Many, many people will charge you money to shill your product on Twitter and Facebook. Many people have written many things on why this doesn’t really work, and I won’t rehash those points here. A little while ago, I came across this post describing an example of how social media can help with product marketing - basically, if your product is good, and you don’t actively prevent people sharing information about it, your customers will market it for you. (It occurs to me that you could make the same argument about The Pirate Bay, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)
In any case, yesterday I encountered another way that social media and product marketing can be mixed effectively. The sequence of events went like this:
1) I see a link on Daring Fireball to a Capo, a Mac application for playing songs in various ways (slowly, looped, and so on) so that you learn them on the guitar.
2) I tweet that it looks interesting, but I don’t really have the musical ear to take advantage of it.
3) A little while later, the developer (SuperMegaUltraGroovy) replies, encouraging me to try and learn, and pointing me at a video that might help.
There are two important points here. Firstly, it wasn’t a generic mass-mailed press release, but rather a specific reply to my post. That differentiates it from spam. Secondly, it was clearly from SuperMegaUltraGroovy - they weren’t pretending to be a neutral observer or satisfied customer. That differentiates it from shilling.
The end result is that, from relatively little effort on the part of SuperMegaUltraGroovy, I’ve come away with a very positive impression of the company, and am seriously considering buying a $39 application that I previously only had a passing interest in.
So, it seems there are ways to use Twitter and Facebook to promote your company or products without pissing people off. It also seems like a way that indie developers can differentiate themselves from bigger companies - I can’t see the latter pulling this off without it seeming contrived. We’ll see if this becomes the accepted way of doing things, or if more irritating methods prevail. Given that nobody seems to have figured out a way to make the irritating methods work yet, there’s hope.
In the post you linked to, the author notes it was a recommendation from a blogger who got her to find the playset she wanted... without realising there were probably traditional marketers involved in Obama obtaining a similar playset and thus causing the blogger to write about it.
Of course, once you build up a good enough reputation (which in itself is marketing) your fanatical customers will do this sort of thing for you (for example, I once had a guy give me information about the release date of a film I wanted to see... still want to see (the release date here is 6 moths or so after the US) ... as far as i could tell from flicking through his twitter account he didn't have any relationship with a film studio)
Hmm, Seth Godin has probably said this all (and much much more besides) before.
[in other news, your comments now work for livejournal openid users]
Fair point. I'm not suggesting that social media used in this way can replace traditional marketing, but that it can be an effective additional tool when used correctly. Moreover, if you try and translate techniques that work for other media - spamming and shilling - then you're just likely to piss people off.