I had an insight that I wanted to share about the way some tweeps (we like to call them spammers) misuse twitter.
At a recent networking lunch, the presentation was about PR. Now I’ve always been confused about the line between PR and Marketing. People from each camp believe they are more important than the other. Some acknowledge that you need a good mix of both disciplines to be as succesful as possible in promoting your product/services.
In all businesses we use tools to help us achieve our goals. Sometimes we use the same tools in different ways. For example, a PR expert will use a newspaper by providing newsworty stories to journalists in the hopes the journalist will pick up the story and publish it, thus promoting the client. A marketing person will pay for advertising, or buy advertorial. The same tool to deliver the message in very different ways. With PR, the cost is free, but the message could be very different to what you provide - if it even gets published at all. With Marketing, the cost is high, but the message is 100% in your control, and being published is guaranteed.
Sometime, tools are particularly suited to one industry, but not another. A hammer is quite suitable for a carpenter but not really useful to a dentist. (Well not the sort of hammer a carpenter would use - ouch!)
Twitter is the same. I think it is useful for PR, but not really suitable for Marketing. PR is all about trust, reputation, and recommendation. Twitter is the perfect vehicle for PR campaigns. Marketing is all about getting your exact message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Twitter users see people who try to use twitter to deliver their marketing messages as spammers, and unfollow, and even block those types of messages from their accounts. PR on twitter opens doors. Marketing on twitter closes them, and flicks on the deadbolt.
Some marketers out there would be defending their position saying, you’ve got to approach twitter “differently”. I think that difference is switching your marketing cap to your PR cap.
In my opinion, you are going to have way more success taking a PR approach to using Twitter, than a marketing approach.
As a final aside, I’d like to say isn’t it interesting how many of us aren’t trained marketers, OR PR experts, yet we feel like we can do as good a job of marketing / promoting our business. Is it smart for a plumber to represent themselves in court, or for a plumber to hire a lawyer to represent on their behalf? Use the people who KNOW what they are doing, don’t just guess.
