On May 12th, Guy Kawasaki presented an amazing discussion via WebEx about
social media. What follows is the first in a series of blogs featuring an
edited transcript of his presentation. This presentation was offered in
conjunction with our new free beta, WebEx Meet - which is our first step into
turning online meetings into social media (you can get it here). We hope
you enjoy both the WebEx Meet beta and the blog posts!
Guy: I'm going to focus primarily on Twitter as a marketing weapon.
I want to show people how you can use Twitter to go far beyond just using it as
a social platform. I think it's vastly underused as a marketing platform, so I
want to show how I use it, what people can do to use it, and how to really kick
butt with Twitter.
Viewing his desktop via WebEx: Let me share my desktop here. I am
sitting in my home office in Atherton, California. And the first thing I have
to say is just love [WebEx] technology. I give about 50 to 75 keynotes a year
and most involve flying someplace. I go to sleep, I wake up, I speak and I
leave – sort of takes two days out of my life. I love this technology; I wish I
could give every presentation this way. So thank you WebEx – I love this.
[Script
site provide by Guy; you might want to open it alongside this blog to see
the links he uses. I will drop in links in the copy where his example matches
his commentary.]
Guy: The scenario is that you are an entrepreneur, a small-business
person, a marketing person, product management person and you want to use
Twitter as a marketing weapon – social media as a marketing weapon. I fully
realize there's this other thing called Facebook, I happen to focus most of my
efforts on Twitter.
I think that Facebook is
very good if you have such compelling content that you can pull people to your
Facebook page. But I think Twitter is more useful as a push mechanism, where
you want to push things to them, rather than trying to compel them to come to
you. And so I focus most of my efforts on Twitter.
I'm going to walk you
through what I do with Twitter as an example.
I have to admit that I
started on Twitter in September 2007, at the request – actually the sort of
pounding on me by Dave Winer
and Laura Fitton. And
if it were not for them I would not be on Twitter, and I think like many
people, when I first saw Twitter I went to the Twitter.com home page and my
first reaction is, "What kind of crap is this?" like, "Why do I
care if Lonelyboy15's cat rolled over?" and "Why do I care if
Amanda21 is a long line of Starbucks?" This is the worst thing in the
world.
I think of it as an IQ test:
if your first reaction to Twitter is that it's the dumbest thing you ever saw, you
pass the IQ test. And it took me a good three or four weeks to sort of "Come
to Jesus" with Twitter. Let me step you through my process.
The first reaction is to
that public timeline, where you see a bunch of crap – from people you don't
care about. So my initial reaction was Twitter is for people with nothing to
say, tweeting to people with nothing to do.
But then I figured out
search. Let's use this example of you are working for Nikon or Canon. You're in
the camera business and you want to use social media as a marketing weapon. The
first thing you do is probably monitor your own brand. If you're Nikon you look
at everything that people are saying about Nikon in real time.
This is when the
light went on for me because of course the first thing I did was typed in my
name. I wanted to see what people were saying about me. Now this is always a
dangerous thing for me to do this real time search [he puts in his name for fun, then switches to Nikon. Here's the link.] You
can see what everybody's saying about your brand and then you quickly think,
"Well, I need to figure out what people are saying about my brand as well
as my competitor's brand, Canon."
Do a search that's Nikon
or Canon and the key mechanism here is this word, "OR." And this
"OR" has to be in caps [example link].
So you could also do, if you think you compete with Kodak you would do Nikon OR
Canon OR Kodak. And now you're searching all three.
This is where the power
of Twitter starts kicking in because essentially you are searching the world of
sentiment in real time for free
whenever you want to. It's kind of like being George W. Bush or Dick Cheney,
except you're doing it legally. You can see what everybody's talking about. So "Nikon
OR Canon OR Kodak" is a very powerful kind of search.
To go beyond monitoring,
let's say that you're Canon. And you want to see what people are saying to your
competition Nikon. You want to see what your competition is saying back to
them. So there's a way of doing a search that is all the messages that are from
NikonUSA and to NikonUSA.
This is a very powerful
way to monitor what's being said to your competition and what your competition
is saying back. [Example
here] that's how you would do this search.
Those are three powerful
methods of monitoring. Look at your own brand, look at your brand and your
competition, or look at what's being said to your competition and what your
competition is saying back.
That covers monitoring.
Okay gang, this concludes part one! Come back on Wednesday to get the
next section of his talk on "engagement"! And don't forget to try the
new WebEx Meet beta - grab it
here.
