Maria Gudelis

I couldn’t resist such a headline on this particular post as I was perusing some of Guy Kawasaki’s article about Twitter Hawk.

For any local business owner to be able to geo-target their market online…now that is a beautiful thing!

Riddle me this… My question to you reading this right now:

1. What is better – geo-targeting via “social media”

2. Geo targeting via a direct mail campaign to a qualified target market (e.g. so you are looking for a buyer for your Las Vegas real estate…you send postcards out to a certain zip code in Edmonton Alberta with a call to action to go ‘online’ to a squeeze page)

I think as in all marketing channels – you need to do both!  There is not one ‘silver bullet’ and thus, complementing your company’s marketing efforts with social media marketing is a powerful force to reckon with! – Maria Gudelis

Here is an excerpt right from Guy’s open forum article:

This is when the panic ensues: “Holy kaw, if many people started using Twitterhawk, it would mean the death of Twitter as a means of social networking and communication!” Let me tell you why this isn’t true:

1. Twitterhawk charges $.05 for each tweet that it sends. What spammer can afford to pay $.05/tweet in order to ask you to help get money out of Nigeria or to sell you penis-enlargement products? By the way, Twitterhawk tracks how many times people clicked on the link, so that you can determine your per click cost.
2. There is a blacklist of terms that Twitterhawk will not respond to. I don’t know what’s on the list, but I suspect words like “the” are probably on it to prevent too many matches.
3. There is a limit of twelve fully-automatic tweets per day per search. At this rate, it will take a long time to find someone to help get money out of Nigeria or a man who wants to get his aforementioned penis enlarged.
4. You cannot send the same person more than one tweet based on the same search. This means that the Audi dealer cannot send you a tweet every time you mention the word “Audi.” The dealer gets one shot at you.
5. You can edit each outgoing tweet when you set Twitterhawk to manual approval. This means that you can use Twittehawk to find tweets to respond to and queue them up for individual answers. (The reason to manually approve each tweet is that you wouldn’t want to send a tweet such as “We’re an Audi dealer located in Palo Alto. We’d love your business,” in response to a tweet like, “I’m so glad I just sold my 1970 Audi. It’s given me nothing but trouble.”

- Guy Kawasaki

Hope you have enjoyed this post, I can just imagine the spammers now all over this post due to the nature of my title! 

Another great quote from Guy Kawasaki on Twitter:

Question: Do you recommend that companies repeat their tweets?

Answer: Yes, if they want to ensure that as many followers see their tweets as possible. There will be tiny number of people who will complain, but you cannot make all your followers happy.

In fact, if you’re not pissing someone off on Twitter, you’re not using it to its fullest potential. Companies should not let a few angry people dictate their marketing practices.

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