Brand Interviews

Our first case study in this series comes from Intuit, a software company for small business and personal finance, with brands such as QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Quicken.

How has your brand been successful using Twitter?

We look at our success in Twitter in a few ways. First, are we learning what works and what doesn’t within the context of Twitter? For example, are we learning about what topics are most interesting to our followers so we can share more in the future? We’re definitely winning with this one using a variety of measurement tools to understand what topics are re-tweeted, shared and/or have driven an increase in followers. Second, we’re learning what works in terms of promotion. We launched @intuitdeals, for example, because we wanted to allow our @intuit account to focus on topics that small business owners care about and not excessive promotion. That said, we know a lot of people want to know about our deals, so we created a special account to handle that.

I think a critical challenge we all face is the real-time nature of Twitter and of customers’ expectations. We have a saying here at Intuit that is “be where your customers are or beware.” We’re seeing an increasing number of customers asking for our help on a variety of topics within Twitter, and we’re working hard to get the right folks on board internally so we can respond as quickly as possible.

Brand management is changing not only because of Twitter. Twitter is an outcome of a move toward openness, collaboration and instant access to information. It’s also an outcome of the increased trust people have for each other relative to large organizations. Brands have to adjust, fast, to how customers want to interact. Brands and brand managers have to learn how to love conversation again and how to listen more and talk less. But, the reality is, this is great news for brand managers. It’s exciting to have real-time engagement with real customers or prospects who have real problems our products can solve. We can, and have, gotten a lot better at how we talk about our products and how our products work because of this fast interaction.

Acecdote

“The Intuit small business team joined Twitter in early April [2008] after adding Twitter talk to its audit of the online conversation. We were surprised by the quantity of talk in Twitter relative to quantity in other online communities/places. We also saw a higher negative sentiment in Twitter than in other online communities. This is not unusual – as we’ve learned over the years, if you’re not part of the conversation, it’s easy for the conversation to be negative. We joined the conversation in Twitter, helping QuickBooks customers with questions, answering prospects’ questions about our products and sharing relevant small business information. With just engagement, no changes to products, price or policy, we decreased negative sentiment by 30% over three months.”

@Intuit is the primary Twitter handle for their small business division.

Kira Wampler, Social Media Marketing leader at Intuit, @kirasw

Also, check out Intuit's Brand Channel on OpenBrands.