Marketing WTF? - Twitter Me Crazy
Anyone who thinks Twitter is a waste of time, just doesn’t know how to use it properly. Take a look at how Mahalo is using the product to build a following of tens of thousands.
According to Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis
“People have told me I’m crazy for wanting to give one of my friends on Twitter a Macbook Air if I become the #1 user (i’m essentially tied for #2 behind Obama). Well, based on the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to Mahalo.com I don’t think so. It’s not huge traffic, but as you can see in March Twitter sent over 10,000 people to Mahalo and this month we’re on track to have–wait for it–20,000 folks visit Mahalo from Twitter. In the past six months ~45,000 people have visited Mahalo from Twitter. If the 20,000 number is sustainable 250,000 folks will visit Mahalo from Twitter over the next year. Most of these folks are coming from my personal account (I’m think half). 250,000 visitors at .01 each is $2,500 in value. At .05 each (what StumbleUpon charges) it would cost $12,500. MacBook Air = $1,700.”
Wow, and I’m really a huge StumbleUpon fan. Call me crazy but I agree with Calcanis, “Twitter is going to be huge. Folks have no idea how huge right now.”
3 Responses to “Marketing WTF? - Twitter Me Crazy”
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April 23rd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I’ve watched twitter for a bit now and it seems to only work for social media sites…I find it hard to see something like this in a B2B enterprise…
April 24th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
We think it is going to be huge even for B2B. In our market (we target Ruby on Rails developers/ops people), the influencers hang out on Twitter all day. So far, we’ve been using Twitter to inform our ~250 followers about blog updates, etc, and are encouraged with the referrals. Still a long way to go, but I don’t think we’ve begun to scratch the surface.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Just like all marketing media, Twitter is right for some companies and not right for others. However, I don’t believe Twitter is only for social media sites. Social media sites may have the highest profile success stories. However, I have had moderate success with B2B companies and it seems to be catching on more. For example, at NetQoS–a network performance management company– almost 20% of the attendees at their recent Symposium were following event details on Twitter. In the Open Source community, it’s even bigger. To me, Twitter is just a great tool for WOM marketing regardless of whether you are B2C or B2B. Probably a good recruiting tool too. In following Twitter coverage, seems like the tide is also turning from “I just don’t get it” to “hey Twitter is really useful.” Anyway, just hope its current fan base doesn’t get turned off by some of the recent availability issues.