Twitter, marketing, and war rooms
Once again, a difficult week for Twitter on the markets turns the talk to the company’s long-long viability: its up and down performance on the markets and its service failures, caused by a growth in user numbers that was neither as high nor as sustained as predicted when the company went public, have all generated doubts about how its value will develop.
In a recent article in Spanish financial magazine Capital, called “#The moment of truth has arrived” (pdf in Spanish), Jordi Benítez asked my opinion about Twitter regarding its seemingly low-key results. In my view, the company’s biggest problem lies in its inability to explain what it is and what it does: there are still a lot of myths related to its earlier existence, when it was still largely a way of knowing what your friends were up to, from a time when it was little more than a closed social network. Since then, Twitter has evolved into something completely different, into a site that takes the world’s pulse on any number of subjects, into the place where brands and users are in constant conversation, into a strand of environmental intelligence able to generate a permanent reflection of our collective activity.
In describing its purpose, Twitter is circumspect, simply providing a tool that offers the new user a range of accounts that might interest him or her, and then waiting for the user to become “enlightened” through use. But in many cases this takes a long time to occur, or only happens after long periods of hesitation, abandoning the service, or simply watching what others do.
Meanwhile, the company’s progress has been more than positive: use is consolidating, particularly in relation to major events: at certain moments during the World Cup semi final between Brazil and Germany, there were 580,000 tweets a minute, attention levels that many of its rivals would dearly like to see. Turnover continues to increase, and is expected to reach between 1.2 and 1.25 billion dollars this year, twice the figure for 2013.
But the most important thing here is that Twitter is in many ways redefining advertising: instead of formats based on the repeated showing of spots that are at best boring, and at worst, a hassle, Twitter allows brands to get involved in the conversation, to be relevant by being relevant, to be wherever the user or prospect wants it to be: commentating on an event, being funny or in touch with things, answering questions or providing information, making offers…
This is a genuinely new model, whereby brands go about things differently, setting up war rooms where analytics experts monitor specific events with advertising creatives, account managers, community managers and legal advisors work together to create moments of attention that can go viral, which humanize the brand, which feed the surrounding the community, and that are circulated through the active participation and interaction of users.
This format is a long way from the tired old formula of a brand repeating the same advertisement over and over again, instead garnering attention for it very efficiently, and raising its profile significantly. We’re talking here about maximum exposure at key moments, backed up by a permanent presence, of the development of a very carefully managed community, backed by constant analysis of feedback, and the development of promotional elements to convert this proximity into sales and economic value. The attention model has been redefined by focusing on the public forum where an important part of the conversation that takes place in society occurs.
If Twitter is proving anything, albeit slowly, it is that marketing is being redefined, and that many of the campaigns we used to think of as success models will soon appear as outdated as the advertising of the 1950s; and presumably, Twitter will be there to harvest the fruits of this redefinition.
But before then, the company will have to do a better job of explaining what it is and the possibilities it offers, and must do this without losing its essence, avoiding practices that might associate it with the traditional approaches to advertising that people don’t like, and creating success stories that will facilitate these new kinds of strategies. It won’t be easy, and success is far from guaranteed. But at least one company is making an effort to redefine concepts such as relevance and attention. If you are interested in marketing and the way it is constantly changing, think what you would give to be a fly on the wall in one of those war rooms.
(En español, aquí)
