When Michael Damphousse had a big announcement to make, he knew he wanted a little rocket fuel to push his message. He picked live tweeting.
Damphousse is CEO of lead-generation company Green Leads in Boston. The announcement he wanted to publicize was a recent company acquisition, and the forum he chose was the SiriusDecisions Summit in May, where he hatched a plan to piggyback on the conference's Twitter stream.
“I timed the press release for the conference, then started tweeting,” he said. “I also asked 15 or 20 friends to tweet the news with my hashtag, and put the LinkedIn tag in there too—so if people retweeted my tweet, it automatically posted on their LinkedIn pages.”
Damphousse remembered watching the conference's Twitter stream during the keynote presentation.
“There was a tweet every 10 seconds or so from the keynote; then, all of a sudden, there was an influx of 30 to 40 tweets about Green Leads' acquisition, and that was my audience right there.”
Later in the conference, Damphousse said he made connections that resulted in several large pieces of business, although he said it would be impossible to credit the new business just to his live-tweeting strategy.
And that's part of the issue. Live tweeting and live blogging events in real time live at the cutting edge of social media. They are cross-platform, immediate and can even be exhilarating. But like so many other social media tactics, it can be very hard to measure its ROI; and, according to Amanda O'Brien, VP-marketing with Hall Internet Marketing in Portland, Maine, it's easy to get it wrong.
“A lot of people are just throwing out words and text that doesn't make sense if you're not part of the event,” she said. “Also, you can lose the sense of the event.”
Instead of generating a keyword cloud, O'Brien recommended approaching live tweeting and live blogging from a strategic point of view as part of a highly concentrated campaign.
First, she said, she suggests promoting the live tweet or blog with a hashtag or dedicated blog space. Second, she recommended having either a small team or a single person primarily responsible for covering the event and responding in real time to questions.
And finally, O'Brien advised going back after the event to use the Twitter transcript or blog entries and create an in-depth presentation that can be offered as a white paper or webinar, making it a lead-generation tool.
If this sounds a bit like the approach Damphousse used, it might help explain his success.
“We got into the social media space in 2007,” he said. “I don't know if I can quantify it exactly, but we went from being a 10-person company to a 106-person company. I never bought any advertising. I feel like I can attribute about 80% of that growth to social media marketing.”
THE CONVERSATION (add your response in the comments): What do you think of live tweeting as a promotional tool?
