As part two of our interview series for the upcoming SES Conference, I had the opportuntiy to interview Hollis Thomases, founder of WebAdvantage.net, a boutique agency providing strategic online marketing and advertising solutions. Hollis is part of a panel “Twitter Nation & Automation” that will discuss the benefits of using Twitter automation on Twitter and how individuals and brands should properly use automation.
Hollis provided a lot of great insight, not only on Twitter automation, but why early marking campaigns on Twitter work so well.
Brian Camen (BC): You are the author of “Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day” which provides a complete guide to a successful Twitter marketing campaign. I’d love to pick your brain about Twitter marketing campaigns. In my opinion, major individual moments have helped Twitter’s growth among individual users (i.e. James Buck’s “Arrested” tweet, Janus Krum’s plane in the Hudson tweet/twitpic). Are there any companies that we can say the same about?
Hollis Thomases (HT): I can’t really say that for any companies there was a “seminal moment” in tweeting, though there were certainly company representatives or brands that came on and did it better than others. For example, Frank Eliason of @comcastcares, Tony Hseih CEO of Zappos (@zappos) or Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, Jet Blue or Southwest Airlines that all did it well out of the gate. Their early success got the attention of the media but more importantly of other brands who then wanted to get in on the action.
BC: Why did early marketing campaigns work so well on Twitter?
HT: I think they had a few things working in their favor:
1) Twitter was a new frontier, and early adopter companies that “got” the value and opportunity of Twitter (and who executed well) didn’t have too much clutter to contend with;
2) Because of Twitter’s exciting new-ness with the masses flocking to it as well as early adopter brands, it grabbed the attention of the media who then latched on to any success stories it could find, which in turn attracted more followers and allowed the brands to grow their Twitter presence;
3) Flexibility & Creativity — Twitter isn’t a platform that is used just one way. Unlike some other online marketing channels, Twitter can really be what anyone wants it to be and the more creative those driving the Twitter marketing strategy, the more unique successes we saw: Customer Service, Instant Savings, Alerts, Promotions/Games/Contests, Customer Conversations, Delivering Unique Information in Real Time, Being Thought Leaders…the list of ways Twitter could be used went on and on. In all honesty, I don’t think some of the early brands on Twitter had a definite strategy when they started: they just got on, observed what was going on around them, and generated ideas and course thereafter. In those instances, one could call it dumb luck.
BC: You’ll be discussing Twitter automation at SES. Can you provide a few pointers for our readers about why automation is needed and what are some of the tools you recommend using for Twitter automation?
HT: The word “needed” is a sticking block for me. If you’re an individual using Twitter, you don’t necessarily “need” to use automation. Automation can make your life a little easier and those tools I’d condone and will be discussing help connect, engage, track and manage your Twitter experience. On the other hand, if you’re a large brand seeking to deploy a Twitter marketing strategy, you’ll probably want to use automation tools like multi-user account management through a single dashboard that assigns tweets and communication flow or feeds or scheduled tweets, as well as all of the above. So the point of automation is to streamline the process and build in efficiencies, but NOT to completely divorce oneself from the interactive component of Twitter. A brand that leads its followers to believe they are communicating with the brand but then only delivers one-way messages will not retain or engage loyal followers for very long.
Some tools I’ll be discussing related to Twitter automation include CoTweet, HootSuite, Twitterfeed, Twibes, bit.ly, twtapps, Twilert and more.
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