The irony of Twitter is that while founders Biz Stone and Co wrestle with the question of how to make a buck there are plenty of people doing nicely out of Twitter. Dell is one and it had made at least $3m so far.You can see why. Dell has more than 640,000 followers on its Twitter.com/DellOutlet account (it has more than 30 others) and is already one of the top 100 accounts on Twitter. I'm guessing these are people who are signing up looking for deals on PCs as well as customer service.It's posting stuff like this: "20% off any Dell Outlet Printer. Enter at checkout: 06G$WMFPKXPCT8 – exp 6/2 or after 1st 500 redemptions. http://bit.ly/DmmQx"And this:"20% off any Outlet Studio Hybrid Desktop. Enter at checkout: GS?GCWLWKMWL0Z – exp 6/2 or after 1st 250 redemptions. http://bit.ly/hLEeo"As part of its Twitter efforts, Dell is tailoring exclusive offers to customers all of which has directly contributed to $2m in sales and another million when traffic to Dell.com is factored in. Granted this has been since 2007, but you can write off 07 and half of 08. That's kind of BT (before Twitter, well before it really when supersonic).By the end of the year I would guess the numbers would be much higher. Of course, you know what happens? Many people on Twitter if they see a really good offer will retweet it. A retweet from a well connected user could potentially be worth thousands of dollars.This stuff is dynamite. No scratch that. It's better than dynamite its free dynamite. An army of followers who are comprised off people actively interested in buying products who tell their friends when they see something good and it costs almost nothing (once you have accounted for the time of the person doing the tweeting).Others firm are doing this as well. I bought a Lenovo netbook in January after being tweeted a discount code and when it comes around to buying a new fully fledged laptop it’s going to be useful to check what's on offer on Twitter. The great thing about which is it is pretty uncluttered. If you go to the Dell Twitter account you know you will find offers pretty quickly. Both of those two above were on the first page of tweets. No clicking around. It's all there ready and waiting.There are loads of other really good examples out there including some we wrote about last week such as @Comcastcares, @WholeFoods, @VirginAmerica, @MountainViewPD and @magiccurrykart.There are others that most people are familiar with including Jet Blue and Zappos.<a name="5436465636"></a>There was a buzz earlier this year when there was talk about Twitter maybe charging brands. I blogged that "Twitter should charge business users", but so far nothing has come of it, but when you see the value brands drive from it you just have to think, wow this is a potentially very potent direct sale channel, why not charge a buck or ten?
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hey Gordon - free dynamite sounds good to me ;-)
btw, I can ask Biz Stone a question for you at Cannes tweet-up: http://tinyurl.com/HK-Cannes
Tweet it to: twitter.com/hillandknowlton
hashtag for event = #HKcannes
This is my question - i mean why aren't you charing, i will tweet.
Yep. twitter can offer "viral" marketing that is actually viral. if the offer is good, the action is simple and there's a good reason to do it, people are gonna take you up on it. And there we have it - effective, measurable (and comparitively cheap) digital aquisitive or sales led marketing . Now it'll be interesting to see how the stats measure up once everyone and his dog are doing the same thing.
So why isn't Twitter making a fortune?
Someone show me the money?
Investors are loving Twitter with more than $23m poured into microblogging related start-ups. According
Nothing revelatory, but some interesting Twitter data from Hitwise beyond the big growth figures, revealing
Gordon Macmillan
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