By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
8/26/2008
Being wildly interested in the impact that social networking is going to have on retail, I have followed developments in Facebook and MySpace, in widgets, in online reviews, and a whole host of other ways that retailers could potentially tap into communities of either outraged or delighted customers. I’ve tried to be a premiere social networker myself, but other than managing a few blog postings (I had a great run for about a week) and signing up for Facebook and MySpace at others’ insistence, I haven’t managed to be much more than a very tiny blip in the social networking graph. I have concluded that I, one, don’t have very many techno-savvy friends, and two, don’t have the required social networking genes. For the record, I didn’t get bulletin boards when they first came out either.
So it is with great trepidation that I embark on an examination of what Twitter can mean for retail. Because I don’t get Twitter at all. You can find me at twitter.com/nikkibaird, for what it’s worth. At least with Twitter, unlike my blog, the posts are guaranteed to be short.
So what did I find? Well, first of all, Twitter could do itself a huge favor in helping out brands by making it easier to find them. Right now the search is very undifferentiated. I knew that Zappos.com has a Twitter account and that employees at Zappos.com are pretty active on Twitter, but a search of “Zappos” yields individual users who have the last name “Zappos”, individual users who happen to work at Zappos, and then the company account itself. It was the same challenge in looking for, say, American Apparel. I figured they’d be out there – that retailer is very active online, but I had to wade through pages of results to get the brand account I was looking for.
I do believe that a “brand fan-feed” could be useful, but it’s got to be easier to find them. And it could easily work both ways – a brand fan-feed account could serve as a way for the brand to communicate to enthusiastic subscribers, and it could also serve as a grouping function that lets lots of enthusiastic fans talk to each other through the fan-feed. Why would you use Twitter for this over, say, a Facebook group? I have no idea. Possibly because it’s a different user base, but I wouldn’t say that’s a strong argument – it’s that whole social networking gene thing. If you’ve got it, you’re probably already everywhere anyway.
Second, even if you’re like me and you don’t really get what all the buzz is about, you need to be monitoring Twitter. Because the people who do use it often have a lot to say about the brands they encounter everyday. They may be limited to 160 characters, but they’ve learned how to maximize the impact within those limits. In my brief search for retailers on Twitter, I also found a lot of people who had, let’s just say, not very nice things to say about recent brand experiences. Comcast has actually received a lot of credit for monitoring complaints this way – and for actively responding to them.
Third, develop a policy for how employees can use Twitter. There are a lot of employees who identify very strongly with their companies and publicize it on their Twitter accounts. When Facebook first became big, it became a recruiter panacea for researching how hard prospective college student job candidates partied – and Gen Yers, being the digital generation that they are, have not necessarily been that clean about maintaining boundaries between their personal lives and their work careers. They’re bringing that same mentality to things like Twitter, where it (apparently) is not that big a deal to identify yourself as a store manager or department lead at a retailer, and then complain about customers, products, or management in the “life feed” of their everyday lives. How embarrassing could that turn out to be for a brand? Just do a search on your favorite retailer on Twitter and see for yourself.
Finally, get your brand on there. There were quite a few “placeholders” for brands where it was unclear if it was the brand itself, or just a cybersquatter – I guess the term here would be a Twittersquatter. Search on Coca-Cola for a good example. I won’t link to it because I don’t want to encourage it. But even if you update your brand’s feed once a week with an early look at what’s in the circular on Sunday or what new store is opening tomorrow, that’s better than someone else coming along and hijacking your brand for a few quick advertising hits.
I do think Twitter has something to offer for brands – my favorite retail-related account at the moment is RetailerDepot, which hands out online coupon codes as it finds them. The Amazon GoldBox feed isn’t too bad either. If you know of any other cool things retailers are doing on Twitter, definitely let us know!
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