NMA Live - Marketing on Twitter

I had the pleasure of attending NMA's Marketing on Twitter event last week. The speakers came from various backgrounds and it was good to hear first hand the different perceptions/experiences they had. Predictably the attendees seemed to be made up of a combination of agency types and brands looking to enhance the service they offer their clients and customers respectively.

First up was Nick Stringer from the IAB, talking about regulation. It wasn't something I'd thought about in the context of Twitter before so I was interested to hear from a someone with some regulatory authority. He highlighted some interesting points, namely about spam being illegal. A lot of the recommendations were as clear as mud; as long as you use a bit of common sense, I personally don't think there's too much to be concerned with regarding Twitter specifically, certainly not enough to warrant a presentation. However, the talk was enlightening and Nick directed us to some good resources which I certainly find interesting! I'm scared to tackle regulation issues on this blog, maybe another time if I'm feeling brave (and slightly more knowledgeable).

Robin Grant from We are Social was filling in for the sickly Alfie Dennan and generally spoke a lot of sense. With understandably little preparation time, it was nice to have someone talking about etiquette on Twitter to such a large number of (hopefully) receptive marketing managers. His presentation reinforced something I've thought a lot about, and identified in a tweet from @tomagotchi; once you understand the platform, it really is common sense how to use Twitter for brands effectively, there's no 'one-size-fits-all' solution.

Next up was Ciarán Norris from Mindshare who was talking about the Twitter ecosystem. The slides from his excellent presentation can be found here. It was interesting to see Ciaran run through some of the third party apps available, and some case studies on how brands have utilised Twitter as part of marketing campaigns. The presentation highlighted that the data driving Twitter is exceptionally powerful and useful for brands; hopefully we'll see more brands getting involved. I'll try and elaborate on this a little more in later posts.

One last thing I'd like to pick up on, was the speculation among the speakers about how brands can attract more followers, to which, correctly, there was no simple answer. Running a Twitter account for any brand, it's important is to have plenty of interaction with your userbase that isn't necessarily relevant and I can understand this may seem strange to some. However, human interaction with individuals, while on paper might not seem like an efficient use of resources, in reality it builds some serious advocacy.

I'll write up Kerry Bridge from Dell and Joe White from Moonfruit's presentations another time, along with some stuff on the panel discussion. This post is already longer than I want it to be.