For at least the third time a Tweetup of Christchurch twitterers has been held, last night at Cocopelli. I wanted to go for two reasons – I was curious as to what a Tweetup might be after seeing Tweetups being organised on a semi-regular basis in Auckland and Wellington and I wanted to meet James Stewart, whose ArtKlick site I once thought had the potential to be a significant competitor to New Zealand’s favourite online art print shop (New Zealand Fine Prints is one of my clients).
Because my interest in Twitter and social media is from a business perspective the best way of summing up my expectations was hoping for a chamber of commerce meeting for the digital age and dreading being dropped into the Uni chess club on a free booze bender.
The key questions I want to know from other business orientated Twitters are:
- How do you find new followers who are obsessed enough with your company’s products, services or events that they want the constant contact that Twitter enables?
- How do you keep your followers interested and engaged?
- What strategies do you employ to filter the deluge of distracting tweets from other people during your working day?
I didn’t manage to meet anyone else who was thinking about Twitter in these terms. It was interesting to meet a relatively diverse bunch of Christchurchians and I enjoyed the night out on a personal level but a business person dropped into the Christchurch Tweetup would have been hard pressed to spot even a glimmer of the potential that social media and online marketing has for promoting their business.
It would have been a lot more interesting professionally if we had had a guest speaker (why not get someone like Giapo to come down and talk about how they have grown their business using Twitter, or a social media consultant like Simon Young who could give Christchurch based online marketers case studies to benchmark their efforts against). And wouldn’t it be a stimulating exercise to brainstorm some online marketing strategies to pay back the bar who hosted the event with some real time social media promotion on the night to test out some ideas and share the knowledge of those present to demonstrate to non-Twitters the real world benefits of harnessing social media?
My online marketing tip to Cocopelli? Put up a sign and hand out a flyer with every purchase asking customers to follow them on Twitter to receive news and special offers. Cost about $20 for 500 photocopied fliers and probably better value for their business than putting on pizza and drinks for #tweetCHCH