Last week I wrote about the growing number of ways in which we are using Twitter to support PR programs. I cited an example of Twitter as another channel to use and monitor during media interviews (see Fact Checking the Fact Checkers).
I thought I’d also share an example of how Twitter helped us in our efforts to get the info we need for market search and product positioning.
In this case, the client was struggling to find the appropriate “bucket” for their technology – software that offers interesting innovations within the broad category of Business Intelligence.
Of course, finding the right sub category is important for many reasons (I have blogged about the topic quite a bit). You want to be accurate in how you describe your technology and align outreach efforts with the right publications, beats, bloggers and analyst practice areas. Finding the right category – or defining a new one if necessary – is one of the first steps in formulating product positioning, which in turn sets the stage for how you tell your story.
You want to be strategic as well; all things being equal, it is much better to be in a category that is seen to be interesting and that has a pulse.
After lots of soul searching (and some investigation) the client suggested DSS, Decision Support Systems (Wikipedia definition). They asked for our opinion, which we offered – both the good and the bad – in terms of our perceptions about this label and its relevance.
We then took it a step further and augmented the secondary research we had done with primary research conducted via Twitter. In short, we put a query out over Twitter, to get a better understanding of how the industry and influencers view the term and state of the DSS space.
I should mention that we have been integrating Twitter into the PR efforts for this account and most others at Fusion PR. We follow key influencers in the BI space, and a number in turn follow members of the account team. Our hope was that at least one of the influencers would take us up on the request and provide some helpful feedback.
One influencer did in fact reply, and a number of his followers chimed in too (he has thousands of followers, presumably, for the most part, people who follow or are in the BI space). The replies confirmed the PR team’s thoughts on the space and provided additional validation.
So, we got some quick feedback from a key influencer and others. Equally important, we got key insight into how a pitch related to this area of technology might be received.
Could we have just called this influencer? Sure, and maybe we would have eventually connected, and maybe he would have had the time to hear us out and answer our questions. Ditto for email.
Twitter proved to be a fairly frictionless way for us to get quick feedback from an important influencer and also tap into a sounding board of BI industry participants.
