Twitter Fan Companies Say it Helps Them Get Closer to Customers

Though many companies still don’t know how to use Twitter for business and are looking for meaningful metrics to justify using it, more than half of Fortune 100 companies are using it, according to a recent survey.

According to comScore, Twitter drew 21.2 million U.S. visitors in July with masses of people commenting about companies’ products and services. It’s become a medium that businesses ignore at their peril.

Dell, Zappos and Southwest Airlines are considered among the companies that “get” the microblogging service. Their efforts go beyond those traditional online marketing messages of merely “read my blog” or “buy my product” that quickly grow annoying for readers. Those three companies admittedly are wildly enthusiastic about their use of Twitter, considered by many to be just the latest hot fad, and eagerly sing its praises.

Dell

“There’s a social media aspect to just about everything a corporation does these days,” says Richard Binhammer, senior manager in corporate communications. He calls social media “the fabric through which we filter a lot of the information about the company” and Twitter “a channel through which we find customers, we reach out to them, we solve their issues.”

Dell uses Twitter in three ways. One is a RSS feed of headlines from its blogs and other news from Dell. The second is its offers. In the United States that’s @DellOutlet, a low-budget way to clear out merchandise it needs to move. The company reported in June it had made $3 million from Dell Outlet since 2007.

The third use involves directly engaging with customers and other people. The company has about 200 people on Twitter, all dealing with their specific area of the business. The list is here. Whether they’re dealing with education, gaming or large enterprise issues, allowing Dell’s most knowledgeable people to engage with people on Twitter allows them to build broader and deeper relationships with its various customers, Binhammer explains.

“In the old days, if two customers have a conversation in Minneapolis in a Starbucks about a data center issue, we can’t hear that conversation. We can’t be a part of it; we can’t contribute to it. We can’t help work through whatever the issue is. Today, our data center pros can get online for a half-hour or hour or just here and there throughout their workday and they can be in touch with all kinds of customers, answering all kinds of questions, solving problems, getting them information. Whatever they need. No airfare, no long-distance charges, no nothing. It’s right there on the Web.”

Bruce Eric Anderson, enterprise evangelist for Dell, said he uses one Twitter account for both personal and business matters. He considers the exchanges that occur over time very personal. Recently he was talking about competing in a barbecue cook-off with the help of his daughter.

“My profile tells people who I am. It tells them what I like. … To me, it puts a real face on the individual and the company,” he said.

He says he really gets to know people on Twitter and likes a quote from Shel Israel’s upcoming book “Twitterville”: “Twitter allows you to hug an old friend the first time you meet.”

He said, “You’d think data center guys would only tweet about zeroes and ones. But they talk about all kinds of things. They tweet about their kids, then they tweet about their data centers.”

He says he uses the medium not only with customers, but with prospective customers and other companies.

“I’m in charge of our Latitude and OptiPlex lines. We’ll often see someone having an issue and we’ll reach out to them. Or we’ll see someone saying they’re looking at an HP system and we reach out to them,” Anderson says.

Binhammer says the company has no specific policy for the use of Twitter. It uses the same rules for protecting customer and company privacy that it did before it even used the medium. The company, however, does talk to employees about appropriate use of it.

Anderson says he urges top-level executives to follow other good users for a while to learn how the medium works before they try it.

“It’s exciting because they’re realizing, “This is something I can use to get customer feedback,’” he said.

Adds Binhammer: “Logging onto Twitter every morning, I feel like I go to meetings with customer information in my back pocket. This didn’t happen before I had Twitter.”

The two also say it’s a good way to keep up with industry trends

“Because what I call the social Web is made up of a lot of early adopters, it’s a great opportunity to be on the leading curve of trends and issues. I did a post on why CXOs should pay attention to Twitter,” says Anderson. “If you’re a CIO, you need to understand what Twitter is and what impact it has on your business. And you need to understand the effect it has on the industry at large.”

Binhammer says a company’s use of Twitter should start with a defined business objective. It should then try to determine how Twitter will help accomplish that goal. Though the “softness” of social media is one of the common complaints about it, he says there are specific things you can measure.

Binhammer says that since the company got involved in social media in 2006:

•    It has seen a 30 percent decline in negative comments about the company.
•    On two occasions it has been able to identify and fix a problem with its products three weeks earlier than it otherwise would.
•    DellOutlet has done $2 million in transactions and sent another $1 million in business to its Web site.
•    And its small-business page on Facebook, where it shares tips for using social media, has 33,000 fans.

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