AJ Vaynerchuk

Here is a quick little story highlighting why Twitter can be a great asset for most businesses:

Story starts off with this tweet:

I have been using the food delivery service foodler for a few months now and have had nothing but great experiences. The service makes ordering food SUPER easy, and that is obviously something that is worth while for me. A few days after that tweet I received an @reply from a competitor of Foodlers:

Grubhub did a great job of using Twitter Search to track tweets regarding their competitors. Instead of being sneaky and inauthentic, the company sent me a tweet from the company account with a nice message regarding their service. I went ahead and checked out the website and decided to give it a shot today. That right there just gave Grubhub business they would have never had before, and took away business that Foodler should have received. On top of that, Grubhub gave itself the opportunity to gain and “steal” a customer.

Unfortunately for Grubhub, their product was inferior. I don’t want to portray the service as being terrible, because it isn’t, but it just wasn’t on the same level as Foodler. The minimum order price was consistently higher than Foodlers, and the delivery time from this one order was nearly 45 minutes longer than my average Foodler order. On top of that, the personal account settings on Foodler outclass Grubhub’s.

So what did we learn here?

Grubhub did a wonderful job utilizing Twitter in a way that could have earned them a new customer. The problem was that their product wasn’t good enough to close the deal. If you are a company using Twitter in this manner, make sure your product is as good as you can make it. There are plenty of ways to improve GrubHub, and if the company were to implement some of these improvements, they can utilize Twitter even more so.

The following is a quick summary of an experience I just had regarding my site PleaseDressMe. If you are going to approach website owners / content owners with your service, DO NOT do anything listed below.

I received a Gchat request from someone I didn’t know. I accepted it just in case it was someone I actually did know.

The individual started off with “Thanks for accepting my chat request.” - That’s fine.

Then the individual states, “I can’t remember where i saw you first but it must have been linked to a cool application. Do you have an application for social networks?” - Really? You couldn’t take 5 seconds to figure out who I am and what my company is about?

A few minutes later the individual writes, “I see that you have a facebook app, have you made one for OpenSocial?” - Actually there is no PleaseDressMe Facebook application… yet

The individual then responds with: “Ok, when you have a facebook app, you should add it to company XYZ” - Well that was clearly a quick, well calculated pitch.

Please, please, please, please don’t follow this model. If you are going to approach someone with a business proposal of sorts take the time to know who they are, what their website is about, and how you can actually help them. The individual who approached me did no preparation, and offered no reason as to why their site would actually benefit me. I had no idea what the site was and why I should invest my time into it.