I met up with Serguei Beloussov and some of his executive team the other night to talk about Parallels, a product I love and a company I think is poised for an amazing next few years. These guys are brilliant, and know how to execute in mining their category for all the user value and shareholder value they can create.
Like any team worth its salt, these guys are busy and rarely find time to keep up with the blogosphere, let alone participate. The problem is that there is an important daily conversation going on within the blogosphere of which they should not only be intimately aware but in which they should be participating. Since they all seem to sleep five hours a night and traverse the world to meet with a distributed team and far-flung clients, it’s difficult for me to recommend that they start reading a broad set of blogs and participating. It would be great to have their top folks blogging, but I doubt they would find time for 2-3 posts a week, let alone significant participation.
So, here’s my recommendation: Just do Twitter.
There are extensive conversations about Parallels going on within Twitter right now. Windows 7 on Parallels is having some issues. There’s direct feedback from bloggers regarding pricing on the new Parallels upgrade. People who are forming ideas on VMWare vs. Parallels are hashing out early findings on Twitter. Subscribing to a set of Twitter folks and following searches using TweetDeck for Parallels, VMWare, other competitors, virtualization terms, cloud computing terms, and other product names would be simple, and would give them a finger on the daily pulse of what’s going on in the world. Then they could respond in 140 characters or less to the blogger.
Twitter is great for a scoped commitment because:
- People: Most of the thought leaders in this space are on Twitter
- Speed: Posts are quick to scan and read
- Software: Twitter software like TweetDeck seems to beat any rss management tool I’ve used regularly
- Response: You only have 140 characters with which to respond, so you won’t take 15 minutes thinking about your reply. Read before you submit, but 1 minute and you’re done.
- Breadth: You can converse with more people due to the brevity of your response.
So, if you’re feeling left out and don’t know how to jump in, consider this: Don’t have a blog, have a Twitter. Don’t comment on blogs, comment on Twitter.
thank you for posting this encouraging advice. I’ve aborted my blogging efforts since it feels so disconnected from people. Me preaching, some folks listening, no one participating or engaging. Twitter is so much more realistic for a founder of a startup or anyone slammed by daily work schedules.
It’s a great way to consume information through out the day and I like using twitter to see what people are saying about events in real time
Tom, you’re exactly right. It’s great to be a thought leader, but executing and churning out regular long-form prose is too tough. Just about every day I get to the end and say “Oh, I should blog… but I want to go home and see my wife.” Then I fold the MacBook and head home. Twitter makes it so much more manageable.
Hey Dave, I agree this approach makes a ton of sense, especially for a company that doesn’t have the resources to hire a dedicated blogger to interface with the community. Twitter is often far easier to fit into my busy schedule, and there is no end to the news that I learned about first via Twitter.
Interesting post. Scanning the Twitter chatter can certainly give you real-time insight into what people think of your product. Get Satisfaction includes tools for tracking keywords on Twitter so customer support personnel can respond to Twitter posts as well as direct support requests. Parallels uses Get Satisfaction. I wonder if their support team is already using Twitter in some way.
Parallels does use Get Satisfaction, but they obviously don’t promote it from their site, or try to push it up in search results. Looks like the last conversation was a month ago. http://getsatisfaction.com/parallels
I think it’s a great idea and I’m glad they’re there. And they may use Twitter for customer service, since they’re smart guys and likely hire smart guys who pay attention to what’s going on.
This is a great post, Twitter is becoming the place for companies to quickly address user or customer problems. As social networks go, Twitter comes out on top for this kind of business to customer communications.
Unlike a social network site such as Facebook, Twitter’s model doesn’t change the more people start using it. Its design and purpose mute the noise found elsewhere. There are no addons to the Twitter site and there are no ads. There is nothing to distract a Twitterer from doing what they’re there to do, it’s pure messaging. That’s what makes Twitter such a perfect medium for B2C communication.
Twitter allows a business to address customer problems in near real-time. In doing so you are more likely to bring some satisfaction to that customer, and that could mean an otherwise multi-paragraph rant on a blog never becomes anything more than a few 140 character or less tweets.
I’m not saying it is (or should be) the only way to handle customers, just that it is a fast, quick and more personal way and that means a lot from a consumer point of view.
My advice as a twitterer to any company that is thinking of tweeting:
- Don’t just look for problems, find people who are happy, too. Simply reaching out to let a user know you’re glad they like your product helps create a more intimate connection between you- Giant Faceless Corporation, and them- consumer of your goods.
- Use your power wisely. Don’t use it as a gateway to push spam at your followers. Twitter makes it easy to block someone from following you and for you to stop following someone.
- Keep it human. It’s good to engage your followers. It doesn’t have to be every time, just enough to show people you’re active.
- Keep it interesting. In addition to contacting people about problems or whatever, drop tidbits about upcoming features or releases.
- Make it easy for someone to contact you. Good PR means offering up an email address can get people to open up to you and explain situations that won’t fit into 140 characters.
Whether it’s for tech support or PR or some combination thereof, if you as a company are interested in your users, scan Twitter and see what they’re saying. You might be surprised.
R(k) could write a book on this stuff. Keep it real. Keep it human (so hard for anyone who’s gone through PR ‘[old]media training’). Keep yourself accessible.
this is right on the money. for lazy bloggers like myself, i think twitter and tumblr are awesome platforms to learn about stuff and post my thoughts. there’s no doubt that twitter has been at the forefront of real citizen journalism — think the inauguration and the hudson river plane crash. good stuff, and i encourage everyone to join twitter.
Great post and comments Dave… Just tweeted the link to it