Archive for November 26th, 2008

Friday Links: Wednesday is the new Friday

Since this is a short week here in the U.S. (yay Thanksgiving!), I’ll be posting the usual Friday link round-up on Wednesday.

• AdWeek posted about an interesting Epsilon study that found that half of the 180 Chief Marketing Officers polled had no interest in using social networking (Facebook or Myspace, but, oddly enough Twitter is not mentioned) as a marketing venue. The study also showed that the CMOs expected cuts in their ad budgets next year, and yet didn’t expect that to effect their e-mail marketing campaigns.
• Speaking of budget cuts, Ad Age (sorry, registration required [boo!] but you can use BugMeNot) has what looks to be a dire report about ad spending in the next six months. However, it only seems dire if you’re in the old media (think newspapers, magazines, broadcast TV) space. It looks as though those with the ad money to spend are going to be spending it in the online, cable TV, and mobile markets.
• Fitting for our tough economic times and just in time for Thanksgiving, Lifehacker asked their readers what free software are you most grateful. The comments are a treasure trove. Lots of props for well-known freebies like Firefox, Open Office, and Adium. But there were a lot of apps I’d never even heard of. What free software are you most grateful for?
• Take a stroll down memory lane with the Top 25 days in computing history.
• For those of you who spend a lot of time traveling, here are 15 Tech Secrets for the Serious Road Warrior.
• Have you got mad shortcut-key skills? If so, you might dig Keyboardr (random aside: can I just say that I will be happy when we go back to spelling things correctly?), a Google search mashup that lets you use shortcut keys to navigate through search results.
• Kind of tangentially related to the last point, That? Which? Or What?, the NY Times explains how to figure out which one to use. [via]

That’s all for me this week, what were you reading on the Internet?

Twitter: How do you choose who gets to market to you?

Earlier this week Julio Ojeda-Zapata had an article on using Twitter for business in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In the article Ojeda-Zapata asks if Twitter is a channel that businesses should explore. In the article Ojeda-Zapata also presents three Minnesota businesses using Twitter, including Fallon’s @_S_A_R_A_H_ campaign for the Sci-Fi Network (check out that slide show presentation by Aki Spicer, Fallon’s Strategic Planner, it’s some good stuff).

It seems pretty obvious why a business would want to use Twitter. It’s direct, immediate contact with customers or potential customers. Even more than that, it’s a contact that the customer chooses, giving the business a chance to stay top of mind for as long as a person follows them, depending on how frequently they Twitter.

Anyway, the more interesting question here is why would people want to follow a business on Twitter?

For some reason being marketed to by tweet seems more invasive than e-mail, and yet when I looked through the list of twitterers I follow, I found a few businesses. However, I never feel as though I am being marketed to. In fact, a lot of the time these businesses (I like to follow publishers) are providing links to content I find interesting.

For me, I think (I just started thinking about this right now), I choose to follow businesses in industries I am passionate about (book publishing). Or I follow them for purely selfish reasons (see Amazon MP3, because I do need to know when Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water” is on sale for $3.99).

So here’s my questions to you, oh faithful readers:
Do you follow any businesses on Twitter? How do you choose which businesses to follow and which ones not to follow? What are you looking from a businnes’ Twitter feed?