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Companies are adopting social media because it has ‘come of age’. No longer is it the unproven, new kid on the block, and we are even seeing a small percentage of companies abandon their websites in favour of a purely social media presence. (Source: Network Solutions)
One of the social media traffic-driving methods is to use Twitter. There are, broadly, three ways to use Twitter:
1) As a broadcast mechanism
2) As a research tool
3) As a conversation tool
Let’s consider each in turn and its place in your social media marketing strategy.
Broadcast Mechanism
One of the simplest ways to reach your audience is to use Twitter to disseminate information about updates to your website, blog, brochure, or to announce sales, discounts and special offers.
However, this requires you to have an audience to reach. In order to gain followers, they need to a) know you exist and b) find your tweets of interest, meaning that they will share them and act as evangelists to their own followers.
As a research tool
For those in active industries, Twitter is an ideal means to find breaking news, watch your competitors, and follow events and news. This use of Twitter can mean taking a far more passive role and needing to engage less than if Twitter is being used for marketing and promotion, as in the other two usages given.
As a conversation/CRM tool
This is easier for smaller companies who inevitably need to engage in far fewer conversations than a large corporate, and can therefore develop deeper relationships with potential and existing customers. For larger companies, if Twitter is to be used in this way, it is wise to assign a number of people to the task and ensure they communicate well as a team.
That last instance is the most likely place where having staff tweet could benefit your company, although keeping others within the company up to date with news, competitive behaviour and so on, can also be extremely valuable.
So, let’s look at staff using Twitter to market the company. There is the obvious use as given above of a dedicated team (or individual) who manages all uses of Twitter in the company name. However, this misses the opportunities presented by involving a wider group of staff in the Twitter promotion of your company.
If this is to work, there need to be ground rules laid down from the outset. For instance, is it wise to allow your staff to tweet about the company on their private Twitter accounts? Probably not, is the simple answer. Is it wise to prohibit staff from using Twitter at all? Again, probably not. Most staff will find a way to access Twitter e.g. on their mobile phones if you ban access.
What is required is a means to allow company employees the chance to tweet about and for the company, but without diluting the message by incorporating it into their own private Twitter account. And all guidelines require an understanding of how Twitter works, and how it can benefit the company if used wisely.
For instance, if each member of staff who wishes to tweet has their own corporate identity on Twitter, and each tweets to their own set of followers, then you have the potential for engaging a far wider audience. This can be seen by large news agencies whose reporters often have their own Twitter identity, whilst each newsroom – Breaking, Tech, World, and so on – also has a stream. This allows followers to watch for favourite journalists as well as follow specific subjects. Hence, permitting a far larger audience across all streams than would be likely from a single all-inclusive account.
So, Increased Reach is a major benefit of allowing staff to tweet. The sum of the parts is far greater than the whole could ever be.
The major con of all this is managing accounts e.g. when a member of staff leaves, you need to withdraw that account to prevent misuse by a disgruntled member of staff. This may prove difficult if that member of staff has changed their password for precisely this purpose, and so security should be managed. Errant ex-employees can have their accounts closed down by Twitter directly, so then again it is not too much of a concern.
You may not realise it but safely guarding all your emails that include your passwords is a very bad idea.
Imagine that your computer is stolen. The thief accessed your email inbox simply by clicking on Outlook, or going to Gmail, hotmail etc. Because, of course, for easy access and because you don’t think of this as a shared computer (right now in this scenario it is though), your passwords for entry to these places is saved.
Once in your inbox, a simple search on the word “password” will bring up untold emails unless you are one of the very few who delete these type of reminder and registration emails, and store passwords in a much safer place away from the computer.
It may be your registration to Amazon (it turns out the thief could really do with some new DVDs), or to the admin area of a client site (s/he really fancies changing a few things on that website you have worked so hard on), or your blog (you *know* you didn’t write that post), or one of any number of sites you have been sent the password to.
Try it now. And then put those passwords somewhere much safer and delete the emails!
It had to happen. As the news of Michael Jackson’s death spreads around the globe, the black hat spammers start to cash in on the activity.
A few mere hours after the announcement was confirmed, the security companies such as Sophos started to notice aggressive activity from spammers attempting to harvest email addresses, as well as to push malicious URLs higher up the search engine rankings.
Additionally, the black hat forums are full of alternative ways to cash in on his death and the flurry of activity on the Internet that surrounds it.
All rather sad, one feels.
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There is an interesting discussion this morning on Chinwag about data being held by third party companies, eg email service providers. This has resulted in an article written by Mark Lesbirel on ESPs, which is a must read if you outsource your email marketing, although it focuses more on the security of information and compromising the integrity of your customer data rather than outright loss of data.
Which once again raises the issue about cloud computing and the security of your data.
If you use Gmail or Hotmail, for instance, as your email provider, should their servers go down, then because they are a web-based service, you have just lost access to your email, including all your addresses. Should (unlikely but possible in the current economic climate) your webmail service provider go under, unless you have been rigorous in backing up your data to an email client on your own machine, you have just lost everything. All your archived emails, addresses – GONE!
I blogged 6 months ago about the need to back up your website, and of course hosting companies are another source for potential catastrophe if you have not backed up your data. A brief reminder – you do have the latest copy of your website in a safe place, don’t you????
Taking this further out into the cloud, many people are using social media and cloud applications for a multitude of tasks and marketing activities. Whether this is marketing through Facebook or Ning, or using online document package such as Google apps, or an ASP for CRM, accounts or similar, it is becoming ever more apparent that many do not give a second thought to back ups of the data held on such services.
The collapse of Google does not seem imminent, but there are many companies providing services to small/ medium businesses, as well as gigantic corporations, who could easily fold with little or no warning. This would make your valuable data extremely hard to rescue.
We treat data quite casually these days, with the assumption that wherever it is, it is safe. Pretty much as we assume that the worst is not going to happen in our homes and that fire/flood/theft will not occur, and are lax at considering how precious some of our belongings may prove if lost, we can be equally as ‘negligent’ with business critical data.
The worst case scenario may occur. Not saying it will, but it might, and you need to be prepared for that to happen. If you lost every email address of your customers, how much might it cost you? If your website hosting provider vanished in a puff of smoke, what would be the cost of lost business, as well as rebuilding the site? If you are holding business critical data on third party servers, then consider carefully how secure it is from a) prying eyes and b) unexpected loss.
Look at where your data is held and how safe it is, and then BACK IT UP!!
As reported today in multiple places, but graphically so here, Twitter users are facing yet more problems.
The cause is either a security hole within Twitter that someone has found and is exploting, albeit with poor spelling and a fairly atrocious sense of humour, or it has come from the latest wave of both phishing attacks and the gap in Twitter’s API that forces developers of Twitter apps to force users to add their log in details to third party sites, rather than use a different mechanism, such as a key, to enable Twitter users to log in to third party tools.
Other apps have similar problems which expose user log-in details to third party developers, the majority of whom we must say are honest and have no intention of misusing the information they have been given for any purpose other than to enable their app to do its job properly.
However, as we enter 2009, the security risks faced by users of websites and apps are only going to increase, and already we are seeing the problems this can cause. Whilst posting Tweets may seem fairly innocuous, however badly they are spelt or whatever they say, the results that this can have as a mechanism for extracting personal information out of internet users could cause major headaches for many during the coming year.
And the lesson to be learnt is that all of us must not leap onto the bandwagon of the latest ‘must have’ app, thereby leaving ourselves open to potential security risks. Whatever software or web-based app or website you visit this year, check it out first. Look for reviews online and make sure you are not opening yourself to a security vulnerability, or even spam (which we all know can be time-consuming at the best of times).
Check out the basic credentials of a site – company name, physical address, privacy policy – before signing up for anything. You would do this in real life, so do it online.
And make sure your marketing strategy isn’t brought tumbling down by some bad PR, which Twitter undoubtedly are going to face in the coming days for this latest problem.
Let’s be safe out there!
