Two short weeks ago, I wrote that 80% of marketers probably don’t need Twitter. I may have been wrong by an order of magnitude.
As Ad Age reported on July 27, “a six-month analysis of the service’s ubiquitous 140-character messages conducted by digital agency 360i” confirmed an advertiser’s deepest fears: they’re not talking about your brand on Twitter.
In fact, they’re not talking about any brands on Twitter. Well, a few, in order: Twitter, Apple, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Blackberry, Amazon, Facebook, Snuggie*, eBay and Starbucks.
Even this blessed handful only gets mentioned in the course of normal conversation, not in any interaction with or about the brand. It’s a lot of tweets like, “Jason posted on Facebook that he got a job at Starbucks. Want to meet me there at 3:00 and see if he’ll give us a free latte?”
But almost none at all like, “OMG, I just tried the new Orange Mango Vivanno(tm) Smoothie at Starbucks. To die for!”
As marketers, we shouldn’t be at all surprised. It’s just as unrealistic to expect consumers to Tweet about our brands as it once was to think that housewives met over backyard fences to discuss laundry detergents. The behavior of consumers who use Twitter has proven, once again, that our customers are human beings, not aliens.
Thank God. Now we can go back to talking to them like people.
*I’m completely baffled by the inclusion of Snuggie on the list. Perhaps they did the study during a particularly nasty cold snap.
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