Twitter Spam Fail

Takeaways:

1. 1) Spam made it through Gmail. Good for Spammer, bad for me.
2. 2) Profiles looked like actual people (no Hot2Trot69 profile name).
3. 3) Tweets consist of spam content.
4. 4) 9 Twitter requests from people I don’t know in one minute = FAIL.

Spammy Tweets

A recent article on Sphinn.com called Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million in revenue caught my attention.

When you take into account Dell’s total revenue, the contribution from twittering is negligible.  The development costs and management probably has a high return on investment even though the model isn’t scalable.  Consumers have to choose to follow Dell.  Dell can not interrupt consumers.

Mashable has an interesting article on Brands on Twitter.  The article boils down to the two strategies that enables a business on Twitter to resonate with users:

1. 1) Is the conversation on Twitter one-sided? A business should respond to users.
2. 2) Does the brand have a “personality” (I believe some marketers call this positioning).

The Mashable article has a nice quote that sums up my position:

“I think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time.”

David Wallace agrees with pairing a personality with a brand on Twitter and offers some additional suggestions for social marketing on Twitter in his article, Can Twitter be Useful for Business?

I think the most important thing to remember for a business is that Twitter is an investment in time (maybe more then you anticipate) and to be successful, you are going to have to commit to a long term strategy to reap the benefits.