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Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

08.06.2009

Shrinking the Distance

Shrinking the distance between your organization and your customer is as simple as having a conversation. You can use blogs and tweets, but video, by far is the best at conveying complex concepts effortlessly. Check out Common Craft if you’re skeptical.

RSS in Plain English
Social Networking in Plain English

Video enables the assimilation of content 30% faster as compared to face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, the percentage of organizations who have incorporated video into the selling experience at both the customer and channel levels remains small. This leaves the door open for you, Mr. Marketing Executive. It leaves the door open for you to begin differentiating yourself at the service level opposed to the product level.

Video, which talks through the pertinent aspects of your product, distills it into its essence. An added benefit is it positions you as a trusted advisor. Where you take the dialogue you’ve created is up to you but it should lead down the path of improved customer satisfaction overall.

Improved customer satisfaction is a multifaceted concept. Part of it resides in the hands of your channel. They’re on the front lines, and don’t forget, they own your customer. Training them consistently, intelligently and cost effectively is essential to your personal success as a marketer and your organization as a whole. Leveraging video to reduce the cost of face-to-face trainings while providing a consistent and repeatable training experience will pay dividends in the long term.

Skeptical?

Try it for yourself. Create a 2-minute video of an intriguing or misunderstood part of your product. Post it to YouTube. Tag it appropriately so that it’s easily found. Allude to it via a blog post or Twitter tweet. Set up a Google alert. Then sit back, remain attentive and see what the uptake it is. Positive or negative, I challenge you to find a comment that you’re unable to use constructively to:

Better your product
Improve communications surrounding your product
Turn a foe into a friend

07.28.2009

Twitter (Marketing) Gets Learning

Marketing works when it’s accompanied by elements of learning. Twitter recently unveiled Twitter101, which answers the question:

How can your business use Twitter?

Does it get any simpler than that? I think not. Contemporary business speak is maligned with jargon, fancy words and phrases that frankly, mean nothing. Anamitra Banerji has distilled this message to its core.

Mr. Banerji opens the piece with a concise explanation of what Twitter is and how it works. This opening, positions the tactical capabilities of Twitter front and center. The real value of the piece is in the business stories that impart how the tool is used to:

Share information
Gather real-time market data and feedback
Build relationships with the customers, employees and partners

Providing this type of focused, real world use case information creates a buzz which; reinforces Twitter’s focus on ‘real’ business challenges and sets the stage for bundled services that will be unveiled at a later date.

So, where’s the learning activity?
It’s all around you, stupid.

Twitter101 educates and emphasizes

Who Twitter is.
Why Twitter is relevant.
What Twitter does for the individual.
What Twitter does for the organization.

Isn’t that marketing? Yes
Isn’t that learning, too? Yes

There isn’t an associated quiz. There’s no form to fill out. There’s no portal to log into either. Quizzes, forms and portals don’t transform marketing activities into learning activities. Whether or not you learned something makes it a learning activity. In short good marketing is founded in learning and compelling learning has its basis in smart marketing.