The Truth About Twitter: All-In On a Side Pot Bet

Seminars, white papers and my own experience indicate the following are required steps you must take to Tweet with “success.” Rule Zero, a Tweet can no more than 140 characters. So, let's be clear. The steps outlined below involve a successful communication strategy limited to 140 characters.

Now, minimal guidelines. One, focus on an audience or subject matter - if your Tweets are about any subject that comes to mind, who will bother to follow you? Your Mom? Two, when people sign up to follow you, check them out to determine if you should follow them. Three, Tweet regularly, not as in weekly, but daily, or even more than once per day. Four, follow (read the tweets of) the people you wish would follow you. They may be subject area experts, people of influence or leaders. Five, monitor how many VIPs are following you. Six, market your tweets in other mediums so you get more followers. Seven, monitor your followers to make sure they are legitimate. Eight, delete those who are not. Nine, use a monitoring service to see who is tweeting about you and/or your organization. Ten, continually recruit people to follow you. Eleven, do steps 1-10 daily. Twelve, note which of your tweets get responses and adjust accordingly. Don't just shovel up sloppy tweets and expect results. In sum, Twitter must be a part of your daily routine, accounting for an hour, or more, of your time.

Now, ask Twitter Wannabes, Experts and Evangelists what your pay off is for successfully completing these twelve steps. Truth is, their details about return-on-investment remain a little fuzzy. You may be building a brand (nice), connecting with people you would never otherwise reach (possibly valuable), generating referral sources (good) and possibly getting customers (retail) or clients (business-to-business). But really, it's hard to identify how actual “cash money,” as Yogi Berra might say, will result from a 12-step Twitter Program. That's why the majority of business people feel unenthusiastic for Twitter and why Twitter has a huge retention problem.

Now suppose, instead of using Twitter, a sales or marketing person applied the 12 steps outline above to a different daily marketing effort. Would the results be better? Here's an example. One, get your elevator speech down to 140 characters. Actually, using more than 140 characters is okay in an elevator. At its best, your elevator speech is your statement of how you and/or your organization creates value and why people should pay you for what you do, or pay your organization for what it sells.

Two, every day, get a few people's business cards and their permission to email or call them every now and then. Three, email them once a week with a short message that interests them. Four, pay rapt attention to what they say when you call them on the phone. Five, network by calling a few new people every day. Six, find leaders in your field and email them, asking them for tips. Seven, use Google to identify legitimate prospects. Eight, set up Google to monitor what people are saying about you or your organization on the Internet. Nine, always look for sources of tips you can reformulate and pass along to others. Ten, complete these core steps every day. Eleven, make the tips or comments you email out really count, but don't worry about limiting yourself to 140 characters. Twelve, give yourself a pat on the back.

Twitter Evangelists may object to this comparison, but the fact is that most sales managers would be pleased if their marketing and sales people (account representatives, account managers, account executives) would take the steps outlined in Plan B every day. In other words, the time and talent required to make Twitter work, when applied to any marketing approach (sales calls, sales letters, email campaigns, the making and mailing of sales brochures, drop in cold prospecting calls, even just “networking”) will make those efforts effective as well.

What will produce the best pay off for you and/or your organization? If you need to directly generate leads and sales, Twitter will only indirectly meet your needs. If you need to reach out to a great mass of people you don't know to generate some possible referrals or some prospective clients, Twitter, or other online marketing techniques, might work for you.

To understand the key truth about Twitter, consider the game of poker. In poker, when a player runs short of money, to stay in the game, he or she has to go “all in.” Here's how going all-in works in poker. When you go “all in,” even if you win, you only win the side pot, not the main pot, because you're short - you're out of money.

In sales and marketing, everyone is short. Every person and every organization does not have enough time and money to do all the marketing they could do. So we all have to bet our marketing and sales chips wisely.

If you use Twitter, you and/or your organization have to go “all in,” as in “all in” that Twitter will win for you. You can't do Twitter half way. When you go all-in with Twitter, you may win, but you're only winning a side pot. The main pot's still on the table.

So here are two questions to ask yourself, in considering Twitter. One, should you or your organization focus just on winning the main pot and can you afford to go all-in to win a side pot? And, two, if you do win with Twitter, what the heck did you win in that side pot, anyway?