Segment twitter streams to increase relevance and reduce noise

Should we create one or multiple branded twitter accounts? What is the role of each?

This is a challenge many brands face with a large and diverse set of products. In a recent audit of a company’s stream that has dozens of products, catering to an extremely diverse customer base with minimal overlap the single account approach was very noisy.

For example. Lets put this in context of a brand like Nike. Nike has products that serve segments in a market – cycling, golf, tennis, footballs amongst a host of others. If Nike were to have a single stream where they engaged in dialog and shared content for about all segments they run the risk of being tuned out by those only interested in cycling or football.

If this sounds like your situation you may want to consider segmenting twitter streams to increase relevance and eliminate noise. Here are a few different ideas for segmenting streams.

@corporate: General company information across product portfolio and serves as the twitter equivalent to the 800 number for customer support and product information.

@market_served: In the Nike example they could create an account focused on one of the sports they design and sell products for like cycling. A market based approach lends itself to a group twitter account where you have product managers, athletes and others from the team sharing insights. This would also work well in a consultancy who has a particular vertical they serve like health care.

@products: Get the latest updates and have inside access to the person/team who can help solve problems specific to this product.

@events: Twitter is a great way to extend reach to people not able to attend an event and to connect those who are physically present. For brands who sponsor events or host their own creating a unique account is a great way to get people engaged.

@people these are the passionate brand advocates who enjoy engaging with customers and solving problems. @people are usually the most trusted because they are real people who have become part of the community on their own with no corporate agenda.

The flip side to simply segmenting in order to create a highly filtered stream is that each approach creates a very focused dialog. The micro market focus allows brands to gain tremendous insight and build relationships on very narrow topics.

Do you think there is value in segmenting streams? Or is this just me hoping companies will take notice to eliminate the noise in my stream.

5 things I’ve learned leading social media initiatives

Recently Opentext acquired my former company Vignette. The role of social media strategy is one many companies talk about but have a difficult time justifying.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear the commitment to formalize social media as way of doing business. This can be attributed to all of the people from Opentext who have been out there promoting the brand and laying the foundation for change.

Part of my transition into the new organization is to share lessons learned over the last year. Here are the key lessons learned while integrating social media into our business processes.

Activity alone does not yield results. You get what your measure.
When trying to prove the value of the social media things like retweets, followers and fans don’t mean much to executive management. When demonstrating value make to sure to show how you had an impact on business goals that were around long before social media.

Think of social media as part of the marketing mix. It is not a silo
When planning product launches or outreach programs don’t “bolt on” social media to a traditional approach. Plan an integrated cross channel experience and know the role of each touch with the customer and how they work together. Each tactic in the mix can move people thru the infamous funnel. But they must work together.

It’s not the job of one person.
For large brands simply assigning a single person to “own” social media is not scalable. This is akin to saying one person can sell, market, support and build new products. Social media cuts across the organization and in many cases interactions started on social networks may require internal collaboration to act on. Brands need to formalize processes for responding, collecting insights and measuring.

The power of the influencer.
Social media allows word to spread farther and faster to an even greater number of people than ever before. It is essential to first identify who is influencing the purchases and then nurturing these relationships thru interactions and sharing of company direction. What I learned was how little many of the influential’s actually knew about what we were doing, simply because we had never reached out and shared it.

The need for an attribution model to assign value social media.
This is one of the tougher lessons as it implies a certain level of sophistication measuring digital marketing activities. In the more complex sale such as enterprise software it is not as easy to simply track a click from a tweet thru purchase. There are several steps that happen in between ranging from viewing website, product demos and on site meetings. But supposing the initiation of the lead came from a social channel how does it get “credit”. Creating an attribution model for social activity will help when justifying additional investments.

Hopefully these insights will help you avoid some of the mistakes we made over the last year.