Archive for November 19th, 2009

Show House magazine - November 2009

DANCING TWEET TO TWEET

While loyal to and enriched by traditional media and old-fashioned virtues of face to face lunches, Rupert Bates finds himself all of a Twitter in this digital age.

“Few magazines on this earth give me more unalloyed pleasure. Thank you Show House,” wrote Stephen Fry on Twitter to his 947,434 followers. The result is we now have more than half a million subscribers.
He did no such thing, but such is the viral promiscuity of Twitter if I could get Fry to follow my infrequent tweets, then conventional marketing is dead. When Fry tweeted recently “hurrah for curry” you suspect there was a run, as it were, on chicken vindaloo. He might even get more people supporting Norwich City, which would be quite a feat.
One writer, anxious to plug his new book, got some of his influential friends on Twitter to sing its praises and in 24 hours it went from 20,000th on Amazon’s live bestseller list to 14th. Oh and it hasn’t even been published.
For those out there unfamiliar with the micro-blogging website www.twitter.com you get to write anything in 140 characters for those following your tweets to read. Most of it is banal in the extreme. “Just walking my flat white to work” that sort of thing. It has evolved from the premise of ‘what are you doing?’ to ‘what are you flogging?’ with many posting short, sharp ads for products complete with a web link.
I enjoy it for what it is and have been known to drop in the odd plug -‘come to the What House? Awards, They’re great’ - but what I have enjoyed in my professional worlds of property and sports writing is building networks and digesting nuggets of information and news sources to help me do my job.
“Does Twitter work as a business tool? Yes, if you use it to build relationships and dialogue with customers, communities, journalists and industry contacts which you can then turn into deeper conversations offline. No, if you use it as some sort of advertising billboard where you just shout indiscriminately about how great your new homes are,” said Liz Male of Liz Male Consulting, who tweets at twitter.com/lizmale.
“The key is to use Twitter and other social media tools within a well thought-out communications strategy. It’s very attractive because the technology is free, but you’ve got to know what you want to achieve and how you’re going to use these tools, otherwise you could easily waste your time,” said Male, a specialist PR for the UK construction and environmental sectors.
“I think Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites can work extremely well to help build a brand for a development, even at planning stage, and to help sell homes. It can gather together the community; create a forum for communication with home buyers, home owners, agents and others, and give you an immediate feedback channel. Handled well, this will amplify your best brand values: a housebuilder that is open, listening, keen to meet customer needs, has a strong sense of its own personality and community values. But this is a cultural thing, and an approach like that needs real buy-in from the boss. It would be a bold housebuilder indeed who could grasp all the benefits this technology has to offer.”
Bold housebuilders? Well a quick flick through Twitter and I find Taylor Wimpey, Bryant, Redrow, Bovis, and Bloor. Marvellous. What an opportunity to talk to a homebuying audience, but the property media. The total number of people those five companies are following? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Combined number of tweets? Yes you’ve guessed it.
Miller is following 176 people and Countryside Properties 127 and I have briefly interacted via Twitter with Persimmon. Compare all this to Urban Splash – cool City cats who know how to engage with the customer – who are following 1,538 people and have 1,475 followers.
Of course this may be all a load of nonsense, with many arguing that the tyranny of tweeting, like email and other electronic media, is merely chopping up our attention span into a thousand tiny fragments and achieving little commercially or socially. I am slightly socially concerned that I fancy Dawn, the cartoon character in Newlon Home Ownership’s Twitter marketing campaign.
I keep being distracted from writing this article by e-mails which, as John Freeman writes in his book ‘The Tyranny of E-Mail’ “march down the screen like some sort of advancing army.” Let’s check Twitter. I’ll post a tweet:
‘Writing Show House piece on tweeting and why most housebuilders are following absolutely nobody. Dinosaurs still roam the new homes earth.’
Within minutes Male, queen of the property tweets, has re-tweeted to her list of followers. Will an irate stegosaurus, sorry housebuilder, reply? Of course not. ‘We are too busy trying to sell homes’ will be their stock reply to not engaging with social media. Build up an online community guys and, who knows? between the bitter buyer still in dispute with you over the boiler, you might get a lead or two.
“Our social media blogging and tweeting is bringing in new business and enquiries from all over. It could do so for your business too,” tweets Space & Time Media.
Must go, just got a tweet from Barack Obama, sandwiched in between a bit of chick banter between English rugby players based in France. One final thought. Why do half a million people follow Starbucks on Twitter? Mind’s an egg nog latte to go.

Rupert Bates tweets at www.twitter.com/rupertbates and wants to compile a list of best property tweeters. Tweet him your nominations.

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