Social Media Marketing Archives

Apparently Twitter is a popular source of breaking news.

When something happens whitenesses grab their phones and tweet.

Probably before they call 999.

As soon as the tweet is sent, it is live.

Viewable by anyone, anywhere in the world.

A few carefully placed hashtags and the tweet can cause quite the storm.

It is certainly a delicious prospect for news junkies everywhere.

Except there is one major flaw.

Trustworthy news sources and Twitter have one key difference: the editor.

When you buy a newspaper you hand over some money in exchange.

The money you hand over suggests that the newspaper has value.

The value can be found in the editor.

The role of the editor is to maintain standards, check accuracy and cherry-pick the news that is relevant to the audience.

Twitter on the other hand is unedited.

That means that there are no set standards, no checks of accuracy and no-one is cherry-picking the news that is relevant to the audience.

There are two depressing things that result from all of this:

1. For every accurate example of citizen reporting on Twitter there are hundreds (if not thousands) of inaccurate tweets.

2. Cunning PR professionals can very easily inject their own spin on an event in the name of diverting attention to their own agenda.

Both of these options are crap for the consumer.

That is why users follow the Twitter accounts of news organisations.

These news organisations ply their trade away from Twitter.

I like to think of their Twitter accounts as embassies in a chaotic foreign land.

The BBC Breaking News Twitter account has over 6 million followers.

That’s 6 million people who crave fast news that is accurate.

The fact that it is the BBC means that fast is not the emphasis.

Having spent some time in a BBC newsroom, one thing I learned was that the editor would rather hold-off on breaking a news item until they knew it was accurate.

The followers on Twitter know that.

They know that their news may be slightly slower, but it will be accurate.

The BBC will never specialise in fast news at the expense of accuracy.

Twitter does, and will continue to do the opposite.

Twitter is a popular source of breaking news.

It isn’t a popular source of accurate news.

*Update – 19/07/2013

The BBC has just published a piece on its new Breaking News Tool (BNT).

It is a tool that allows journalists to publish breaking news.

Note the fact that the BBC BNT is platform agnostic.

Also note that “the BNT [allows] journalists to publish a single accurate breaking news line”.

The word “accurate” is the key there.

I attended Marketing Week Live last week (26/06/2013).

The first presentation was by a man who works for Twitter.

He was a big fan of Twitter.

Engage this.

Content that.

You name it, he had a cliché for it.

One of his big success stories was that of Oreo.

During the Superbowl 2012 was a power cut.

As you’d expect, the lights went out.

Being night-time, it was dark.

Within half an hour Oreo had tweeted:

“You can still dunk in the dark” – accompanied by a picture of an Oreo cookie in the dark.

Very good, they managed to turn that around quite quickly.

To date it has had more than 15,000 retweets and so is officially a success story.

Is it going to help them sell more Oreo cookies? You be the judge.

At the end of the ~~sales pitch~~ talk was a short Q&A session.

One plucky audience member asked this:

You have spoken about how big brands have used Twitter to successfully market themselves…

Can it work for a small company? Something like a local concrete laying company?

After stringing some words together in no discernible order the man from Twitter concluded by sitting firmly on the fence.

In effect, he tried his best to not say “no”.

So in effect, he was saying “yes”.

There’s a challenge for you.

Market a local concrete company on Twitter.

Ok, so there will probably be a smart-arse who makes something go viral – like a blog about strange things you can do with concrete.

But that isn’t going to sell the stuff, it will just make teenagers laugh.

And it can only be done once, it’s not an industry changer.

So there is the problem with social media marketing.

It can and does work from time to time.

But there is a majority group of marketeers who are too obsessed with it.

They feel that it is simply ridiculous to think that it won’t work in some scenarios.

This attitude rubs off on many businesses who begin to question whether they should have a Twitter account.

The man from Twitter did nothing to fix this problem.

He knew that Twitter is perhaps not the tool of choice for a local concrete company.

But he couldn’t bring himself to admit it.

Sometimes it’s ok to say ‘no, it probably won’t work’.

Sometimes you have to admit, Twitter is not for all.