TrueTwit: 3 Unintended Consequences For Businesses, Job Seekers, and You

Ok, yesterday’s post on TrueTwit lack of customer-centricity generated some very interesting dialog. This post is about unintended consequences. As clarification, the customer that TrueTwit is not customer-centric around is your customer. Lacking customer-centricity towards your customers drives your customers away. That’s the unintended consequence.

The core of the dialog responding to yesterday’s post came from a number of very smart people, much smarter than I. They pointed out that TrueTwit falls in the category of economic and social unintended consequences. Forget the user experience, the lack of customer-centricity and look at the broader net effect, these colleagues suggested.

Unintended Consequences

If you’re an economist or social scientist, you know this term. If you know Tennessee Tuxedo and Chumlee geting in trouble with Mr. Whoopee, or Mr. Bill, finding himself victim of a good idea gone wrong, then you also know unintended consequences.

Wikipedia defines unintended consequences as “outcomes that are not the ones intended by a purposeful action.” There are three general types of unintended consequences: “positive unexpected benefit,” “negative unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect,” and a “perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended.”

Twitter for Business, Job Seekers and You

Twitter is a great tool. It has profound reach. For prospecting, its potential for businesses and individuals to create and capture value through social media is just now unfolding. Value can be financial, or it can be the connection(s) and exchanges that occur which ultimately sustains value for business or one’s personal brand in the long-term.

Sure, there is spam, dummy accounts, exchange or noise that we don’t want to see or read. But in a diverse world that same noise is someone else’s interest. Like in the real world, we need to respect that, and learn ways filter noise out of our own information streams. In the social era, we must use tools. I made some suggestions in yesterday’s post.

TrueTwit Unintended Consequence I

In Business, we find this first TrueTwit Unintended Consequence and much the topic of yesterday’s blog and the Dude Ranch example. Twitter is a tool to get closer to customers and generate community that supports a business’ customer loyalty and retention strategy. It also helps to measure the pulse and tone of customer sensitivity around the business and product brands. Using high-end predictive and prescriptive analytics, a business can learn and do a lot to ensure that activity is not driving away customers.

Most powerful, however, is the ability to generate new business and increase the reach of sales activities that fill the sales pipeline both more efficiently and more effectively. This is the big unintended consequence that Social Media Marketing Managers using TrueTwit unknowingly generate.

The goal may be to have a clean social stream of followers with no spammers, bad followers, and such. However, TrueTwit does not discriminate. It eliminates potential prospective customers from engaging in the business’ social stream (and ultimately the sales pipeline) just by the negative experience.

It’s far better to have a little spam, and use tools to filter the stream on your end, than to filter out potential business before it has a chance to engage with your brand.

TrueTwit Unintended Consequence II

As a job seeker, the second TrueTwit unintended consequence was to Job Seekers. Recruiters, hiring managers, human resources professionals, and others with jobs to offer you come across your LinkedIn profile. You’ve all made it easy for them to follow you by putting the follow me on Twitter button on our linked in page.

When a recruiter tries to follow you, and engage, but they see you have a TrueTwit hoop for them to jump through, that hurdle alone is a good enough reason to eliminate you as a candidate for that job. Remember, job seekers today cannot afford to give a recruiter an excuse to look elsewhere. Job seekers must make it as easy as possible to connect. TrueTwit, puts a multi-step hurdle for these people to jump in order to help you land a job. If you are a Job Seeker you can’t use TrueTwit and expect to get a lot of calls from that social media effort.

TrueTwit Unintended Consequence III

Individuals with a social media strategy encounter the third TrueTwit Unintended Consequence. Twitter is for building communities of followers. Unless you are a celebrity, you generally follow others who follow you, and hope that those you follow, follow you back. It’s this reciprocity that builds your social community on Twitter. Through it you create value for others, capture value from others, and exchange value in an expanding global social ecosystem.

Any individual building a legitimate following will use Twitter. Statically, if you are building your personal brand, your musical presence, your speaker reach, or whatever value you create and deliver, the larger your audience the more potential you have to reach others that gain value from your work.

Without a statistics lesson, the best way to say this is that more is better, when it comes to Twitter – you want a bigger sample size. With a bigger following (sample size) you get diversity, which includes noise. Spend your time with the non-noise aspect of your following, and spend no time on the noise – let it go.

What does TrueTwit do? It focuses indiscriminately on eliminating any follower that does not have the patience to go through the five barriers outlined in the previous SteinVox post. Statistically speaking, this will retard your following, and reduce the results of your objective. Again, there’s not much more to say on this.

Lessons

As I said in yesterday’s post, TrueTwit has a good if not great intent. I’d like to see them deliver a better anti-spam and follower-validation solution. The lesson for TrueTwit is that they need to innovate, and become a catalyst, not a barrier that prevents its customers from gaining customers. TrueTwit should not drive your customers away with their service.

Businesses need to ensure that Social Media Marketing Managers are not inadvertently reducing the conversion rates, lead generation results and/or delaying prospect to closed-sale potential for your business. That means you should know that a little spam in your social stream is ok – let it go and focus on Pareto’s 80 percent that has potential business value.

Job seekers must ensure that jobs can find them, and that means not accidentally putting barriers up that prevent recruiters, hiring managers, and human resources people from engaging with them, on Twitter.

Individuals that are building their social presence and want to do it fast understand that diversity is a good thing, and with diversity comes a little spam. The tools to filter the stream(s) are effective, use them. Ensure that anyone that wants to be part of your social community has no barriers to encounter, no hurdles to jump, no hoops to go through. Make it easy for them to follow you. The results will be profound.

Leave a comment. Social media has a number of avoidable unintended consequences. Let me know which one to write about next.

Image Credits: Thanks to Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams. And, Shout! Pictures release of Tennessee Tuxedo, Chumlee and Phineas J Whoopee.