Inside Twitter’s live studio
Twitter has been spending February, the Valentine’s month, giving brands back some love by creating a pop-up “live studio” to help them and their agencies plan activity with the site.
Brands including Adidas, Paddy Power and Samsung have all visited the Marshall Street, London space, presenting the Twitter team with briefs to solve.
The half-day sessions open with Twitter’s senior team presenting to brand marketers and their agencies around the idea of real-time marketing – an area in which US brands rather than UK brands are currently making the headlines, which Twitter UK managing director Bruce Daisley and his team are hoping to change.
Changing perceptions
Twitter UK are also looking to change current misconceptions around what makes a good piece of real-time marketing. Oreo Cookies’ “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet when the lights went out at last year’s Super Bowl is often held up as the best example, but Twitter UK is trying to move marketers away from the idea that penning a quick, reactive and witty tweet is the only way to achieve it.
During the course of the presentation, Twitter UK instead encourages marketers to plan for the everyday, campaigns and live events – while still keeping room for the unpredictable. Not “getting stressed” about that element is key, according to Twitter’s UK sales director Dara Nasr.
Twitter then goes on to use real time data, provided by third party supplier Buzz Radar, to demonstrate what users are currently saying about the brand and the areas they are associated with. The dynamic interface presents information about the times of day people are tweeting about certain subjects, recent Vines, the most popular TV programmes, photos and the potential reach of a brand’s tweets. Some marketers have found the rolling data – which sits war-room style on three TV screens in the studio – so useful they have requested to get a similar set up in their own offices.
The sessions then move to a workshop, where brands and Twitter thrash out how to solve business problem using the platform, introducing Will Scougal and his brand strategy team who run over areas such as how to use Vine and how to create a Twitter content calendar.
Samsung is currently embarking on a mission to become the “most loved” brand in its sector hand came to the studio earlier this month to seek advice on how Twitter could help it achieve that goal.
Identifying football as a passion point among its consumers, Samsung used the workshop to tap into Twitter data about the growing excitement for the World Cup – of which it is not a sponsor – to engage with followers.
Nasr says: “This isn’t just about tweeting ‘we are Samung, we have a phone’, it’s about creating moments in their everyday communications with the right tone of voice that can help them answer how they can become the most loved brand.”
Early adoption
Twitter is looking to embed itself much earlier in the creative process, rather than just being an add-on once a campaign is already live. Daisley claims Samsung sold more phones as a direct result of tweeting out the tech specifications of its Galaxy S4 device when Apple was unveiling its latest iPhone, which show the power of planning early, he adds.
While the live studio is clearly of benefit to those brands invited along, the relatively small size of Twitter’s team means not all marketers will be able to receive such treatment. A report published by Forrester in November found just 55 per cent of brands that market with Twitter are satisfied with the business value they achieve from doing so and only 44 per cent are satisfied with Twitter’s ability as a marketing partner.
Both Daisley and Nasr say Twitter is addressing this issue by staffing up and late last year launching a small business product, the lack of which was previously holding it back, Daisley says.
The live studio is open for just one more week, but Daisley already has a potential space in mind in Twitter UK’s new office space that the company is set to move to in the coming months. Daisley hopes workshops such as these will help the UK match the US in creating more headlines about great planned creative moments on Twitter – beyond the inane or reactive, to meaningful marketing.