Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
I've tried to be a premiere social networker myself, but barely managed a few blog postings (I had a great run for about a week) and signed up for Facebook and MySpace at others' insistence. So it is with great trepidation that I embark on an examination of what Twitter can mean for retail. Because I don't get Twitter at all. You can find me at twitter.com/nikkibaird, for what it's worth. At least with Twitter, unlike my blog, the posts are guaranteed to be short.
So what did I find? Well, first of all, Twitter could do itself a huge favor in helping out brands by making it easier to find them. Right now the search is very undifferentiated. I knew that Zappos.com has a Twitter account and that employees at Zappos.com are pretty active on Twitter, but a search of "Zappos" yields individual users who have the last name "Zappos," individual users who happen to work at Zappos, and then the company account itself. I think a "brand fan-feed" could be useful, but it's got to be easier to find them.
Second, even if you don't really get what all the buzz is about, you need to be monitoring Twitter. Because the people who do use it often have a lot to say about the brands they encounter every day. They may be limited to 140 characters, but they've learned how to maximize the impact within those limits. A fan-feed could easily work both ways - it could serve as a way for the brand to communicate to enthusiastic subscribers, and also as a grouping function that lets lots of enthusiastic fans talk to each other through the fan-feed.
Third, develop a policy for how employees can use Twitter. There are a lot of employees who identify very strongly with their companies and publicize it on their Twitter accounts. Gen Yers, being the digital generation that they are, have not necessarily been that clean about maintaining boundaries between their personal lives and their work careers. They're bringing that same mentality to Twitter, where it (apparently) is not that big a deal to identify yourself as a store manager or department lead at a retailer, and then complain about customers, products, or management in the "life feed" of your everyday life. How embarrassing could that be for a brand? Just do a search on your favorite retailer on Twitter and see for yourself.
Finally, get your brand on there. There were quite a few "placeholders" for brands where it was unclear if it was the brand itself, or just a cybersquatter - perhaps a Twittersquatter. Search Coca-Cola for a good example. I won't link to it because I don't want to encourage it. But even if you update your brand's feed once a week with an early look at what's in the circular on Sunday or what new store is opening tomorrow, that's better than someone else coming along and hijacking your brand for a few quick advertising hits.
I do think Twitter has something to offer for brands - my favorite retail-related account at the moment is RetailerDepot, which hands out online coupon codes as it finds them. The Amazon
GoldBox feed isn't too bad either.
Discussion Questions: What do you think Twitter can mean for retail? What does it say about the opportunities and challenges of social networking sites? How should retailers and brands be responding?