Do I want to follow lastminute.com on Twitter?
Travolution is currently followed by over 200 people on Twitter - the micro-blogging service and on-off darling of Silicon Valley.
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Our latest fan is everyone's favoruite pink online travel agency, lastminute.com. The email arrived earlier today:
The OTA joined the service earlier this week, according to the updates list on the lastminute.com Twitter page.
This is the first UK OTA we have found to be actively using Twitter as a brand. There are plenty of individuals from travel companies using Twitter.
Anyway, inevitably, lastminute.com is using Twitter to flog, er, lastminute deals - five in one day this week.
It also has a decidedly garish screen!
So the question is this: do I want to follow lastminute.com - and have its updates getting in the way of other, perhaps more personally relevant people I'm following - if it is just going to serve deals to into Twitterland?
I can see why they are doing it - just not sure if I want it.
What do you all think?
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
Technorati tags: twitter lastminute
19 comments:
Well from a business point of view, they are obviously using it for lead generation. Which, for which I hope that the person who thought of it got a nice little pat on the back.
But.... It makes me angry that useful tools like twitter & facebook etc become a way for companies to gain free advertising/brand awareness/lead generation. I think it lowers the appeal of such services as they will inevitably become bloated with offers/deals etc.
Can't we just have something as a community for once?
Oliver: Good to hear from you!
We'll keep an eye on how many "followers" LM actually gets.
UPDATE ALL:
interestingly, in the past few hours, LM has been slowly adding to its following list. it appears to be tracking quite a few of - how do we put it - core group of travel bloggers, such as TW, hotel-blogs, travel-rants, Jaunted, Chris Elliott, et al.
Indeed Kevin, I am watching this with eager eyes.
I wonder though if it REALLY is someone at Lastminute.com or a PR agency? Not that it makes any difference I suppose. I think they could do with working on the background, it’s erm, yuck. I don’t mind companies adding their late deals, on Twitter, but it depends how often they post.
No. Even if you did want deals, I can't imagine twitter is the best place for them. Too much noise.
Though I like that the profile page is giving TUI's youtube effort a run for its money :~0
Oliver: yes, good to see you here!
Thanks very much for all of your feedback, especially the comments on our profile design. ;)
What we hope to do with the lastminute.com Twitter feed is to provide a new way for people to follow our news, deals and updates, rather than to push information.
We're trying to find new ways of talking with our customers and as with all new ventures, a bit of advice and criticism is always welcomed.
We'd appreciate your thoughts on how we can make it better and we'll keep tracking comments here so we can take any suggestions on board.
Thanks,
The lastminute.com team
Hi Kevin,
Lastminute.com should provide travel tips and news also with random updates on deals etc, and lead people to the website.
Yes twitter is noisy, but a great tool for marketers but only if its done effectively. I get a lot of useful news from twitter, I also engage with other twitters. Just as it is a quick process to create a twitter account, you can just as quickly die from being deemed a spammer and irrelevant. And in this age of the internet revolution, word of mouth is the new PR.
Be sure that your audience/customer is even using twitter before you jump in. The key to social media PR and marketing is:
Listen
Engage
then
Participate
Jennifer - social media PR
Lastminute.com: cheers for adding your input to the debate. i suspect you won't share it with us, but we would be keen to learn what kind of ldeas you feel you get from twitter, once your account has settled into its normal rhythm.
Jennifer: Has tripwolf used it as a marketing tool yet?
Dear Mr Lastminute,
Thanks to follow me also on Les Explorers
just my 2 cents, a little 2 cents:
if you want to be part of the conversation, it will be great to tell us your name. I mean, I am human and want to talk with George or Linda or Daniel...but "The lastminute.com team" it's a ghost.
Please tell us your name (are you a boy or a girl ?, Bill, Linda, Georges or Melinda) and we start conversation and we will show you how Travel 2.0 work ;-)
best regards
Claude
Claude: I suspect it is a number of people from the LM.com PR/marketing department which are running it together.
PR guys !!!
Will see if they learned
Yes I use twitter as a marketing tool for tripwolf, I also make comments about what I am doing, as well as share information that is relevant to travel 2.0. which is also a genuine interest of mine.
Jennifer: is it working as a marketin vehicle for tripwolf?
Claude makes a good point about companies that use their business name but don't display a human name.
I think its one of the downsides of Twitter and that it can be impersonal.
My Twitter is Travelrants but it displays my full name, so people know who I am.
If it's a team of people Twitting then that's more difficult do I suppose, but like Claude I like to know peoples real name.
The same thing annoys me about people who comment on blogs and use their business name (or SEO keywords) instead of their name.
Kevin,
Suggest you send a link to John Bevan, he will understand the stuff.
Regards
Claude
Claude: I suspect he has seen it already.
Happy days Happy days! The pink company decides to get younger by using blogs and twitter. And instead of keep it quiet for a while and launch it slowly with more thinking and feedback, we already critisize the action. Funny enough the background of Twitter reminds me of when TUI used YouTube with this awful overly branded design.
Problem about names is we (bloggers) are individual driven by no companies or shareholders. When you socialize on behalf of a company, I am not sure it's good to put an employee's name down considering the size of Lastminute.
So when I read The Lastminute.com team, I read we are unsure to put individual names on the social community (just yet).
Let's be more patient.
Guillaume
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