Social Media Guerilla

Dell Outlet Twitter Campaign Duplicable???

Guerilleros, my sincere apologies for completely abandoning this community for almost 3 months. Hopefully you were able to survive without my guerilla tips 😉

In fact, from the Feedburner notifications I’ve been receiving, traffic to the SMGuerilla was not badly damaged. So let’s address that right now.

Recycling Ideas Make Them Fresh?

No, of course not – just like Recyclables are still trash, despite their higher value. But a wise man once said that there are no original ideas, so I’m putting my recycled Guerilla strategy to the test.

I’m sure you heard about the impressive success that @DellOutlet generated: over $2 million in sales from Twitter alone.

Great, huh?

Here’s the challenge

Can the same be done for an Online Fashion Boutique?

I’ve created an @Outlet account for them and fired up all of the inventory they had put aside for “liquidation”.

The next step was to create a special coupon (in this case, tweet10) to serve two purposes:

1 – Tracking (of course, Analytics helps too)

2 – Exclusivity (only followers have access to these great deals).

Here’s where things go a little South:

The company prefers their sales staff focused on “more important things than Twitter”.

Can Twitter create revenue?

Is Twitter A New Sales Platform?

The real reason behind Dell’s success was that they had a real person tweeting, interacting, and actually performing extensive customer service work. They shifted the focus off Dell and started retweeting quotes, participating on #followfriday, and answering @replies.

But is it the real reason? Or was Dell simply the 1st big corporation to try such strategy and benefit off of novelty?

Here’s where my guerilla suspicions come from:

• None of the deals were actually that much cheaper or exclusive
• Dell.com/outlet existed prior to the twitter account

Our Strategy

While the sales staff is focused on more important stuff, and since they’ve paid me for all the work upfront, I decided to run without them.

• My software is updating their outlet account with offers every 10-15 min –
• All offers point straight to the final sales page with that specific item on display.
• We go in once or twice a day to check for @replies.

Here are the stats after 10 days of campaign:

• 114 Visits from Twitter.com
• 69 followers (as of 2/17 at 12:35am)

Considering their usual traffic source is PPC, 114 visits would cost $45.6 (at a cheap $.40 bid).

So even if the campaign turns out less than ideal, they’re at least looking at a cheaper traffic source.

What about you?

What do you think it’s going to happen to this automated Twitter sales process?

Leave your comments!!!