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Welcome to my blog, my name is Paul Dunay and I lead Red Hat's Financial Services Marketing team Globally, I am also a Certified Professional Coach, Author and Award-Winning B2B Marketing Expert. Any views expressed are my own.
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Thanks for the reality check.
One point though.
This Dell campaign is not "social" at all. It's traditional marketing on twitter with the "funnel" logic: 100K will read; 10K will check and 500 will buy. Very much like an emailing except that opt in in emailing makes the consumer more in charge of what he accepts or not.
There is nothing specific for me nor for my community in the message and no attempt to build trust, or establish a relation. Very little value in the message.
The paradigm of social media is usually the reverse: 100 will buy and they will be so delighted they will spread the word.
I personally would not retweet this tweet and if Dell would be using too many of those, I would report them as a spammer, like I do with emails.
Won't you ?
@ dominic – thanks so much for reaching out – you are absolutely right there is nothing social about their message – they are using a social channel to broadcast a message of a discount
same goes for the Asian BBQ truck which uses twitter to disclose where it will be that evening
I would argue that the Asian BBQ truck while doing the same as Dell is still communicating to a group of followers that rival a community
perhaps we are seeing some community building but of a one way nature using these tools
great comment
Hey Paul,
If you assume that an average Dell ticket is $750, that means only 2.6k units were sold. With a reported 200 Dell people Tweeting, that's only ~13 units each – and one might expect a good amount of cannibalization from a Dell-favorable audience. While it's nice to see a brand publicly talking about sales, I'm still wondering at what investment and margin? At what point would a senior exec seriously embrace twitter as a channel with a P&L target? My guess is that these sales are gravy and the best way to view these efforts are as customer support costs & benefits.
And, fwiw, like dominic I am one of those that would shift tweets with too many coupons into my spam list. I've already noticed more than a few brands who don't realize that Twitter is not simply an alternative to e-mail spam offers…
Hope you're happy with the new gig.
Edw.
Hey Ed – thanks for reaching out and commenting
I Love your thought about how to calculate the dollars per rep on twitter – overall I think it is safe to say 3 million for a company that size is a drop in the bucket – but hey you have to start somewhere right?
Also your theme of cannibalization is very interesting – I feel if they were just doing straight promotions on all Dell gear it would cannibalize their revenues but since it is close out material it is pure gravy
Yes – enjoying my new Avaya gig alot – its great to be in such an innovative communications firm in the middle of a communications revolution!
best
P
Dell could also pass out flyers in Times Square and kick off $3-mil in new sales. Why? Because they are Dell, and because they sell a great product. I don't think that mega corporations that already have enormous followings are the best examples for the effectiveness of social channels (b/c those companies would get those results regardless).
@ Travis – fair point
The Retail Advertising and Marketing Association lists COUPONS as the top media influencer for purchases.
If it was a piece of paper, banner ad, commercial or social media, Dell would have likely received the same response. This is no proof that “Social Media” was the driver for the purchase. If Twitter did not exist and Dell had sent out the same coupon to EXISTING customers that ALREADY like their product, would the same sales response happen? Very likely.
Just like most people in this country, I am very busy. I see most of the micro-blogging blasts that I get as digital white noise. Even my techno-junkie 18-year-old and his friends say they hate Twitter and find it annoying. (Yet they use it.)
I maintain that social media is like a social disease. Very few people know about it or pay attention, unless they are your close friends and it impacts their lives in a significant way.
Social media is digital narcissism, where everyone is waving a flag about themselves, with little care for building authentic relationships with the customer. Until I see genuine NEW relationships being built, I am not sold.
We sit here arguing about the ROI of Twitter, but give it a few years and yet another mindless digital robotic service will have taken over and we will be having this same argument. Right now everyone is so enamored with technology systems and platforms that they ignore one simple fact – the same old things still work, they are just repackaged.
Coupons did the job, not Twitter.
Carl Hartman | brandgineering.biz | Denver
@Carl – I agree – and that’s my point to the reader that Dell is not using any special magical sauce – they are using a coupon (might as well have given out S&H green stamps 😉
Great post. I find it funny that many of the comments seem to be coming from the converted. I disagree with the comment that says the tweet you’ve posted doesn’t offer anything for a community or establish a relationship only because we don’t know what tweets came before this one. I would suspect that Dell knows how to use their feed to establish it as a valuable resource for information so that when a coupon is offered it is read and not considered white noise. (That’s an assumption on my part that may not be true.) Even with that disagreement, I would also suspect that most of the folks posting here would agree that so much of the discussion taking place in the social media world is centered on squishy metrics and buzz. I find it incredibly frustrating when I start having discussions that involve simple ways to track clicks, “feed the funnel” or calculate some type of value only to be met with objections from social media “experts” who have no clue what I’m talking about. My hope is that Carl is correct and another bright shiny object will attract these experts sooner rather than later so we can all go back to marketing. 🙂
@James – LOL – some great points but dont lose your focus on the feed the funnel angle – I think we really can use social to identify conversations where there is a potential sale developing – thanks for commenting!