Lessons on Marketing from Twitter

I really don’t like referring to one blogger all the time, and I don’t even read his blog every day, but somehow I stumbled on this post and thought it was relevant to my post yesterday.  (And as I write this, I’m watching a Nightline story on Twitter, so I feel like I’m right on the cutting edge of relevance.)

There are two concepts that Chris demonstrates in his post:

1. The new marketing is about personal, human contact that is easy now because of web tools, not the spam messages that are also easy with the new tools.  Spam is the lazy way, and the old school business model, which actually damages your reputation and is more detrimental to your business than the few sales or traffic you may get from it.
2. The new web tools (and influence built with them) also allow changes to be made quickly, which makes your business nimble and responsive, able to address your customer’s concerns instantly.  And that is invaluable to your customer, in fact, so amazing that they might tell all their friends about how you treated them so well.  And that’s really good for you.

I guess the overall message is that we should be careful about every interaction we have with anyone, because that is who we are to that person, especially if they have no other information on which to base their impressions.

So this post actually ends up being about the new marketing and not so much about Twitter.  Because you can do good and bad marketing with other tools also.