Blog: Twitter Love isn't a marketing strategy - CEO lessons from a year in social media

They say that CEOs and social media is like watching your parents dance!  So it was with some trepidation that I renewed my career as a blogger a year ago.  I thought I’d report back a year on. I wrote about networking earlier this year, which covered more general ground.

First of all some basic stats:

• 19 blog posts since June 2010
• Tweets 88, followers 213, following 100 since Sept 2010
• LinkedIn contacts 554
• Facebook 37 friends

Blogging

• I spend considerable time crafting my blogs, with an elapsed time of perhaps 4 hours over a week (or more) as I hone the text.
• I only get there if I dedicate some quality time to it (headphones on/quiet room/train).
• My approach is that posts need to stand the test of time (at least in the medium term).
• I’m surprised how many comments have been added to the posts.
• I’m fortunate in being able to promote my blogs to the 1,200 people to whom I send my twice or thrice yearly Sift Update.
• I regularly meet people who say they’ve checked my blog posts before meeting me (or making contact).

Conclusion: Relatively few direct new leads, but very good at internally and externally positioning/reinforcing Ben Heald as someone with opinions/being somewhat involved in things/being relatively well-connected.  And also, as very few people put the effort into thought-through longer-form blogging, it’s quite easy to stand out.

Tweeting

• I found the terminology and etiquette quite hard to get into.
• I regularly unfollow people if their signal to noise ratio is too low, or if I feel their posts clutter up my stream too much.
• I tend to scroll through my tweet stream a couple of times a day when I’ve got a slot; and will often email a tweet to myself to look at properly later.  The great thing is you don’t feel you have to process the whole stream (which is my approach with email).
• I certainly don’t reciprocate and follow anyone who follows me.  It’s a continual challenge to curate a stream that merits monitoring.
• As a currency for success the number of followers is not clever.  In a very broad consumer context it’s a measure; but in a business context, more thinking is required.  Simple boring questions: Who are you trying to reach?  With what message?  What are you trying to achieve?  What is the cost in time?  It still seems to me as if most people don’t take this approach.
• I find it depressing that on some industry sites I track, the ‘reaction’ section just lists all the retweets of the article.  This is not engagement.
• And ‘twitter love’ isn’t a substitute for marketing.  With the greatest respect to some of my esteemed colleagues, general twitter love is likely to be only marginally more effective in promoting an event than shouting from a hot air balloon flying above London!  And when I see the call go out, I think to myself, there’s another event that could have done with some considered marketing.  That’s absolutely not to say that Twitter can’t be a part of a marketing campaign, but it needs to be in the context of trying to reach a target audience with a message that generates an action, etc.
• It feels to me as if Twitter is trending ever more to a business tool.  People post the odd personal message to demonstrate their humanity and remind us there’s a person beyond the keyboard/smartphone; but I don’t see significant personal use cases from the people I follow.
• Finally, my view is that Twitter-style functionality will become pervasive in many business areas, both external and internal; and Twitter itself will evolve towards a utility valuation rather than a $100bn disruptive business.  For example, the Sift Media team are now fairly avid users of Chatter as a tool for internal knowledge sharing.

Conclusion: Few representatives from my target audiences follow me (or use Twitter), it’s predominantly other industry tweeters, consultants & marketeers.  So it’s important to be involved, but at the moment it feels as if we’re all talking at the same time and very little of it’s two-way.  This is in stark contrast to our internal use of Chatter, where people are constantly linking, building and sharing.  Presumably Twitter will soon start offering tweet circles, ala Google +, which I’d welcome.

LinkedIn

• Most of us use LinkedIn as a self-administered rolodex – particularly useful as people tend to use their private email address.
• Perhaps 95% of all the people I meet in business are listed.
• But now that we’ve all got hundreds of contacts, the novelty has rather worn off; and people don’t update their profiles sufficiently regularly for it to be a worthwhile stream to monitor.
• I’m sceptical about the value of LinkedIn for introductions.  Introductions work if you are a special friend with someone and they’re prepared to really try for you.  To what extent do I have a special connection with my 550 LinkedIn contacts?!  And generally speaking I prefer to go direct if I want to make contact, rather than trawling through their contacts for ways in.
• Personally, I very rarely accept a LinkedIn request from someone I don’t know.
• I do take part in some LinkedIn groups if I feel I can promote myself to the right people.
• I also toy with radically culling back my contacts, perhaps to the people that I can remember meeting!

Conclusion: LinkedIn is the definite UK business rolodex, and at this stage it’s difficult to see this position being challenged.  It’s going to be interesting to see how the LinkedIn business model develops.

Facebook

• In contrast to LinkedIn, I would say less than 10% of my contacts mention Facebook in a business context, so for me the use case is entirely personal.
• Even then though, the raggle taggle of business contacts, family, school friends is unworkable.  I can see Google +, with its more sophisticated circles being more useful and intuitive.
• As I don’t use it regularly, I find the constant changes in terminology and layout confusing and non-intuitive.
• My interpretation of the ‘Facebook generation’ idea is that although young people will be strongly influenced having used Facebook so avidly during their teenage years, this doesn’t mean their adult online experiences will be so narrow.  For example, my son recently did a year’s work after school, and very quickly adapted to writing proper emails with beginnings, middles and ends – simple reason, his job was to communicate with suppliers and customers, and that was the best way to do it.

Conclusion: Just as we’ve wondered if CompuServe, AOL, Freeserve, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc will dominate the Internet, the answer is that Facebook will become only part of and not the whole scene.  I’d put money on it not achieving a £100bn IPO next year!