Short and Sweet: A Lesson about Using Twitter in Business
I just got the latest Evernote newsletter, which comes about once a month to regular users like myself. The company has some great news to kick off ‘09, not the least of which is the closure of a $4.5 million round of funding. That’s great news, and they’ve earned it steady improvements to an innovative product.
The last note in the newsletter has a telling lesson for businesses who think that Twitter is just another megaphone for broadcasting how awesome your company is:
As many of you know, we’re big fans of Twitter. A while back we asked you to tell us what you liked about our @Evernote tweeting and what you didn’t. The response was clear: more suggestions on how to use Evernote and fewer links to media coverage. So, for those interested in the latter, we just launched a second Twitter account focused solely on media and blogosphere coverage.
Emphasis is mine. There are two lessons here: 1. People want value from corporate communications, especially when it comes through a channel like Twitter where you have to be not only concise, but relevant. And double-especially when your product is a productivity app!
- Twitter is a conversation, not a one-way broadcast, and definitely not an SEO enhancer. To misuse it is to hear the gentle sound of interested customers losing interest.
Let’s hear it for learning from your customers and responding in action as well as word, as Evernote has here.
Comments / Leave a response
January 29, 2009, 3:54 am
Evernote looks interesting, but before I rush into exploring all the videos on their site, could I ask you to succinctly describe how you use it?
January 29, 2009, 10:09 pm
I use Evernote primarily to capture things while I’m on the go, away from my macbook (using their iPhone app), and for things that I might need to consult while I’m away from the macbook. Adding items is a matter of just dragging them to Evernote and letting the sync to server happen in the background.
I don’t use Evernote for any text editing, as they seem to be writing their own text editing paradigm from the ground up rather than just use what the OS provides. Where I used to do all sorts of writing in Yojimbo, Evernote makes it nearly impossible, so it’s really a capture and sync service for me. I have talked with their support channel and they’re working on the text editing, as well as exporting which Yojimbo also did better.
With all that it sounds like I was happier with Yojimbo, and to some extent that’s true. But there was more immediate utility in Evernote for me with as a bridge between Macbook and iPhone, and I see strong efforts in their development, so I was willing to make the switch.