To get this week’s Marketing Minute off to a rockin’ start, please click here to enjoy the intro to one of the most fun songs ever recorded, "Rockin' Robin," performed by Bobby Day. (You might want to turn down the volume or plug in the headset if the boss is around.)
What a great song. It's also a great lead in to this week’s Marketing Minute as we delve into the question on the minds of many businesses, “What is this Twitter thing all about and why should I care?”

The answer lies in a single word: “engagement,” or the process of drawing your customers into a relationship built around a conversation. That’s what social media is all about, really – engaging in a conversation with your customers. Okay, so if engagement is the key, let’s think now about the more traditional opportunities for engaging your customer. Mostly there is a physical element to it. They have to come in, call, encounter you at a business meeting and so on. Even if you were to do the engagement thing all the time – something no one has the time to do – there will always be people you never get to engage simply due to limitations of time and space.

Ah … now is it becoming clearer? Twitter and other social media outlets allow you to engage your audience on an ongoing, persistent basis without the limits of time or space. It even allows the conversation to go viral (as we say) by having what you said “re-Tweeted” to other people you probably don’t even know. Arguably, among the various social media tools available, none is as purely conversational as Twitter with its fairly informal exchange of ideas and perspectives that mimic a live conversation.

The key word here is conversation. Ever get into a pointless and deadly dull conversation? Typically it’s the ones where the topic is “Me, me, me. I, I, I.” While we may suffer through it, we definitely are not going to feel engaged and we will probably do everything we can to avoid, not engage, that person in the future. By contrast, good conversationalists focus not on what is interesting to them, but what is interesting to you. It’s called quality content, and in the world of successful social media, success is ALL about quality content. It’s also about listening.

In next week’s Marketing Minute, we’ll go into the details of what quality content is, and where you should go within your organization to produce it.

So until next week we say, “Blow Rockin’ Robin ‘cause we’re really gonna rock tonight! Tweet! Tweet!”