I follow Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter feed with varying degrees of interest. When he announced that you could get a free copy of his new book, Reality Check, I jumped at the chance. The caveat? You had to let his new venture, Alltop.com, post twice-daily “ads” promoting their new categories as they grow.
It seemed like a small price to pay, I thought, and a good way to observe how it was used and whether or not it worked. I mean, hey, I’m in marketing. What better way to test new social marketing efforts than to use myself as a guinea pig? I went to twitterfeed.com/alltop and subscribed on my personal Twitter account so I didn’t have to worry about inadvertently spamming any of my clients. This was a good move.
It didn’t take long before the fallout started. I got into a fight with a follower because it posted two obama.alltop.com tweets on my behalf, and we are both pretty adamantly of the mindset that your politics and religion are a private matter. He took it very personally that I had started to promote something political, and it took a good bit of talking to smooth that one over.
Then, unbeknownst to me, it posted two pregnancy.alltop.com tweets. Now, when you’re of a certain age, people watch for any and all signs of babies on board. I woke to find tweets asking if I was pregnant, and congratulatory emails. Each time I had to explain that, no, I was just letting Alltop send tweets through my account, and that anytime they saw an alltop.com post it didn’t come from me.
I thought I had it all smoothed out, but then the buddhism.alltop.com tweet posted. Twice. Suddenly I was back to reassuring that same follower that I really, truly wasn’t posting about religion. Really.
So while it’s been an interesting experiment, I can’t say that it actually works. It reads like an ad, and not like my own personal style (as a writer I can’t personally bring myself to use shorthand like “What if u…?” but the alltop feed doesn’t have this issue). Once you start to understand the format that they use, you can identify it in others’ posts. But if you’re unfamiliar with it… well, it looks like you’re discussing politics, pregnancy and religion. And honestly, when you consider the amount of otherwise billable time I’ve spent responding to emails and explaining the process, I could have bought the book several times over.
If I had the ability to pick and choose my topics to promote, perhaps my experience would have been different. The netsecurity, consulting and techwriting category tweets haven’t been too far off base, but the rest tend to be far enough off topic to be distracting.
It’s been an interesting experiment, but there are going to have to be refinements to the process in order for it to be an effective marketing tool.