Weird Twitter Marketing
Reclaiming Twitter.Com for Brands.
2014 is the year we need to own the space of Weird Twitter. No longer can Wint control the mindspace economy of America’s teens. Fortune 5' companies, you need to reassert yourselves through sheer Unbridled Weird™. Twitter is first and foremost a platform for marketing, and brands, we are not surfing the new wave with our best foot forward.
The ‘Weird Twitter’ community has taken over the Tweetways™ and we believe that 2014 is the year that Corporate needs to get in on some of that action. For too long we have sat earnestly by as marketing gold nuggets flow by in the river that is Twitter’s stream.
How do we make our marketing weird? Take a look at the history of your company; faux nostalgia is a rich source of weird. Coke, part of your Brand Persona should be that your marketing executives are drinking the good stuff. The ‘old’ Coke. The Real Thing (cocaine). Apple Inc.; your Twitter presence is frankly disappointing. As most valuable Brand in the world, you are not engaging enough with the fact that your brand is also the name of a reasonably popular fruit. Why not? Own the ambiguity.
Pretty much the most important trope in Weird Twittering is to send earnestly weird messages to companies in order for them to reply in a straight way. This is guaranteed to get you ReTweets and favors, which are really all that matter in the modern marketing world. So you need to sit down in your social media war room, loosen that tie, tighten it halfway back up and have a very difficult conversation with your social media marketing interns.
You need to take the breakfast networking to the next level; identify the key influencers in your social graph and reach out to them to engage in weirdplay with your Brand values. Prep your interns for Klout-laced weird and watch the magic unfold.
You can also invent like crazy on Weird Twitter; no one is out there for fact checking, they are out there for ‘lol-s’ and to share bandwagons. Take some time with your board, or VP Marketing to come up with some compelling and entirely fictional stories; how your company was started at 4am on a road trip for pizza; how the name of your best product sounded just like your sisters boyfriends dog barking. And then, once everyone has ReTweeted that, unveil your big reveal: get a whole new bout of influence as people talk about what it means for Brands to engage in Play. This is a marketing strategy known as the Absurd Theatre.
Take Weird Twitter to the next level with the Fake Firing. Invent staff members and fire them for crazy reasons. Have ludicrous, scripted to the second, public blowups on the twitter with staff, old staff, ex- partners, schoolyard bullies and then use popular blogging platform TwitLonger to earnestly apologise. Keep these coming; if your Brand is known for Drama, your growth will be dramatic.
The ‘Sext:’ ‘meme’ simply puts on twitter what we’ve been doing in ‘dead tree’ media for years; associate your Brand with sex and your using the modern science of ‘behavioural psychology’ to sell. And sell. And sell. The ‘sext:’ simply involves sending your normally marketing Tweets, but prefixing them with ‘Sext:’; fooling your users for a second that they are about to see a scantily clad teen (‘MILF’). While they’re vulnerable and aroused, hit them with a ‘Just Do It!’ or a ‘Dude, you’re getting a Dell!’ to sear your Brand into their limbic system.
These are just a few ways that you, a Fortune 5' Brand, could be engaging with people who don’t already follow you on Twitter; the only surefire marketing strategy for 2014. Grow you ratios, team.
