Twitter Battle Heats Up

Tons of comments on this article I wrote and posted Monday on the Multichannel Merchant site:
Twitter Better for Nonsense than Business Sense.

The premise: More than 40% of all tweets are considered “pointless babble.” Twitter may not be all about self-promotion, as the surveyor had thought. Heck, MCM editor Melissa Dowling pointed that out in this post last month.

With the exception of one comment (which may be by someone who has a personal vendetta against Pear Analytics, the company that did the study on Twitter content), everyone brings a valid argument to the table.

The debate ranges from Twitter allowing you to reach the masses, to Twitter not allowing marketers to capture actionable customer data. And the reason for this medley: The article was featured across the Chief Marketer brand, so you have a clash of experiential marketers and data geeks.

I have written and edited for the PROMO and Chief Marketer brands, and am with Multichannel Merchant now. So I’ve seen both sides of the marketing debate. And I find myself on the data geek side, but it’s not because of my current loyalties to Multichannel Merchant.

It’s because it seems a lot of brand marketing managers fall or have fallen in love with the next big thing.

Did naming rights to The Ballpark at Arlington help Ameriquest sell… whatever it is they sell? Did product placement on “The Apprentice” help whatever American brand of automobile sell vehicles beyond that new sportscar it was showcasing?

Now it doesn’t mean I’m all anti-Twitter. I think Twitter is a great customer-service channel for brands that have the time and resources to do Twitter searches and find out what people are saying about them.

And if these brands and companies can do that right, then maybe they will find gold in Twitter.