Breaking down the walls separating the “marketed to” and the marketer

One thing I often talk about is a vision I have of social media breaking down the wall that has existed for ages between the corporation’s marketing department and the great unwashed — that means you and me — on the other side of that wall.  The “marketed to.”  The social web has ushered in the potential for unprecedented collaboration between consumers and marketers.  It can potentially lead to an age in which companies don’t market to consumers, but instead, market with them, for the benefit of both.  And even possibly improve the image of marketing as a profession beyond its current position slightly above “used car salesmen.”  (No slight to used car salesmen intended.)

A recent study released by Forrester shows that this vision can become a reality.  As the title to a piece on ReadWriteWeb about the report says, Consumers Will Not Only Buy, They Will Help Create.  Indeed there are many consumers who say they would be willing co-creators, but not so many marketers who have chosen to take advantage of that fact.  According to the report, 61% of consumers would be ready to help companies design new products and improve existing ones.

General Mills goes social

Here’s the killer chart…

During the launch of the Fiber One Bar, General Mills could see a nearly exact correlation between weekly online postings and volume.  As Mark Roddicks, General Mills’ CMO, points out in his inspiring presentation General Mills Goes Social, it’s the kind of chart you can take to management to prove the value of consumer participation in the development and launch of products through social media tools.

General Mills has a stable of well-known, iconic food brands, including such favorites as Pillsbury, Cheerios, Green Giant and that venerable but ageless queen of the kitchen, Betty Crocker.  Back in the 40’s, the Betty Crocker brand received up to 3,000 letters a day from passionate homemakers.  Social communities built around brands have existed for decades.  Only now, thanks to today’s online social tools, General Mills can leverage the power and passion of those communities in unprecedented ways.

Here’s just a few examples of how General Mills is “going social,” because, as Addicks says, the company has only recently started on this journey and continues to learn as they go.

General Mills regularly gets new products into the hands, and kitchens, of engaged consumers before they launch.  The company uses social media tools to encourage those consumers to talk about the product, share experiences and feed back opinions and suggestions.  Not all the feedback is positive, but that’s how the company learns.

Two tools they use for this are My Block Spark and Pssst…, which invite connected consumers and bloggers to participate and provide them with platforms to share and provide feedback.

By leveraging communities in this way, General Mills builds early awareness and involvement among influencers, which facilitates fast word of mouth when the product actually launches.  Progresso Broth was launched through the Pssst… community with almost no support from traditional media.

One way General Mills gets the conversation going is by saying to consumers, here’s why we created this product, here’s how we think it works, tell us what you think.  Feedback can be in different forms, including video, and the ensuing dialogue provides rich insights for the product developers and food experts.

General Mills brands also support a number of causes.  The effectiveness of these programs has been enhanced through web 2.0 tools put in consumers’ hands.  The Yoplait “Save Lids to Save Lives” initiative in support of  Susan G. Komen for the cure saw participation increase by nearly 50% when women were provided with online tools to set up their own teams behind the program.

Addicks understands that going social with consumers with this degree of transparency can seem pretty radical to C-suite members who are used to a traditional tell and sell approach.  One way he suggests to get started is within the company itself.  One of the first things General Mills did was to create a common portal inside the organization, which enabled employees to form communities, discussion groups and interactive best practices.  This helped senior management understand the power of becoming social by demonstrating the power of the organization to help itself through these kind of tools.

Inspiring stuff.  You can see the presentation deck, as well as a video of Addicks presenting it, at the Business Building Blog.

Said the advertising to the academic, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

I’m a little late to this one but I’d like to share some thoughts all the same.

Last March, Eric Clemons, who is a professor at the Wharton School, one of America’s top business schools, wrote a post on TechCrunch entitled “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.” It caused quite a stir.  Professor Clemons’s key thesis is that online advertising will ultimately fail.  There will be less of it in future because in today’s interconnected world, people don’t want, need or trust ads.

While the piece’s title refers to online advertising, Professor Clemons goes further:

“… simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail.  It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information.  We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising.  We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind.”

Earlier in the post he asserts that “the ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.”  So he is not talking about the eventual demise of online advertising only, but of advertising in general.

There is much in Professor Clemons’s post with which I agree, as well as some excellent perspectives that really got me to stretch my mind.   Especially thought provoking is his description of paid search as “misdirection,” because it sends consumers to pages that are not necessarily the most valuable to them, but rather to the sites of companies that cough up the most money.  (For this reason he believes Google’s business model is probably unsustainable.) Anyone who knows this blog also knows that I not only recognize, but am inspired by the changes web 2.0 and social media are bringing to fundamentals of marketing, communications and brand-consumer relationships.

Still, I am not convinced by the good professor’s thesis that advertising’s role in the marketing mix — online or otherwise — is necessarily doomed to oblivion.  The reason is that Mr. Clemons has a very info-centric view of advertising, as you can see by the previous quote and in the definition of advertising below that he offers in his post (passages in bold are mine):

“Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.”

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

If you believe that the only role of advertising is to provide information about a product or brand, or for that matter, that a person’s rational evaluation of a particular brand’s attributes and benefits is the only basis for the choice of that brand over another,  than his thesis makes perfect sense.  But of course we all know that human beings are not especially rationale creatures, especially in their brand choices, and that advertising in many categories plays a role beyond simply conveying product benefits.  It may be out of style to say it, but the truth is that even in an online world where we have easy access to all sorts of information about brands, people are still influenced by other factors in their brand choices than a simple assessment of the benefits received relative to the price paid.

We all know that brands have dimensions beyond the attributes and benefits they offer.  Brands can represent an idea, connect us with a feeling, signify a particular attitude toward life, or express a value with which we personally identify.  Advertising plays a role in shaping those dimensions in our minds, and when the product attributes and quality of two brands are more or less equal, it can be primarily those emotional qualities that determine whether someone chooses one brand over another.

I doubt this will ever change.  It’s in the nature of who we are as human beings.  I remember reading somewhere that it is in our psyche to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects.  That’s what’s at the heart of our propensity to ascribe emotional and image dimensions to brands.  It’s through those associations that brands are one of the ways we define who we are to ourselves and to others.  And that’ something else I see no sign of changing.

This doesn’t deny that a brand’s image today is driven much more  than in the past by the thoughts, opinions and impressions that people can now share with thousands of others on line.  But even though online conversations play a bigger role than ever in shaping the collective perception of rational and emotional brand dimensions, this doesn’t mean that brand communications, created by marketers, no longer have any influence at all.  Brand perception is shaped by a myriad of sources — online conversations, ratings and reviews, personal experience, comments from others when we use the brand, our perception of others who use it, and — yes — brand communications.  Just because that last factor plays a smaller role than it did when we lived in a marketing world dominated by one-way messaging from marketer to consumer, it doesn’t mean it plays no role at all today or will play no role in future.

But even if you come from the information angle, I think there is still a role for advertising.  Just because I’m not actively looking for information about a particular product or category, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want information to find its way to me.  I’m a Mac fan.  I’m happy to get “uninvited” messages about a new Mac product or an upgrade to my current one.  Or even to hear about a new flavor of my favorite tooth paste brand.  (I’m a flavored tooth paste junkie.)

One of Mr. Clemons’s arguments is that advertising will fail because people don’t feel it is a trustworthy source of information.  But in future, it’s quite possible that advertising will gain in credibility because marketers will be forced to provide a higher level of truthfulness and integrity in their messages and claims, precisely because in a web 2.o world, any inaccuracies or attempts at deception will be quickly exposed and shared mercilessly.

There seem to be a whole bunch of people making extremely black-and-white statements about the future of marketing and communications these days, about whether advertising as we know it (or knew it) will fail or succeed, evolve or be doomed to oblivion.  No one really  knows, but certainly a lot of people seem to act like they do.  Rather than channeling all this energy into debate on these questions, which is a bit of a tempest in teapot, we should focus more on exploring and sharing what’s working, what’s not working, and how old and new media potentially work together.  And then see what happens.

Does that mean that this is the last time I’ll ever raise my voice in the debate?

Probably not.

Why are we so afraid to say “I don’t know” the ROI of social media?

Olivier Blanchard calls a spade a spade.  And he calls ROI, ROI.  I like that.  He takes to task those social media strategists who try to get around the question of measuring social media ROI with nebulous assertions about how it’s now all about “return on involvement,” or ROI is for the nerds and the number crunchers.  Many of the assertions made by so-called social media experts are so fuzzy around the edges, or just so intellectually sloppy, it’s enough to raise the “BS” antennae of even the most trusting of listeners.

Click-through rates, positive mentions, blog posts, re-tweets, celebratory customer reviews, etc. are all very nice things and important to measure, but they are not return on investment.  Return on investment is money — nothing more, nothing less. It’s the cash that comes into your business as a result of any effort above the dollars invested in that effort, as determined by material costs, man hours, overhead and other charges.  It amazes me that anyone writing, speaking or advising clients about social media for business needs to be reminded of that.

I don’t know why so many thought leaders in social media, when asked, what was the ROI, are so afraid to say, “I don’t know”?  It’s not a crime that we don’t know.  It doesn’t mean that we won’t get better at knowing.  And it doesn’t mean we have no indication of the contribution social media is making to our businesses or that we should stop doing it.  But instead they hem and haw, go off on some tangent, or otherwise attempt to circumnavigate the question.

Recently, Chris Penn asked Mitch Joel this question when he interviewed him on Marketing Over Coffee.  Now, I love Mitch.  He’s a great guy, a great thinker, blogger and speaker, produces a terrific podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, and has just published a book of the same name.  He is one of our greatest standard bearers for social media.  But when asked this question, he equivocated for 5 minutes — okay maybe I exaggerate — but it felt that long to me, and as I listened I couldn’t help thinking, “Mitch!  Just say you don’t know!”  He finally did.

Okay, so we know what social media ROI is, and what it isn’t, and we know we need to get better at measuring it.  To this end, Olivier Blanchard has uploaded to Slideshare a very good presentation on the basics of social media ROI called Social Media is Not Free.  It covers some fundamental thinking and data one needs to track in order to measure social media ROI.  However, I think we need to go further than what Olivier provides here, because the metrics he takes into account are virtually all within the digital space and don’t consider the  competitive environment.

Without factoring in other elements of the marketing mix, both one’s own and competitors’, it’s difficult to determine the specific role of social media in driving business success.  I can see Olivier’s design would work, perhaps, for a company whose sales, marketing and communications take place mainly on the web.  But for many other businesses, we won’t be able to get to a true measure of social media  ROI without taking into account other factors like advertising, media weights, distribution, in-store activities, promotions, events, etc. — both for our own brand and our competitors’ brands.

That’s a much more complex task than the one Olivier suggests.  (In all fairness, he does say these are the basics.)  I’m not a statistician, but it probably requires statistical and other analytical techniques that can help determine the different roles and contribution to sales that each element in the marketing mix plays.  This isn’t a new challenge.  It has always been hard to determine the precise ROI of each component of the marketing effort — even before the internet and web 2.0.

So why are we so afraid to say “I don’t know” when it comes to the ROI of social media?

I love plaid. Plaid Nation that is

I fell in love with Plaid today.  Not the pattern, the Agency and its road show Plaid Nation.  Plaid is a small shop hailing from the mega-communications metropolis of Danbury, Connecticut.  They do some cool work creating online communities and social media programs for organizations and brands that include Boehringer Ingelheim, Iron Horse Bikes, Segway, Sony Music, Virgin Records and — how lovely — the Westport Country Playhouse.

I fell in love because everything about Plaid lives and breathes the best qualities of social media.  They’re open, real, honest, charming, relaxed, human.  And frankly I just like the design of their web site. It’s fun and funky.

The way I got onto them, though, wasn’t through the web site or their work.  I’d been hearing for awhile  about something called Plaid Nation on different blogs and podcasts.  I knew it was some kind of road show or tour, with a team that went across country meeting with anyone doing interesting, innovative things — people, companies, NGO’s, even other creative agencies.  But I didn’t know much more than that. Today I finally got around to visiting the Plaid Nation 2009 web site and getting behind the story.

The first Plaid Nation tour happened in 2007.  It began as an idea for Plaid to generate awareness and PR.  A group of company staffers made over a van in plaid and drove across country to visit — unannounced — brands they liked or would like to get to know.  Since then the tour has become, according to Plaid’s Darryl Ohrt in Ad Age, “a produced ‘show’ that profiles some of the world’s greatest, most interesting and innovated business thinkers.”

Indeed it does.  Go over to Plaid Nation where you’ll find interviews featuring:

• Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, talking about his recently completed tumultuous first year at the corporate giant.
• Steve Pacheco,  Director of Advertising for Federal Express.  Federal Express’s late-delivery rate is tiny.  But when you consider that Fedex delivers millions of packages on any given day, even a fraction of a percentage of late arrivals can amount to a significant number of complaints on Twitter.  In contrast, no one on Twitter is going to post that his Fedex package arrived on time this morning.  That’s just one reason that Fedex has begun to engage in social media.
• An inspiring visit to the Make it Right project, an organization started by Brad Pitt to help rebuild New Orleans’ post-Katrina neighborhoods with economically and environmentally sustainable housing.
• A talk with the people running the The Q Hotel  – the first green hotel in Kansas City and one of only 11 hotels in North Amercia that has been certified green.

And that’s just a small selection.  All in all this year’s Plaid Nation July tour spent time with inspirational movers and shakers in Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Branson Missouri, Jackson Mississippi and New Orleans.  And the tour members shared their experiences through a vibrant combination of videos, blogs, tweets and Facebook posts.

What strikes me most about the Plaid Nation tour is its generosity.  Of course Plaid launched the tour to promote their business.  But  they realize they have the most to gain by giving.  Everyone who visits Plaid Nation profits from the ideas and inspiration they discover there, while Plaid profits from the exposure, sharing the way think and work, and letting potential clients get to know the people who make Plaid what it is.  And of course the people and projects they visit gain through the exposure as well.

Apparently it works.  Plaid says the tour has been a major driver of new business since its inception.

So pay a visit to Plaid Nation.

And to Plaid Nation I’d just like to ask, can we hope to see you in Germany some day?

Suicide Girls shows how online communities can monetize by thinking small

If you don’t know George Parker, you should.  Creative consultant, 30-year advertising industry veteran — he’s known for his no-holds-barred opinions and perspectives.  He writes a blog — Adscam/The Horror — and is a popular guest on various marketing podcasts thanks to his bitting, comic commentary.  He’s a bit too hard-edged for my taste and his humor often depends on the below-the-belt put-down — like the jokes of Don Rickles, a comedian I never could stand.  But beneath all the rancor, George is a pretty smart guy, has seen it all, and is worth listening to.

On a recent episode of the BeanCast, which has become one of my favorite podcasts on marketing and communications, George enjoyed a healthy rant about Facebook and Twitter and the fact that despite their popularity and growth, they don’t have a viable business model.  According to George, they never will.  The problem is that they’re too general.  They’re trying to be all things to all people.  So they can’t create a unique, distinctive online social experience that people will pay for.  In George’s opinion — and he may be right — the future belongs to small, niche online communities that offer a unique package of services, content and ways to connect that are highly desirable for that specific community.  One that he calls out is Suicide Girls.

Suicide Girls is a web site tailored to the lifestyle and fashion aesthetic of young women (and men) who are into piercing, tattoos and living life well beyond the borders of  what most of us would consider mainstream.  You’ve got to pay $4.00 a month to join.  But that’s only the beginning.  Building on the common interests and attitudes of the community, Suicide Girls has grown into an “alternative” lifestyle brand that now includes books, DVDs, a magazine (how “old media”!), a burlesque tour and a fashion and accessories line.  Here are just some of the items you can order on the site:

The Suicide Girls Beauty Redefined Book ($40)

Women’s Huddie ($100)

Suicide Girls Graffiti Panties ($12 — that seems like a bargain!)

Suicide Girls Buttons (pack of 10 for $7)

According to Crunchbase, Suicide Girls has 5 million unique visitors a month.  So you can also imagine that the banner ad for the London Tattoo Convention in the photo of the SG home page above will garner a hell of a lot more clicks there than it would as link on Facebook or Twitter.  For the right advertiser, niche communities mean a much a higher ROI, boosting  the viability of advertising as an online revenue source for these narrowly targeted sites.  It’s not the quantity, but the quality of reach.

You can learn more about how Suicide Girls has successfully monetized its online community in this interview with its founder, Missy Suicide.  Her real name, of course.

Get Satisfaction’s Company-Customer Pact augurs a new age in customer relations

Get Satisfaction is an online community that provides a place for consumers to come together and share information, tips and advice about companies, products and services.  They can comment, rant, rave, ask and answer questions, suggest ideas and even have conversations with employees of companies that are sufficiently web 2.0-savvy to recognize the benefits of this new way of interacting with the people who, ultimately, pay their salaries.  So this isn’t only a consumer community.  Companies, too, are encouraged to join the conversations.

Here is just a sample of questions and comments you might find on Get Satisfaction:

What happened to my chai tea latte’s flavor? (Starbucks.  Note the use of the personal possessive pronoun “my”!)

Why are you treating loyal Platinum members like dirt? (i.e. Me) (American Express)

Where do all the unsold cakes go? (Whole Foods Market)

Your strawberry, banana orange juice is orgasmic. It is the best orange juice I have ever tasted. Why is it so hard to find? (Tropicana)

It would be great if Amazon could make an iPhone app that would let you buy music from the Amazon MP3 Store.

You begin your journey on Get Satisfaction by entering the product or company name into a search box.  That search takes you to the applicable Get Satisfaction “community” where you can immediately see if company employees are participating.  For me, that alone earns a tremendous amount of good will.  (And makes the companies that don’t get involved look pretty lame.)

But I find one of the most inspiring things on Get Satisfaction is their Company-Customer Pact.  Fundamentally, it’s a set of guidelines for how companies and customers can best engage with each other for the mutual benefit of both. It reflects the new realities of a web 2.0-interconnected world that rewards transparency and the guts to really listen and respond to customers online, in a dialogue that is visible to all.  What’s also pretty cool is that the pact doesn’t place the whole burden of the relationship exclusively on the shoulders of the marketer.  Consumers also need to listen and be open to the point-of-view of the company.

It’s an excellent code of behavior for what I have called the concept of brands not marketing to, but marketing with, their consumers in a refreshingly human, open and social web 2.0 world.

Dell Outlet sales through Twitter are a bigger deal than I thought

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post questioning the significance of $3 million in Dell Outlet sales attributed to Twitter (Twitter has made money for Dell Outlet — is it just a big yawn?).  After all, $3 million is just a drop in the bucket of Dell’s total turnover.

On a recent episode of the podcast For Immediate Release, Neville Hobson interviewed Richard Binhammer, who manages Dell’s social media efforts.  Richard mentioned two things that place Dell Outlet’s use of Twitter in context and strengthen the case for Twitter as a marketing tool in this specific instance.

First, Dell Outlet is a small division and doesn’t have much of a marketing budget.  The cost of marketing via Twitter costs virtually nothing.  (Pun intended!)

Second, Dell Outlet has a business model that makes Twitter the perfect communications tool.  It sells discounted computer products and systems that have been used and refurbished, or were left over from canceled orders, or are the equivalents of “seconds,” that is, hardware that has some kind of cosmetic fault that doesn’t affect its performance.

Apparently the business model doesn’t allow for holding on to inventory.  When stuff  gets returned, even if it’s as few as 5 laptops, Dell Outlet has to move product fast.  They can’t afford to have excess inventory clogging up the system.  “I can’t think of any other venue in which we can do that,” Richard says.  Even relatively short newspaper lead times take too much time.  (Oh yes, and newspaper advertising costs money.)

This case raises an important point.  Everyone keeps asking the question, can Twitter and other social media communities be used effectively for business.  The answer is, “It depends.”  It depends on the business model.  It depends on the product.  It depends on the community, why that community has come together, what each individual hopes to get from being there.

Dell Outlet on Twitter is just one of many ways Dell uses, and continues to pioneer, social media for business.  For other Dell activities on Twitter and links to other Dell social media endeavors, go to this page.

Acquiescence isn’t enough, marketers should actively embrace objectivity from their blogging partners

Much discussion has erupted lately on the topic of partnerships between mom bloggers and marketers.  It seems to have started with a call for a PR “blackout” from Momdot, a mom blogger community:

MomDot is challenging bloggers to participate for one week in August in a PR BLACKOUT challenge where you do not blog ANY giveaways, ANY reviews, and Zero press releases. In fact, we don’t want you to talk to PR at ALL that whole week.  We want to see your blog naked, raw, and back to basics. Talk about your kids, your marriage, your college, your hopes, your dreams, your house and whatever you can come up with for one week.

Burnout, not objectivity, is the reason behind MomDot has recommended a blackout.  They suggest that the array of product reviews, promotions, giveaways, etc. in which mom bloggers engage is distracting them from more general content about home and kids.  Nevertheless, the question of blogger objectivity has come up in posts about the blackout, and the issue of objectivity, paid sponsorship and editorial vs. commercial content has been a hot topic in the blogosphere for awhile, and recently in a New York Times article, as increasing numbers of marketers link up with bloggers for the purpose of reviewing or promoting their products.  Recently the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that it is reviewing its guidelines for “endorsements and testimonials in advertising” with bloggers in mind.

Compensation for product reviews takes on different forms — e.g. pay per review, free stuff, promotional giveaways — but what is common to all is that most bloggers will only agree to the deal if the marketer in question allows them to write honestly about the product.  While bloggers say this allows them to maintain their integrity, one has to wonder if  — even with the best of intentions — they can remain truly objective when being compensated.  Won’t there be a little voice, whispering from the subconscious depths of their mind, suggesting that, despite everything the marketer says, a negative assessment will reduce the chances of being offered a paid review in future?

That’s why marketers shouldn’t simply agree to honesty and objectivity from their blogging partners, they should embrace it actively and vocally.  Here’s why it’s in their interest to do so:

• The online social community space rewards transparency, while it sniffs out and exposes secrecy and collusion.  A marketer who tries to manipulate product reviews will be found out eventually.  That negative word-of-mouth will spread exponentially and the overall take away will be that something must be wrong with your product, if you weren’t confident enough to let the product speak for itself, free from manipulation.
• In contrast, a marketer who makes it known that it demands absolute honesty from its blogging partners builds trust and credibility.  It tells people that you’re completely confident in the quality of your product.
• Negative criticism isn’t a threat, it’s a fantastic source of knowledge and opportunity.  You can learn better than any focus group or quantitative test about the strengths and weaknesses of your product through an honest assessment from a blogger and the ensuing comments and online conversations about that assessment.
• The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.  The blogosphere will forgive a mistake, provided that you listen to the criticism, acknowledge the problem and keep everyone informed about what you are doing to fix things.  You have nothing to fear, and everything to gain, provided you listen, show that your listening, take action and follow up.

Several blog posts I read on the topic of transparency and objectivity talk about the steps bloggers should take to make their disclosure and review policies clear to marketers who approach them.  This suggests that bloggers feel the need to defend their wish to remain transparent and  objective when it comes to paid-for product reviews.  Similarly, the FTC’s actions to revise its policies regarding endorsements and testimonials to address online practices would indicate that it doesn’t think the marketing community is taking adequate steps to self-regulate.  The alleged need for these policy changes implies that, generally speaking, marketers are more inclined to manipulate online reviews and comments about their products, rather than encourage the transparency and objectivity that brings true value to both the marketer and the customer.

It’s hard to say definitively if marketers are “doing the right thing” when it comes to embracing objectivity from their blogging partners.  However, when I think of all the articles, posts and comments I have read on the issue, I can’t recall any I’ve seen that have come from a marketer.  If you have, please let me know.

Twitter has made money for Dell Outlet — is it just a big yawn?

I was interested to hear that Dell has attributed $3 million in sales to its Twitter feed @DellOutlet.  Dell Outlet sells discounted computer products and systems that have been used and refurbished, or were left over from canceled orders, or are the equivalents of “seconds,” that is, hardware that has some kind of cosmetic fault that doesn’t affect its performance.

I just looked at Tweetcounter, which currently places @DellOutlet at rank 75 for Twitter users.  @DellOutlet has 779 thousand followers.

Three million is a sliver of overall Dell sales, but the assertion by Dell that Twitter has actually helped the company make any money at all has been celebrated by some in the blogosphere as validation of the business viability of Twitter. But some critical voices have been raised as well.  They say that the use of Twitter as a sales promotion channel will adversely increase traffic, spam and “fail whales” on the site.  They ask why Dell, and other companies using Twitter to generate leads, announce promotions, etc., don’t limit this kind of stuff to their own online turf.  In other words, “Don’t do your dirty work here, guys!”

A few obvious answers come time mind.  If there’s an online channel that a seller can use free of charge to contact potential customers, why wouldn’t he use it?  Then, of course, there’s the fact that Twitter is so immediately searchable and socially spreadable.  Anyone interested in a 2nd-hand computer system can find a whole range of potential sellers in one place, and can follow all of them easily, and in real time, using Tweet-deck or other applications that allow the user to group and aggregate tweets.  Many Twitter users who hear of a good deal will happily post their finds on their own Twitter feeds spreading the word beyond the seller’s direct followers.

It does beg one question though.  If Twitter starts charging companies to use the service commercially, will those companies still come?  Apparently Twitter and Dell are talking about compensation models.  It will be interesting to see where they end up.