Social Marketing Apps - Clutter Buster Daily Tweet

New Social Marketing apps are popping up every day, and it is tough to keep track of all the different players. So, starting today, I am sending a once-a-day Tweet highlighting an innovative Social Marketing app. Here's the general format: [AppName]-[Bit.ly URL]-[Type] #socmktgapps.

Break through the clutter.....click the "I Tweet Follow Me on Twitter button" and hear about the best and most innovative Social Marketing applications available on the market. 1 app will be highlighted Monday through Friday. So, sign-up and follow me on Twitter. My Twitter id is  http://twitter.com/grahamlubie. You may get a couple of other tweets occasionally, but only a handful at most.

See today's Tweet about a great, real-time conversation monitoring application. It's very cool.

(BTW - I am tagging these as Social Marketing vs. Social Media apps since they are specifically related to the marketing function. I believe that "Social Media" is broader in range and can address functions outside of just marketing and PR).

Twitter? Show Me The B2B ROI

A colleague of mine recently asked if we were doing anything with Twitter, and she was shocked when I said "No". I proceeded to explain that while I am always looking for new ways to get exposure for IQ, I can't justify the expense (yes I know it's free - but as with any other communications initiative, it does have a content creation and internal "maintenance" cost) without an ROI. All my other tactical marketing programs have an ROI expectation, Twitter would be no different.

There is so much hype about Twitter right now, that the need to quantify actual business value is getting overlooked. If there is no value (measured by return on investment), why do it? If you Bing "Twitter ROI" you get about 535,000 hits with Dell's $3m total revenues as being the ROI poster child.....not too impressive given Dell's multi-billion dollar annual revenues and that they have been Tweeting for 2 years.

For B2B marketing, especially of enterprise applications, there is an even bigger hurdle to Tweeting.....sales dynamics. Who is going to follow you unless they are either in a search and selection mode, or they are a competitor? If a potential customer is looking for your type of product, they will engage you directly. Where is the value to them to get Tweets from you every 20 minutes? The information they need to make their decisions is coming from a sales rep directly at a very different pace. Other information will be gathered online via search, from analysts or from references.

So, I have discussed Tweeting with both my Marketing and PR agencies and neither can provide a compelling reason to take the jump. It will be interesting to see how the medium evolves.