I recently spoke with Adweek’s Brian Morrissey about Twitter and brands. He began with the thought that Twitter presents a challenge for old school marketing people who are used to crafting messages and coming up with clever ways of presenting them. While Twitter can be used to broadcast your message, this approach will usually fail. Instead of thinking of Twitter followers as a passive audience for your messages, consider them as the ultimate focus group. It allows you to listen to what others are saying about your brand and engage them in conversations to address their concerns and encourage their praise.

For example, the WWE (aka World Wrestling Entertainment) looks at the varying noise level in arenas to judge what people feel about different wrestlers. Now they have taken to Twitter and Facebook big time and listen for the virtual noise about different wrestlers in the same way. Except Twitter allows greatly granularity and the ability to talk back to individuals, as well as your whole group of followers.

Another adjustment for brand marketers is the time it takes to both build a following and find your Twitter voice. Mad men would probably not have the patience. For example, Coke Zero has an edgy voice to its tweets to match the edgy image of the drink.

Brain also mentioned that traditional media and social media can help each other. Of course, social media can promote traditional media plays. Recent experience has shown that the reverse can certainly be true. For example, TGIF launched a Facebook fan page. Then they did an ad buy on Facebook to promote it in their target age group. This helped. But when they included reference to the Facebook fan page in TV ads, it really took off.

Like any business effort, you need to think through your marketing strategy and how it aligns with your business strategy before getting started. It is not simply a race to get the most followers. Rather it is what are you going to do with these followers? What is the value to your brand? What calls to action do you want to initiate? Brands are looking for their customer advocates who will share their praise with others. Twitter can be a way to find these people and give them a voice but you need a plan to get there.

Brian also shared some of his thoughts on Facebook. You can find them in this article: Success Factors for Brands on Facebook. 

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