Five Considerations Before Twittering Over New New Media

It’s easy to get excited about new media like Twitter that explode into the mainstream. There are already over 100 million registered Twitter users. It is even easier to get excited when we learn that Dell sold $6.5 million worth of computers through Twitter in 2009 (http://mashable.com/2009/12/08/dell-twitter-sales/) a threefold increase over the year before. But before we go all atwitter over Tweets, Dell’s social media “success” needs a little context.

Dell’s annual sales in ‘09 were $60 billion. The Twitter sales represent only a tiny fraction -- less than 1/100th of 1% -- of Dell's total revenue. It’s not that Twitter and other emerging media won’t one day be critical components of a marketing mix, it’s just that the excitement of the new media must be tempered by the evolutionary reality of consumer behavior. If Dell was hoping to move the needle, Twitter didn’t do it.

More important, there are some online basics Dell could deploy that would make a big difference. Consider the “old” new media standby, organic search. There are more than 50 million searches per month that include “PC.” Searches for “PC” on Google and Dell come up in 5^th position behind PCWorld, PCMag, Wikipedia and others. A move from 5th to 4th position in the organic listings is worth anywhere from 2% to 9% more clicks.

Do the math: 2% to 9% more organic clicks on 50 million searches amounts to 1 to 4.5 million free visitors per month. The average value of a paid search click containing “PC” is $1.50. So the marketing value of moving from 4th to 5th position in the organic search rankings for Dell is between $1.5 and $6.75 million per month, and that’s only one search term! Clearly, the return on SEO that would get Dell from 4th to 5th position in Google’s organic rankings is significantly larger than the Twitter opportunity.

The moral of this story is one should get the online basics right before getting into a tizzy over new media types like Twitter. Here are 5 tips for making sure you are optimizing your media mix:

1. Determine the value of your customers and/or sales so that marketing profitability can be calculated accurately.

2. Put in place the right tracking and analytic tools to measure the conversion rates from all media types to sales and or customer acquisition. This will make media mix optimization possible.

3. Start at the top with search. If you do not have a comprehensive SEM and SEO search program that is invested up to the point of marginal profitability, get one!

4. Fully test and evaluate the relative profitability of e-mail, display, affiliate marketing and acquisition/CRM efforts to round out your core media mix.

5. Once you have done all of the above…use your understanding of customer value and tracking tools to test new media types like Twitter and determine their relative potency.

Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer has a great acronym, GMOOT, meaning Get Me One Of Those. It is used to describe the knee-jerk reaction we often see in online marketing to the new cool tool. Twitter, is definitely a cool tool and an emerging phenomenon (e.g. you can follow my tweets on Happiness at Twitter.com/HappierU2). But search, e-mail, display, and affiliate marketing have all moved from “state of the art” to “state of the practice” because of their proven ability to move the profitability needle. Before we all go GMOOT on Twitter, let’s be sure we are taking care of the online marketing basics.

Jonathan Shapiro is CEO of MediaWhiz, an online performance marketing agency that helps clients acquire customers more profitably.