No Man’s Blog

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One of the most sacred truism of social media is that it is no place for direct marketing and salesy messages. Yet recent developments and observations seems to suggest that this might become just another cliche’ as companies are experimenting with social platforms as sales and promotions and even a new breed of direct marketing, one where contact (lead) is being made by the indirect requests of people.

The initial change came from brands using Twitter for sales promotions like the successful story of DellOutlet, Jetblue and many other brands. This is a no brainer. if you have a good deal to offer people will follow.

But it’s worth paying attention to emerging practices of direct marketing. I’ve been thinking about it for couple of weeks now and don’t know what to make of it yet. Sometimes I think it’s plain wrong yet occasionally it seems to make too good of a sense sense and I’m tempted to convince one of my clients to experiment with. At the moment Twitter is where these experimentation can take place so a bit limited in scope but this indeed can be just the beginning of something big.

Let me start on a true story…

Few weeks back I #lazytweeted a question about a place to stay in Barcelona. Few nice people (not just from my network) have replied with recommendations. One @reply came from an apartment hotel offering their place.

Is this the holy grail or the greatest ever spam machine in the making?

Set up search words through twitter search of your category and you might find the goose on steroids or you might find a stinky corpse. I don’t know.

Here are some fictional tweets to bring this more to life:

Someone: anyone knows a good ethical wedding company?

I can think of hundred more examples, some obviously more promising than others.

There are, of course so many issue here, I don’t know where to start.

Do people want to be directly contacted by companies or is it intruding spam that will put people off Twitter and kill it? My instincts say sod off but seriously why not? If the right offer can come in the right time by the right people – how is that a bad thing?

I’m shouting out to my network, not to sales persons you say. Well, the emergence of the #lazytweet says otherwise. When people in need they want to throw their net as far and as wide as possible right?

That’s a spam full stop, you say. It will taint my experience and kill the network. But if these replies appear not on your main stream but on your @reply stream which you can access or ignore as much as you like that makes it less problematic right? And you can always block intrusive users. Besides, you bloody hypocrite, why is it OK for brands to ‘listen’ to your customer service rants and response very quickly but NOT with anything else?

Tricky thing, virtual social spaces. You can argue that in the physical world, a sales person won’t approach you in the pub saying, sorry mate, I just overheard you asking your friend about X. I’m Asi, I’m an X retailer, come buy from me. But we slowly change our perceptions of public/private in mediating social technologies and getting used to what Danah described as their persistence, searchability, and the presence of invisible audiences. So comparing it directly to physical spaces is a bit futile although I’d still suggest taking that test.

And there are of course loads of other issues from a business perspective – mainly resource and scalability. Please let’s not fall into the twitter trap. It’s still and probably will be just a noisy minority of the early adopters so take it with a pinch etc. I guess that just like with everything social interwebs, context is king and we will soon see another demo of Sturgeon Law – some companies/brands will get it and do it right and make some good business of it, most will fail.

Please tell me what you think of this one – your opinion (as usual) is hugely appreciated.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, smarter and quicker people have thought about it. It’s getting hot in here…