What did you think you would be when you grew up? I don’t know about you, but my dream job wasn’t centered around a pizza place when I was growing up. Then again, I never imagined a pizza job would involve spending your day on Twitter either.
Pizza Hut surprised a few people out there when they announced that they wanted to try a “Twintern” over last summer, but the company has been so impressed with the contribution this job has made to their business, that they’ve now hired Alexa Robinson in a full-time position as their “Tweetologist”. It’s probably not the job her mother thought she would have either, but I bet that Alexa is having fun at work.
The whole concept of using Twitter as a full-time job had me curious, so I went and took a look at the Pizza Hut presence on Twitter. There are the random comments about weather and basic social commentary in these Tweets, as you would expect, but there are also promotion of new products, promotions of other pizza hut online locations, and even vast amounts of customer service being done.
Before I looked it up, I predicted the promotions, both of products and services, but apparently I overlooked the ability to use this tool as a customer service engine. And I felt a little silly for doing so. It just goes to prove that we already have notions on how these social networking tools can work, just a few years into having them.
So, if we ditch the conventional ideas, where can we go with social networking and with SEO practices? Sometimes it takes special people to think outside the box, but I tend to believe that we can all tap into that ability now and again. Someone at Pizza Hut sure did it.
There are other times where the idea you have for increasing traffic to your business may seem mundane. Amazon announced a textbook trade in program, which seems like a no-brainer for me. Then again, I come from a world where learning and trading books seems like an everyday occurrence. Who knew that Amazon didn’t do this before? But it is brilliant, because this will drive more traffic to their site and their business overall. Twitter decided to improve their mobile site. Again, this isn’t a something that makes us stop and wonder about it, it seems like an obvious choice for Twitter, but the better their mobile site is, the more they drive traffic away from third party sites.
Effective SEO and social media marketing doesn’t have to be ideas that seem like they are in left field to be effective, but sometimes in business we forget to follow the dots.