Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter

Businesses should lose their inhibitions over using the microblogging tool to get closer to their customers

By Shel Israel

Twitter didn't do much for Ricardo Guerrero at first. In March 2007, the new tool was getting rave reviews from social media aficionados (BusinessWeek, 4/2/07) at the South by Southwest interactive media festival in Austin, Tex.

Guerrero considered this tiny new tool du jour very limited, at least from his perspective as a marketer of refurbished Dell (DELL) products. No one was in control. Conversations started in the middle and trailed off to nowhere in particular. If he wanted to direct messages to "targets," they were free to "unfollow" or "block" him out. All messages were restricted to tiny teaspoons of text, no longer than 140 characters in length. Much of the chat was mundane reports on lunch, weather, or bedtime nighty-nights.

Guerrero nevertheless thought Twitter had a certain engaging charm. So with a few friends he started playing around on the nascent technology that was being offered for free from a podcast technology startup formerly called Odeo.

Bringing Business to Twitter

Guerrero did not intend to pioneer the first for-revenue business foray on Twitter, but that's pretty much what happened. In June 2007, Guerrero opened @DellOutlet, the first Twitter-based direct sales account. It offered followers special discounts on rebuilt PCs.

Twitter let Guerrero get to customers quicker and at lower cost than by direct mail. It let anyone interested in a deal follow him for announcements. It reduced his need to jockey for prominent space on the company's massive Web site, where refurbished products were often relegated to the online equivalent of Siberia.

Further, Twitter took little time and effort. He needed no human assistance. More than that, he learned Twitter was fun—an all-too-often underrated element in sales, as well as in life.

Glitches Are Common

By DellOutlet's first anniversary, it had sales of more than $500,000. That's a paltry sum, compared with Dell's $16 billion in annual sales, but he had opened a new channel. Others at Dell would soon follow and along with them a lengthy parade of smart businesses. Dell has added 20 more Twitter accounts, but only two are sales-oriented. The remainder are used by Dell to engage in customer dialogue.

"Revenue is not key," says Dell spokesman Richard Binhammer. "What we want most is conversational engagement.…Twitter is perhaps the most intimate social media tool yet developed." Therein lies the key to social media's huge potential. It also explains why Twitter,though often plagued by downtime and startup company-type gaffes, has grown an estimated 500% in six months to almost 2.5 million users worldwide.

In fact, it's Twitter's very popularity that has caused many of the glitches (BusinessWeek.com, 5/15/08). The tool was designed for collaboration between members of a mobile work group of less than 10 members. Now some Twitter stars have more than 50,000 followers.