Jesse Engle, chief executive of Co-Tweet, says his product provides a front-end for businesses on Twitter to reach their customers much more efficiently.
In the so-called Twitter ecosystem, competition to supply the next killer Twitter app is rife. But the ecosystem’s inhabitants—spin-off companies, such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, which provide tools for Twitter users to analyse, track and organise their tweets in more meaningful ways—are finding revenues hard to come by. The market for these third-party developer tools mirrors the market for the majority of online content: plenty of users; little or no inclination to pay.
Despite attracting 190 million visitors every month, Twitter itself still hasn’t figured out the best strategy for turning all those visits into revenues. Earlier this year, the micro-blogging site started to include paid-for messages in its search results, much to the chagrin of users. In 2009, leaked minutes from an internal strategy briefing were published, revealing Twitter’s desire to generate a dollar per year from every user. A more acceptable strategy, many in the tech community maintain, is to forget about consumers and focus solely on business users of the service.
That’s exactly the strategy of third-party offering Co-Tweet, which launched in 2009. Co-Tweet provides a dedicated platform, or front-end, for brands to communicate more efficiently with customers through Twitter, says co-founder and CEO Jesse Engle. A key benefit of the tool is its ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts, as well as allowing different employees to share the same account. The ability to assign tweets to different team members, schedule particular tweets for publication at different times and track the progress of different conversations, allows Co-Tweet to act as a real-time customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
Engle says Co-Tweet’s value as a CRM device is in part down to its development in collaboration with key customers, such as Microsoft, Ford and Pepsi. “We’re learning nuances every day about how companies use it more effectively,” says Engle. “What we started to see from enterprises is that they needed work groups that could share information, make notes on user’s profiles, and send tweets back and forth.”
Companies pay $1,500 a month for access to Co-Tweet, a revenue stream deemed solid enough to persuade email marketing firm ExactTarget to pay a reported $8.1m for the company in March. It appears Twitter has been watching Co-Tweet carefully. The former revealed part of its own plan to leverage the business market late last year, announcing a feature designed for corporate accounts called “contributors”, which allows multiple users to tweet from the same account—a tool central to both Co-Tweet and rival Hootsuite’s models.
Is Twitter starting to cannibalise its own ecosystem? Some in the industry seem to think so. Responding to Twitter’s decision to limit third-party advertising apps, US angel investor Chris Dixon tweeted: “Twitter is like a drunk guy with an uzi killing partners left and right”. He later added: “Expect investment in ecosystem to drop significantly.”
Engle denies suggestions that Twitter is treading on Co-Tweet’s toes. “Twitter’s financial plans are account verification, analytics, enhanced profiles and a contributor feature,” he says. “It’s not clear what the pricing will be.” He says he isn’t aware of any plans for Twitter to “get into CRM”, which in any case “would be foolish”, because it’s “heavy lifting to get the value. They can create an ad platform, they can create other things for businesses that help them drive business. [But] they don’t have any plans to get into CRM.”
Despite an apparent lack of interest in CRM, Twitter came very close to buying Co-Tweet, says Engle. Twitter CEO Evan Williams set up a meeting with Co-Tweet’s board just as they were closing a funding round, last summer. “We educated them on how companies were using Twitter. They liked our philosophy on how we thought businesses should use it.” In the end, though, says Engle, “they decided we were more valuable as an example of a company that was building a business on top of their platform.”
Using social media as a CRM tool is a strategy still in its infancy. There are many brands, admits Engle, particularly those owned by larger companies, who see CRM as a necessary evil—they keep customer service reps “in a basement without windows,” he says. More switched-on CEOs “think of customer service as an extension of marketing. Arguably it’s the best form of marketing,” he says. “Everyone knows no company is perfect all the time. It’s how the company responds to those problems when they occur that makes all the difference.”
Twitter of course, allows a real-time response to those problems. But it remains to be seen whether companies, and their customers, want to expand the use of social media in customer relations. “I don’t know of any company that’s said it’s going to do all of its customer support through Twitter,” he says. At the moment, adds Engle, “it doesn’t make sense. You can’t really do it effectively. Companies have said, ‘we’re going to make this a channel that customers can reach us through, and then hand it off to call centre processes they already have in place. We have yet to see how [social media driven CRM] scales.”
He says Co-Tweet isn’t necessarily about routing all customer service enquiries through Twitter, but about making the enquiries that do come in through the platform as efficient as possible. He cites US airline Jet Blue as an example. Jet Blue found it was receiving a number of repeat questions from customers, which the 11 reps manning the Twitter account were having to copy and paste text from a Word document in order to answer. “We built a function within Co-Tweet called Snippits to allow a team to share a database of answers to frequently asked questions,” says Engle. “So now you hit a button to respond to that FAQ.”
He says the goal is not to “turn Twitter into bot-land”, but to make the process of CRM as efficient as possible. The ultimate objective is for Co-Tweet to automatically analyse the content of tweets and “tee up the most appropriate answer, so the best-suggested response is already there and the customer services rep just has to press send.”
Engle says he is inspired by social media’s palpable effect on corporate behaviour. His clients are not dragged “kicking and screaming” to social media, he says. In fact, quite the opposite. “The people who are empowered in organisations to make this change are earnestly trying to do the right thing. That is incredibly exciting—to see businesses realising that good behaviour is good business.”
Engle isn’t naïve enough to think his work is done, however. “The world is full of examples of businesses doing bad things behind a veil of secrecy, but that’s getting harder and harder to do.”
Some firms opt out altogether, of course, BP being a high-profile example. “I wont even touch how bad their PR has been in general, but in social media they have been non-existent.” The worry is, he says, that “people come in to fill that vacuum, people that they would probably prefer didn’t fill that vacuum.” Engle is referring to a spoof BP PR account on Twitter. “160,000 followers and they are not even there to defend themselves. The missed opportunity for BP in social media is astounding.” Engle, at least, knows an opportunity when he sees one.
