MarCom Professional

I have had some great comments from readers to this series about Biz Dev and Twitter. In case you missed it How to Twitter part 1 ; How to Twitter part 2 ; How to Twitter part 3.

And to wrap up the series, I am going to summarise other great resources that may help you use Twitter to find more customers. 

New York Times ran an article that covers some of the same ground that I recommended. It also includes these two categories:

Engage customers. Run contests, solicit feedback and thank customers for supportive messages. Jetblue does all three. (By the way, JetBlue doesn’t identify the person or people who Twitter under its account, but best practices suggest you should.)

Provide customer service.

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Mark Ritson writing in Marketing Magazine (3 September 08) showcased the tie-up between Penguin Books and Match.com in a co-branding deal.

Coincidently this week I am working on a client who has a paid-for newsletter for a niche audience. They approached me asking for ways to increase subscription and advertising revenues.

My answer, in part, includes co-branding.

And so the challenge for you is to find out whether this is an appropriate tool for business development for your company.

Situations where collaborative marketing and co-branding may be appropriate include:

• you have a good database of customers in a clear market niche or particular geography or demographic profile 
• there is little cross-over between the current customer base of either brand
• each brand can benefit from the positioning and reputation of the other
• profits from the resultant new business can be shared while both improve brand equity

Ritson suggests that if More...

And so I hope that now you have set up your own account. Here are some advanced features that may be helpful as you progress in Twitter usage.

Business on Twitter website - A great web resource with tools, articles and advice on using Twitter for busines. This article is worth reading.

Article on software tools to make your Twitter life easier including automatic thank yous to followers, Status update loggers, desktop aggregators, Skype and iPhone applications.

Searching Twitter - helpful when you are just getting started and want to find followers /people to follow who are interested in the same things as you. More...

Was browsing around the Jiglu website and decided to actually read the terms and conditions of service docuemtns.

What a surprisse. Written in normal language with careful explanations about how they will and won't serve you and use your information. 

Here's an extract.

We are very conscious that most people are asked to click on terms of service without ever being given a clear idea of what it is that they are allowed to do, or not, unless they have practiced law for some significant period of time.

This strikes as a little unfair, and so what we intend to do here is to set out what you can and can't do with our service, and what we are allowed to do.

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Hopefully you've done a little 'experimenting' with Twitter over the past week. I promised a round up of the five companies using Twitter and what they've been tweeting about. This is intended to give insight and ideas about how you might use Twitter for your business.

@dot_design The Devon based design agency. Follows 1996 people and has 267 followers.

• They trailed their blog in general terms three times asking for RSS subscribers. 
• Re-tweet a post from someone else. Useful tool to help your contacts get their message out more widely - you 'amplify' their message by repeating it to your audience

This is a little one-sided and self-promotion focused which is reflected in the balance of followers and followed. More...

From time to time I get work with a mergers and acquisitions company and today I've had an email from them asking for my help.

If you ever come across, or know of, a small brand/packaging focused company, or unit, or team, who would be up for a discussion do let me know. I have a client who wants to bring such a unit into his company.

Small units in the sector are going to find it tough going this year and next as the economy worsens and projects get cancelled or delayed so there may be a mutuality of interest here. Anyway, as I said, probably a long shot but do keep in mind in your travels round the industry. 

And so here's the challenge. More...

I have been on twitter for about six months now and am beginning to feel confident about the tool and howbusinesses can use it.

This post is not about how to get yourself set up (there are plenty of videos on YouTube and blog posts to teach that) but about watching and learning from other businesses who are using it to find new customers and as a business development tool.

Assuming you have a twitter account here are several things you can do to leverage it as part of your online profile building and business development. If you don't have an account, just browse, check back to a few twitter pages of people / companies you know and use this as part of your market assessment and review. More...

Just had a good chat with Andrew about hiring new biz people.

The gist was that most businesses get to a size when the MD can no longer do all the biz dev work alone. What do you do next?

Options include:

1. train up a graduate
2. hire an experienced person with 3/4 years in the industry

My views were nicely aligned with his. I said Oxbridge-type grads are good hires because they are bright, keen and want to rule the world quickly. If you train them up for marketing jobs - but
for sales get a seasoned professional from another industry. I don't think you have a cat's chance of training a grad to being a good salesperson quickly. More...

Got a reply from Robert Frost at adstorm.

We don’t disclose details of our own marketing and advertising activities and their performance to strangers however it is probably clear to you that being specialists in online advertising, AdStorm closely track performance and conversion of all our media, and if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be doing it! The general demographics of Facebook users are not ideal for business to business marketing and the targeting is not as good on Facebook as other media but nevertheless with careful set up it does bring us a certain amount of useful traffic.

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A project I am involved in requires a website, shop and e-learning component building.

Anyone interested, email me for the full spec.

Bidding closes 18 August.