Choosing Twitter over Email to engage customers

Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the follower can ‘unsubscribe’ (or unfollow) without any fear that the company will override or lose the unsub request.
To my mind, the biggest problem with Twitter for B2C communication is the 140 character limit. On the other hand, it means that companies need to be clear in their language and concise in their tweets. Maybe the limited space is actually a feature not a bug.

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This morning I got spam about college basketball – Subject: Inside: your ESPN Tourney Guide. That’s anything but unusual, but this spam got through my spam filters and into my inbox. That’s a rare enough event that I’m already annoyed before I click on the mail in order to mark it as spam.
Wait a second, the spam claims to be from Adobe. And it’s sent to a tagged address that I only gave to Adobe. Sure enough, it’s Adobe and ESPN co-branded spam about college basketball sent to an Adobe list.
Down at the bottom of the email there’s a blob of tiny illegible text, in very pale grey on white. Buried in there is an opt-out link: “If you’d prefer not to receive e-mail like this from Adobe in the future, please click here to unsusbscribe“.
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