Marketers missed the best op of the year with The Scobles pregnancy
I have been discussing this with anyone who will listen especially Mr Mulley over the last two years.
Yesterday Robert Scoble announced that himself and his Mrs, Maryam are having a baby. (congrats Robert and Maryam)
As you can see it set the twitter world alight.
Result
ZERO
In fairness, when we have Shel writing a book which has a heavy emphasis on companies that skirt around twitter with marketing/customer engagement and Jeremiah advising his clients on the oppurtunities in Twitter but the response to Roberts announcement was zero. Where were Pampers on twitter, I think they are the worldwide number one brand of diapers.
Where were Strollers.com and finally and most importantly where were Nestle.
Not a word, Nada, Zip
Where are all the Twitter marketers now?
This is a huge FAIL (much as I hate the word) and was so easily avoided, I run searches on 27 items on twitter on roaming, if I get an alert I jump in and offer a free MAXroam sim.
You know what happened, Robert announced on a Saturday when all the 250k a year marketers were off playing golf, tennis or the like.
This shit is so easy I could write a book on it 
seriously what do you think?
Was this a huge FAIL?
Durex should have stepped in. Who wants another Scoble??
Ok- just kidding.
Nice post Pat.
With you on that.
Absolutly agree, huge opportunity missed.
Real hungry guys like yourself (an me maybe) are connected 24/7 to spot opportunities.
You plug your sims, I pimp my wifi knowledge and opinions.
Twitter makes spotting marketing opportunities soo much easier.
But as we both agreed during the panel discussion at BizCamp yesterday; time is up for those type of jobsworths. This is economy 3.0 baby!
yeah agreed but I don’t feel any pity for the big boys missing out. The fact that the playing field is now level thanks to tools like twitter etc makes it a lot easier for us small boys to have a shot at the title without having to spend 00000s on advertising etc
working in a big dot.com we want to do the twitter but with all the legal and other thing it takes us months to repond to things, and i still think brands havent’ understood what is really going on. plus it’s spam, it really is. replying to something like that is spam. even if it’s a congratulations from pampers. And let’s face it twitter is still geek despite the many sign-ups lately it doesnt’ mean people use it.
I think no matter how much FMCG marketers talk about using new and social media to ‘dialogue’ or ‘engage’ with consumers, they’re still entrenched in traditional one way messages. If they use social media it’s to push something rather than interact, they don’t want interaction as it’s messy and it complicates the marketing message they want to transmit. It’s like the banks thinking they were ‘conversing’ and doing relationship marketing in the 90s when really it was junk mail. As a marketer myself, my colleagues have a long way to go to adapt their mindset rather than their budget.
From a consumer perspective I say thank f**k. Mediums which get cluttered up with marketing are ones I pull from if at all possible.
From a business perspective I still need to understand how to use twitter tbh. dbTwang.com can use it and I need to spend more time on that.
From a small business perspective Niall and Joy are correct – the mindset change needed by the big guys is enormous and that is the opportunity for any nimble small business with emerging tools.
Good to be provoked into though and response, cheers
keith
Number of extra pampers/baby_milk/strollers sold if those brands engage with Scobles = 0. How many extra Seagate sales was Robert responsible for? Or was it Maxtor? Or Western Digital? Can anyone remember?
I’m a complete believer in two-way marketing and getting as close to your customers as possible but only if it means that you deliver them a better product and you improve your sales. For small companies in particular, it is critical. But how exactly would being associated with a person that 99.99999% of the world has never heard of achieve either of those things for a global brand?
I said it once and I’ll say it again. Until companies change their internal processes and shift customer service from a reactive to proactive tool (which would involve investing in training and upweighting its importance) this will continue. Brands jump into Twitter unsure of what their objectives are.
That said it should be noted that there are companies actively mining customer conversations. For example, I asked for recommendations for Project Management tools and DeskAway & Norada both responded. Interestingly, so did meetdux which seems to be another version of tinyurl.
In the companies you’ve called out defence, brands do need to weigh up various channels and see which they will get the best ROI from. In this regard using tools like Twitter to identify potential new customers is a no brainer for companies like DeskAway & Norada. Again it comes down to setting objectives. No company should set up a blog, Twitter or Facebook account without asking the questions why am I doing this and what do I want to achieve from it. Otherwise how would they be able to judge success?
The spammers and the those who game systems are always first to try new tools and introduce them to a wider audience. It’s amazing how many flies you get on Twitter if you mention the words social and media yet it seems nobody pays attention to a search like this: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22we%27re+pregnant%22
But an approach via Twitter would freak me out. If I announced something on Twitter and I got some marketing droid contacting me I’d probably get rather annoyed. All depends on the type of approach though.
Utterly delighted for Maryam and Robert. Milan is a gorgeous baby, now there’ll be another!
Hey Damien, I’ll try not to reply to your tweets for fear of annoying you,
Yours etc.
Marketing Droid
On Thursday last I asked the twitterverse was it mother’s day this weekend. The first 3 responses i got back were from online flower retailers linking me to specials they were offering. I found it a little annoying to be honest & replied with a polite “ill find my own locally thanks” only to get back an entertaining “Well, you have no excuse then do you” reply.
I would typically be allergic to a marketing approach like this but there was a personal quality to it at the end that didn’t seem too offensive to me.
the day I follow nestle or see a nestle ad on here is the day I move onto spmething else.
A lot of opinions here.
Marketing is changing. People are more skeptical of marketing messages. They trust brands less and value their friends recommendations more. Brands can understand this better by joining listening and engaging, rather than just continuing to flog their message over every available media.
The nice thing about tools like twitter is that it is available to anyone – no big hurdle to get started, and small businesses can make the most of that. A few people talk about being spammed with offers – the nice thing is you can ignore messages and if you’re still upset, block. But when you need a really simple way to seek a recommendation from friends, it works a treat.
Businesses are going to get closer to customers and converse with them using social media. It’s early days, but we’re seeing loads of signs of potential – for a whole new way for people to get in touch with businesses.
Old fashioned “marketing 1.0″ pumped through twitter will not work and will only create bad blood. However Twitter is an ideal medium for more “engagement marketing”.
I have no problem with being approached with information on a service/product that is related to my needs and interest. I actually welcome this.
However the approach has to be engaging and more pull than push. It should aim to build a two-way relationship between the marketing and the marketee…
@florian – that one certainly wasn’t lost on me either. As a former client of mine that would have been one of my first thoughts – opportunity!!
Still laughing at @florian’s comment…
Jokes aside, you are definitely right. I have all the possible forms of “click to call” “c2c” “click-to-call” “push to talk” and so on heavily monitored and immediately jump in when someone is looking for a solution. That’s the right way to use Twitter.
Pat,
Like you I monitor all of the traffic around my business. Whenever I see the opportunity to strike I do, however that comes with some rules that I have set for myself.
When someone is announcing a pregnancy it is not the right time to jump in with ads. To me interactive twitter marketing is more about Scoble up at 3am complaining about a problem, “can’t figure out diapers” and then a pampers person comes on.
Just my two cents,
Jamie
@PaulFabretti Durex is one of best brand when it comes to viral marketing on a subject that remains taboo for most people. My favorite is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZZmUprDrhk&feature=related
I think you’re spot on Pat. The opportunity is massive and massively missed.
If someone was giving me something useful and wasn’t rude or obnoxious I’d appreciate it. Especially if they could give me a good deal.
It’s the not being rude or obnoxious part that’s important. It’s not about ads, I don’t want an ad delivered on the basis of a need, I want an offer of help from someone who can.
Not with you on this one Pat, I don’t think an opportunity was missed by the marketers.
I agree with Conor O Neill when he says that the opportunity for sales here was low, and I think that, like Damien, I might find it a little intrusive if Pampers replied directly on Twitter to a tweet about pregnancy.
I do think, as Scoble himself alludes to in his post, that in time social marketing will get smart and will leverage your friends to influence you.
Right now it’s hard to see exactly how this might work on Twitter, but with Twitter evolving at the rate it is now I’m sure that some kind of smart solution will become evident.
With FaceBook, as Scoble pointed out, it’s easier to see how. With people already interacting with brands there the way they do (pages & fans), it’s only a matter of time before the marketing aspect uses that and serves you information which includes your friend’s opinions of brands being offered to you.
Either context sensitive ads with friend stats attached or, as Scoble offers, search driven results.
“20 of your friends like Pampers Nappies” would surely be more effective than “Hi Pampers here, we hear you’re having a baby – Congratulations!”
You yourself recently mentioned finding Twitter difficult to manage, and I think this will only get more difficult – especially if marketers ramp up the way you outline here.
The approach Scoble outlines would allow for less intrusive marketing which takes context to a new level, the context of your own social circle.
So the real question for me is, what can Twitter offer to marketers in order to preserve the integrity of Twitter while allowing business interaction to occur?
Conor: actually I have a folder full of people who told me they bought Seagate drives because of their sponsorship of my show. They still think social media is important and now have an internal blogger who is on Twitter, friendfeed, and Facebook.
@florian – agreed! Wait until you see what they have coming up later this year! It’s pretty darn good – I should know, I helped them with it!
I’m not at all surprised. With my BIMA hat on, I can say that many companies have yet to grasp the importance of ‘digital’, let alone very very new tools such as Twitter. It’s easy for us to get caught up in ‘early-adopter’ mode.
It’s still very early days for *most*. Some of my friends who are in senior positions at large organistations still don’t get twitter and Facebook.
Damn*.
First off, a great post. You’re right – it’s surprising that no one has jumped on this. You’d think, in this day, age and connected world we live in, that this would be a no-brainer.
Well to folk like yourself and it would also see your friends and readers this is obvious.
But the rest of the population it seems are still catching up.
Frank makes a good point re intrusiveness; it;s a tough one to crack. I myself already have reasonably strict, self-imposed ‘rules of engagement’ whenever I embark upon any SpinVox-themed conversation online..
And that’s just voice-to-text!
When it comes to someone’s personal life and moreover their children – personalized advertising in this way treads a very fine line.
*I was out when you first posted this. Reading through the comments most of the good points had been made already..
Hence: “Damn”
Keep up the good work
Well said Pat.
@rune, Damien, Frank P & others… I can see where your concerns are (and you’re right to assume that many will go the spammy route) but I think this is a definite opportunity missed.
I would see no harm in (for example) John Smith from pampers saying “Congratulations on the news, if you ever need any advice or help over the coming months feel free to send me a message any time”. It’s not overly pushy or spammy, opens the door to a potential new relationship and most importantly gives Robert the ability to simply say “no thanks”.
And because he’s famous too there’d be no harm sending a few free boxes of pampers his way!
I do this with a website of mine which has free leaving cert notes, if I spot someone tweeting that they’re struggling with study I offer them some help. Very simple, nothing automated and all that’s required is a simple “no thanks” if it’s not needed.
“it’s marketing, Jim, but not as we know it”
@James Whatley, I find it funny when I read your comment as without ever meeting you we have been involved in very “classy” warfare in the social universe.
The way that you at Spinvox and myself at PhoneTag have been able to use very public social marketing tools without creating awkwardness with the customers or overstepping the “lines” is one for the text books.
The “self imposed rules” that both you and I have created are so important in how you keep a companies message from becoming spam and int turn hurt the overall market.
This is not a fail. Scoble is an outlier model case and not an appropriate subject for this question (he is widely known, at least amongst the bleeding edge tech community but not beyond – the rest of us only has the purchasing power of one).
Online marketers don’t know enough about a tweeter of a single tweet to be able accurately and consistently target responses. They also have brands to protect so they can’t just scattergun everyone with spam.
There also just isn’t enough scope for automating interaction via twitter so it is not cost effective for online marketers to engage this way on a global scale. I’m not including the vanity “Look we’re a multinational and we’re on twitter” accounts that some companies like VMware, Dell etc run.
Even a client driven engagement (as advocated by the VRM crowd), where the individual decides to follow the company to get updates won’t work via twitter. The interface between the two parties simply isn’t fine grained or sophisticated enough to do any sort of intelligent @reply/tweet filtering.
Facebook on the other hand is a totally different proposition…
The Wall Street Journal has an article on Brazil’s Telefonica hiring a TV personality (who has a following of 18,000) to mention the company in his Tweets. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123741800551177861.html
What if companies were to do more of this? Like Pampers offering folks with large followings like the Scobles to Tweet about them for either free products or money?
I have no doubt that commercialization is coming to Twitter, it’s just a matter of how it’s done and if it is done right. Companies should be careful not to raise the ire of Tweople though, Motrin anyone!
Pat,
I’m late to comment but you are right on. Twitter offers such outreach to consumers for companies, they just have to take advantage of it.
Good post.
My missus is due in about 9 weeks so if any #nappy or #diaper companies want to give me a year’s supply of nappies for Me3.0, I’d happily engage in one of these two-way conversations I hear so much about. Oh, and I’m @laurenceveale on twitter.