Twitter Campaign Planning Basics: One Rule to Rule All Other Rules
As mentioned here last week, we’ve just kicked off a fab new project with IBM, working alongside our friends at Text100. The clever guys from Big Blue recreated the Chinese Forbidden City as a virtual world late last year (sometime between a morning tea break and an afternoon siesta), and collectively we decided it would be a great idea to use it as a virtual meeting space for some lead generation activity.
So here’s what we came up with: a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket invite to a first-of-its-kind, insider, behind-the-scenes tour of the Virtual Forbidden City …hosted by the experts who built it. Forbidden, but not forgotten – the tours will demonstrate all of the IBM SOA and virtualisation secrets that were used to build the city. (If you’re in the market for some SOA, you can register to attend here.)
In essence, the recruitment campaign is simple: drive IT Architects to the event microsite and have them register to attend. There are a number of ways we could have tackled this: media relations, banner ads, etc. But we settled for Twitter as the most immediate, relevant, direct and cost-effective way of reaching out to people and driving interest and traffic. (You can check out the campaign Twitter profile here.)
So far, so good. We’ve delivered a stack of signups and the campaign is only a week old – and we’re aiming to make our quota within the next week or so.
This is not the first time we’ve used Twitter for this kind of activity, but I thought I’d share some learning with you as it’s a radically different way of doing things. Unlike a press campaign, an email blast, or a telemarketing binge, it means that – from the word go – you have to let go of something that we all cherish in the world of marcomms: control.
You don’t own a Twitter campaign. It owns you…
You’re probably thinking about Twitter as a campaign tool because it’s quick and easy to use and it has such fantastic reach. It has enormous viral potential. This is exciting and daunting in equal measure because, unlike most standard communications tactics, you don’t own the network or the flow of information. You’re looking for cascades (re-Tweets, replies, etc) to spread the message into the farthest corner of the Twittersphere, but in order to do this you have to abandon all control.
In the context of Twitter, to control is to limit your scale. If you really want to manage the flow of messages, and direct traffic like a policeman, then it’s not really for you. This kind of approach demands that you work on a more one-to-one basis – but if you want your campaign to live a life of its own then Twitter is ideal because it demands that you take a step back and let the network do the talking.
In our experience, the only way to do this effectively is to a) start with good content (and we’re very lucky on this one, as we have a whole Virtual Forbidden City to play with); b) do a stack of research in order to find the right places to seed your conversations (ie, identify influential people that actively care for what you’re doing and build meaningful relationships with them); and c) be prepared to let these people – the centre of your campaign network – do whatever the hell they want.
In practice this might shock you. From the outset those perfectly crafted 140 character Tweets go haywire – they get mangled, chopped and changed; URLs get bashed about, lopped off and simply forgotten; and all kinds of random folk that were never part of the plan decide to get on board. But here’s the thing: this is exactly what you should be aiming for…. Anarchy.
For the classically trained, this kind of response is kind of like Primal Scream. The data tells you that your campaign is working, but your control of it went out of the window on day one.
Yesterday you were a benevolent dictator, polishing your missives and spraying them via your troops. Today, with Twitter, you are more like Florence Nightingale. Your role is to effect small changes to help the chaos move as effectively as possible towards a satisfactory conclusion. Nurser and Noodler, your job is to identify and get involved with the right people, conversations and ‘hubs,’ win new friends, and give them a little nudge in the right direction.
We use a bunch of different tools to do this effectively, but when all’s said and done, the main skill is in being social… we try to find appropriate ways to make what we have to say interesting, and interesting enough to be passed around – and we ensure that we’re always around to lend a hand to anyone who needs it (for example, stepping in to help people fill out a form, or helping to fix bugs as soon as they’re spotted).
This is less about hitting the ‘re-Tweet’ button in an attempt to replicate the message, and more about being a good conversationist.
Anyways, that’s our guiding principle. What’s yours? We’d love to hear…
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Matthias Fiechter
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roberto Valle Mateos
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Juhani Tontti
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