New IP Biz: The Next Big Thing for Marketers?

11:38 AM Thursday April 9, 2009
Twitter for Serious Marketers?
Tom Davenport

The Next Big Thing for Marketers?

A few months ago I was speaking at a marketing conference, and after I spoke on marketing analytics, there was a panel on social media. Larry Weber, who started and then sold a very successful PR firm (and who is on Babson's Board of Trustees), was asked whether there was a role for analytics in social media.

"Frankly, I'm tired of analytics," he said. "I got into social media in part to get away from analytics." Well, honesty is good, but I didn't see then — and don't now — how you can do serious marketing through any medium without metrics and analysis. Twitter and other social media may be fun, but are they really serious marketing tools?

I thought of this again recently while grading some of my MBA students' papers about an IT strategy for Welch's, the grape juice people. A couple of the student groups suggested that Welch's should embark upon a Twitter initiative. Okay, they get a point or two for being au courant. And to the students' credit, most suggested that it was a low-risk, low-return marketing approach. Still, I couldn't imagine which customers would decide to follow Welch's tweets about its grape juice and other associated products. The busy moms who form Welch's core customers? I don't think so.

Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn't cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company.

Let's face it — Twitter is a fad. It has all the attributes of a fad, including the one that people like me don't get its appeal. It has risen quickly and it will fall quickly. It's this year's Second Life — which, you may have noticed, nobody is talking much about anymore. One Daily Telegraph article that did talk about it noted, "While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte's director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been "virtually abandoned" by "normal" people and businesses." Ouch!

I had a conversation with an influential business editor the other day that confirmed some of my predilections about Twitter. He said he was "unfollowing" (defollowing?) those who tweet a lot — "It's just become a burden to read them," he said. I, who issue nary a tweet, am clearly sitting in the catbird seat. You have to wonder about a technology when those who use it aggressively are shunned.

I'm not as negative about the business and marketing potential of some other social media. For example, because Facebook and MySpace offer the promise of monetizing social networks — though they haven't done so yet, to my mind — they are not to be easily dismissed. And wikis clearly have some value, or Wikipedia wouldn't be so useful. Yet I haven't seen too many wiki success stories within firms, and the ones that do have value don't involve marketing. One smart knowledge manager, Sukumar Rajagopal at Cognizant, told me that he thought successful wikis within companies required that participants in them have strong network ties, and that's not always easy to orchestrate. Another pharma executive who had experimented with them suggested that they require substantial human curation (facilitation and editing) to be successful — which, come to think of it, Wikipedia does too.

One conclusion I've come to is that we should unbundle the concept of "social media," because some of its components are much more useful than others in a business and marketing context. Facebook? I suspect it faces prosperity, over time. Second Life? On life support. Twitter? In the long run, not worth a tweet.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts, but please restrict them to more than 140 characters.

For an opposing view, see John Sviokla and Chris Curran's post, "Twitter: A Marketer's Duct Tape"

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