Why Marketers aren’t Running to Jaiku (yet)

May 20th, 2007
By Noah (marketing, observations)

This post started out as a comment on Douglas Karr’s post about Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku. After 3 paragraphs in his comment box, I decided I’d just make a blog post out of it. So, go read his post and then read mine.
You Are Here (outside the box)

I’ll give you three reasons why marketers aren’t all over Twitter and Jaiku (yet).

Too busy to experiment with a new service
The rules keep changing
What the heck is a Twitter?

Too busy doing their jobs
I’m sure you’re already saying, “but, that is their job!” Sure it is, but so is everything else. I don’t work for an “internet” company, but we do have a rather large web presence, pull millions of pageviews per month, and have both marketing and web staff. We even sell things online (more and more each year). But while our marketing manager has probably heard of Twitter, she probably hasn’t thought about using it to promote our products or services.

Why? Because she’s too busy with all the other traditional and non-traditional marketing work that has to get done (including, but not limited to: meeting ridiculous deadlines imposed by people with no true sense of the work that goes into marketing with a budget that is almost non-existent). There is already a long list of other things that need to be done in the off chance she has a little extra time. Woot seems like a company that should already be exploring this. However, a major airline company? I bet they are under enormous pressure to perform and while micro-blogging could possibly be a huge success, they probably have a limited amount of time they can spend on exploratory projects.

The rules keep changing
Another major conflict is marketers trying to keep up with all the rules that keep changing when it comes to online marketing. There are probably lots of marketers that are just now coming into fully realizing the potential of RSS feeds and blogging, and likely feel their content should be served from their website. In fact, they probably have pressure from their superiors to increase traffic to their site. The idea of pushing that feed-like content off to some new service that probably seems redundant to what they are already capable of likely doesn’t make sense.

I can hear the IT department now: “Why? We already provide hundreds of feeds for that stuff that anyone can access.”

What the heck is a Twitter?
Twitter and Jaiku are not what I would consider mainstream. Most marketers have probably never heard of it (or have, but don’t fully understand what it is). In a larger sense, I’m not convinced people that use Twitter know exactly what it is, or what it could be. And that isn’t a bad thing, it’s actually a very good, interesting, and even exciting thing. But while that can be a source of creativity and innovation for those on the bleeding edge, it can also be a source of confusion and obscurity for others.

Parting thoughts
In case you missed it, I agree that these two services could be a goldmine for a savvy marketer. I just believe that most marketers (savvy or not) are too busy doing their jobs to do their jobs (if that makes sense). Marketers in smaller, more web-based companies are in a much better position to recognize the potential of such emerging web trends and take advantage.

I feel like marketing departments should start hiring for a new position called “Exploratory Marketing Specialist.” This person would ignore traditional marketing techniques (and leave it to other staff) and focus on finding new avenues such as Twitter/Jaiku to market their products (and it wouldn’t have to be limited to online marketing). This might be hit-or-miss, but I bet the “hits” would more than justify the extra position in the long run.

2 Responses

Sunday, May 20, 2007
Douglas Karr

Great observations! Especially #1:

When I was a Database Marketing Manager a few years ago, I used to get really annoyed that it was 95% database and 5% marketing. I eventually turned things around, working with developers and automating most of the work. That’s when we began to grow exponentially.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Marketing and Twitter | The Marketing Technology Blog

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