Yesterday, after making a purchase of some chocolatey goodness and withdrawing some cash from the human ATM at my hospital’s gift shop, I tweeted out this.
So there you have it — nothing more than a bit of random narcissism about one of my pet peeves. But a few hours later I spotted this in my replies
Now there’s a fine line between marketing and spamming when using social media and this is really a beautiful example of the former. Let’s parse it a bit:
1) It’s customized. Instead of spotting keywords and blasting out some cookie cutter stock text, they actually read the content of my tweet and responded back like an actual person. If it was a bot which wrote this (which I find unlikely) it’s one that is good enough to pass my internal Turing test.
2) It’s personal. Instead of just using the @name they actually grabbed my real first name from the Twitter profile. And they even spelled it right! That’s classy.
3) It ends with conversation starter. It doesn’t just yell “switch today!” It asks the question. Have you thought about it? Hey, let us know. Let’s chat. It draws me into a conversation instead of just yelling instructions.
So what was the result? Well, I haven’t switched banks but I did spend 10 minutes on their website checking out what they had to offer. And that’s exactly what good marketing should be doing. They started a conversation that got me to engage with them. And they did it without seeming spammy.
@Monicals_Pizza is brilliant at this. They have someone that has to spend like 2 hours a day replying on twitter, and are amusing.