the passion people feel for their favourite title or writers when you’re stuck inside the bubble all day.

It means creating value worth paying for and then offering people the chance to invest in it. And people need to be able to judge and justify the value for themselves – not be forced. Think forcing people works? Bugmenot begs to differ.

And it means creating value for the businesses who are looking for new customers.
I’ve seen companies move advertising budgets because a commercial person switched companies after giving them great service and helping them learn better ways to connect and make sales. If that person was able to educate more businesses, the demand from competitors and other companies would follow.

The problem is that doing all this requires more work, which could reduce the profit margin – but I’d rather have a small profit that can grow, rather than heading for losses.

US print advertising sales

U.S print ad sales dropped 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, losing more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue. There’s a lot more analysis on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur, including breakdowns by category, but losing almost a third of the value suggests U.S. print ad sales are reaching terminal velocity, and the rest of the world isn’t going to be far behind.

Online sales also fell by a record 13.4%.

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t need to sell as many widgets and doohickies than ever.

It means they can’t see enough value in print or online newspaper advertising to use a recession-hit budget.

And those that survive the recession will have had a crash course in finding alternatives which are more cost-effective and justifiable. They won’t be rushing back.

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing Tagged With: Advertising, business models, digital, Digital Publishing, magazines, newspapers, online, paywalls, revenue

Why I hate the use of ‘personal brands’

March 2, 2009 By Dan Thornton 19 Comments

I’ve recently experienced the benefits of banning myself from using the word ‘brand’ in a business context after joining an experiment by Mark Earls.

As a result, I’ve been a lot more specific about what I really mean – awareness, reputation, tradition, logos, content, tone of voice etc. But at least in a business context, I can see it’s excusable to use the term sometimes, rather than listing out everything it could mean.

But ‘personal brand’ – that’s just silly.

Branded by powerbooktrance (CC Licence)

Because at the end of the day, a ‘personal brand’ surely means just three things? (Although I’m open to disagreements/suggestions for additions).

Awareness: Have people heard of you?

Reputation: Do people think you deliver?

Revenue: Are you able to make money from your awareness and reputation?

And I’d suspect much of the rise in ‘personal brands’ comes from people really wanting to build ‘personal revenues’ as a main source of income, or as security in case of redundancy.

But does an individual person really come up with explicit rules for their tone of voice in all communications? And is that ever sustainable? Do you really aspire to becoming Me Inc, rather than real person?

Personally, I don’t see Scobleizer or Louis Gray as brands. I see them as people who simply have particular personalities that might mean they absorb and share information at a high rate, or that might lend them to networking more, etc. They’ve built awareness and their reputations, but unless they’ve been branded like cattle, I struggle to see why we need to label them with a term that should really be retired with traditional media.

And the new breed of people chasing a personal brand appear to be missing part of the point.

Geoff Livingston has a great post which sums up a lot of the pitfalls of concentrating totally on building a personal brand.

But at the same time, I totally agree with much of what Chris Brogan recommends in Personal Branding.

Paradoxical?

There’s nothing wrong with building awareness and reputation by marketing yourself. But trying to build a ‘personal brand’ isn’t necessarily the right thing to do if you want to be successful in a large company. It’s better to be part of success, and then reference it.
Claiming a ‘personal brand’ could make you believe that you don’t need to work as hard on your latest project, because your ‘personal brand’ will save you – when you’re only as good as your latest project.
Personal branding actually contradicts Chris when he talks about being more than just one thing – after all successful branding normally relies on a core message.

And most importantly, the second you start thinking about yourself as a ‘personal brand’, you run a huge risk of sounding like a tool:

Cartoon by Hugh McLeod (gapingvoid.com)

Promote yourself. Use the same avatar everywhere. Build a strong reputation based on great work. Interact everywhere you can. Choose Life. Just don’t call it a ‘personal brand’ unless you’ve tattooed your personal logo on your personal forehead!

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