Thoughts on Twitter – and how CRM vendors stack up

Last time we looked at blogging best practices and which CRM vendors walk the walk when it comes to actively blogging.  In this post I’ll share some highlights of how the same vendors are using Twitter to engage with their customers and the marketplace at large.  But first, here are a few thoughts on Twitter as a social marketing and support channel…

In my experience, Twitter is a great listening channel, a good promotion and alert channel and a pretty good customer service channel.  But it’s less effective at branding or story telling (hard to do in 140 characters) and is overrated as a “full-service” or true collaboration channel given that there is just too much noise IMO.  Comcast is perhaps the poster-child for using Twitter as a service (really listening) channel, and even GM is now getting into the act to spot and engage with unhappy customers (see here).

And there is a lot of interest around Twitter as a promotional channel for group buying (like Groupon) or special coupons and multi-channel campaigns like my friends at OfferPop and JitterJam are building.  For B2B, when Twitter campaigns work well, they tend to work as well as a good opt-in email list.  With of course the added bonus of a word-of-mouth “multiplier” when your followers re-tweet messages to their followers, and so on, effectively multiplying your reach and original list.

As for Twitter and branding, a while back I did a quick hit analysis looking at the correlation between Twitter influence and brand value (using Forrester’s CxPI index).  Not surprisingly all the top brands – the Top 10 in the CxPI index – also had a high Twitter influence score (over 95 in Twitter Grader). But so did several of the lowest rated companies in the CxPI index such as USAirways, Qwest and our friends at Comcast.

Clearly top brands are actively using Twitter, but actively using Twitter does not make you a top brand!

So how are top CRM vendors using Twitter?  For this part of my analysis, I looked at two measures: where is Twitter promoted/placed on their corporate web site, if at all; and how influential/engaged is the company via its corporate Twitter account.  I used Twitter Grader to measure influence, although there are many other tools that may be interesting to try as well.  And there may be individuals in these same companies that have more followers than the company itself, but I focused just on the company account (there is a lesson here in fostering individual vs. company brands, but that is another discussion).

In terms of placement, here’s where I found links to Twitter and which vendors placed their link in that location.  Again, I may have missed some placements, and if I found a link on the home page I didn’t go looking for others on additional pages.

• Home page – SugarCRM, nGenera, Amdocs, NetSuite, eGain, Convergys
• Press page – SalesForce, RightNow, Pega, Consona, Ciboodle, CDC
• Product page – Oracle
• Blog -- Chordiant
• No link found (yet) – Sage, KANA

As for influence, here’s how the vendors ranked in terms of Twitter Grader scores - higher is better! - as of last week (tool has been a bit flaky this week):

• 99+: SalesForce, OracleCRM, Sage
• 95+: Convergys, Amdocs, RightNow, NetSuite, SugarCRM,
• 90+: nGenera, Pega, Consona, eGain
• Under 90: Ciboodle, Chordiant, KANA, CDC

Now, by combining these datapoints with our blog analysis we can create this snazzy chart to get a visual picture of how these vendors compare:

 

As before, I’d love your thoughts / comments.  And next I’ll talk a bit about LinkedIn.

Comments

[Phsoffer]

Another interesting post, Allen.

In my comment to your last post, I said that the intent of the communication matters more than the medium. I want to amend that, though, to say that different media have different constraints and affordances, and that these differences are going to affect how we measure their impact.

With Twitter, it's really easy to set up an account. It's also relatively easy, especially if you're a big company with one Twitter account, to gain a lot of followers and be seen as "influential." So a lot of people on Twitter are like Daniel Boorstin's celebrities: they're known for their well-knownness.

I think it's a little bit harder to see from these coarse-grained metrics whether a company is walking the walk on Twitter. For example, here are two things that I think a company that's walking the walk should do on Twitter that would probably not be reflected the above:

* Encourage key employees to Tweet under their own names and not just RT the corporate line.
* Encourage members of their customer network to participate on Twitter in a fashion that goes beyond engaging *them* in transparent dialog.

I would argue that the corporate Twitter account is probably not the place where the interesting Social CRM action will be happening.

Phil

[Allen Bonde]

Hi Phil - thanks for the read and comments! I agree Twitter is easy to set up, and in *theory* it should be easy for big companies to get a lot of followers - but there are some pretty big companies in my analysis that haven't be able to (or haven't tried to) do just that - Pega, Chordiant and CDC come to mind.

I also agree/noted that individuals from these companies may be tweeting on their own - we both know lots of them! - but as an x-CMO and "brand guy" this may be where the action is but I wouldn't want those activities to be at the expense of the corporate brand/Twitter channel. Ideally the company has a strong corporate Twitter presence AND individuals who are also engaged, like SugarCRM for example.

Allen

[twitter.com/mjayliebs]

Interesting post and I sense a more interesting conversation happening :-) I resemble some of the comments, but that is ok. It comes down to value, right? I do both, tow the corporate line at times, on Twitter and Blogs. Jumping blog platforms, sharing information based on channel and context. For me, the context is both the channel and the account type, corporate or personal.

Reading some others posts, not technology, but culture, two themes seem to be emerging. 1- People do not really want a relationship with a brand, they want what a relationship can offer (better service maybe). 2 - People would prefer (and possibly trust) people, not companies.

What is especially true for people new to me on Twitter or Blogs they see what I am saying first (most often) before they see what my corporate identity is (what is my angle). As a vendor, I usually have bit of an uphill battle to show people that I am trying to simply working to add value to the conversation (like Phil does). I think people begin to respect me (then my company by association) over time - If my sometimes sarcastic tone can be tolerated of course.

Mitch