The Lunch Pail

In my last post I wrote about the Twitter contest Knotice held at the Shop.org Annual Summit. This was the first time Knotice used Twitter as a channel to promote the company and our direct digital marketing concept. For someone to enter the contest they needed to have one of Knotice's booth staff give them the "secret phrase" for the contest. To enter a person had to tweet: @Knotice direct digital marketing @ShopOrgSummit. All a person needed was to know how to Tweet, and they were entered to win a free Netbook.

Going into the event I had really high hopes for the success of the contest. I knew that we kept the contest under wraps from the public and that it is interesting to test word-of-mouth value plus Twitter. I also knew that the Shop.org Annual Summit is a trade show full of technical people looking for the latest and greatest digital solutions in the retail space. My expectations for entries were pretty high. I was thinking that around fifty people would participate in the contest. Other people at Knotice did not have any expectations for participation in the contest. For them, it was a first time trial and they did not know what to expect.

The first night of the show, my expectations of around fifty people entering the contest via Twitter were quickly re-aligned. The Knotice booth staff was told numerous times by Shop.org attendees that they did not Tweet or did not see Twitter as useful. When asked to create a Twitter account for the show to enter the contest, the response was that attendees refused on the grounds that Twitter was a “waste of time.”

The reaction was completely opposite from what I originally assumed about the online marketing space and how people in professional positions use Twitter. A lot of people Knotice spoke with at the event may have a Twitter account, but few use it. If a person was not on Twitter, it is pretty safe to assume they are not seeking out what others are saying about different products or services on Twitter. I have found out that updating and using Twitter takes a lot of time. Staying current about industry-wide happenings and tweeting about relevant things can be time-consuming.

After a search for professionals that use Twitter, Knotice found just six people willing to participate in our contest. For those that did elect to participate in the contest, the chances of winning were very high.

Another issue that Knotice encountered during the event was the fact that the Knotice Twitter account was hacked. The worst part about this was, that the hacker sent out direct messages to people that were following us, telling them about a money making scam. It was an obvious hack that did not annoy our loyal followers, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

After quickly resolving the hack on our end we discovered that Twitter’s response to the hack was not at all helpful. They told us to change our password and to check out our computer and to make sure that we only had the right parties authorized to use the account (duh, we did not need their guidance to figure that out). Even asking different questions to the Twitter customer support team received the same automated response over and over again. It would have been nice from a customer service perspective to see that if someone had a legitimate question about their account, the response was pertinent to the question.

Our conclusion about using Twitter for business is that Twitter is a valuable PR tool to spread the message about recent company news, upcoming events, new customer wins, industry developments, new ideas, etc. Using Twitter to help build brand can be helpful, and is where Twitter’s primary value lies.