The tweets and links

Clicking on the promoted trend ‘Red Cross Join Us’ shows up the latest Red Cross tweet with other users’ tweets underneath related to the promoted trend. During the time the ad ran the Red Cross featured the two tweets shown above.

The call to action in the first tweet is a little odd as ‘donating’ tweets will be a new concept to most people but, on the other hand, it sounds like a very easy ask that should have been good for user engagement. I was pretty surprised that they used bit.ly to shorten their link considering that the URL shortening service makes the stats on their short URLs publicly available. Still, it’s helpful for those of us that want to take a look at the effectiveness of their campaign. Taking a look at the stats we can see that the bit.ly link was clicked on, at the time of writing, around 500 times. So far, not so good.

The second tweet was a much more traditional marketing message asking people to sign up for Red Cross Month activity. Although this shortened link seems not to have been done using the bit.ly service, adding a ‘+’ symbol to the tweet reveals that the URL is still using the service which means that we can also get stats on the number of clicks. The data shows that this link was clicked on, at the time of writing, just over 1750 times.

Which is how many conversions?

These figures are, I’m sure you’ll agree, fairly paltry considering the expenditure and exposure but lets drill a little bit deeper. If we aggregate the clicks from these two links and assume a very generous 10% conversion rate for the two calls to action we end up with less than 250 conversions. Assuming a more realistic conversion rate of around 2% we only get around 50 conversions.

So what went wrong and what went right?

If the American Red Cross paid full price for their promoted trend they can’t help but be disappointed with the result. However, one thing they will have got in spades is brand recognition. Sitting on the top of the Twitter trends list for 24 hours is absolutely great for promoting their brand and their campaign.

What I did find a little odd was that the promoted trend was visible to someone who was viewing the top London trends. It seems to me that targeting UK Twitter users with a promoted trend aimed primarily at those in the States would elicit a far lower response rate and deliver a lower return on investment. I did also find that the Red Cross Month landing page left a lot to be desired. There is a lot of dense copy and the calls to action are barely distinguishable from the overwhelming torrent of text which can’t have helped their conversion rates.

Most puzzling of all to me is why they chose to go with such a stale promoted trend: ‘Red Cross Join Us’. The most popular trends are always the ones that demand participation from Twitter users. For example, two popular trends in London today were ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’ [sic] and ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’. Both wouldn’t be mentioned by most Twitter users without adding some of their own thoughts. This is their viral quality.

As you can see in the chart above from trendistic.com, the Red Cross’ trend barely outperformed ‘#thingsthedevilinvented’ and woefully underperformed compared to ‘#thatswhyyourmyex’.

Even if the Red Cross got the promoted trend for free the data still suggests that they squandered an absolutely fantastic opportunity. Not many charities will have the cash to try to do right what the Red Cross did wrong but their failings can and should be learnt from and act as a stark reminder to charities that digital campaigns need to be more than just set and forget. These days our audiences demand interaction, vitality and originality. And so should we.

Update: After I posted this story up on Twitter I was contacted by a member of the American Red Cross' social media team who said that my points were 'well taken' but that they 'did [their] best with 1 hour's notice'.  As I suspected this means that it was a last minute campaign and that they were probably gifted some distress space by Twitter at short notice.  However, I think there are still some valuable lessons to be learnt including optimising trends for user engagement.

Image: R Philipson (Flickr)

Lots of sites are still using bad security questions and it's an easy way to get your account swiped. Common questions like 'what is the name of your pet?' and 'what is your mother's maiden name?' are actually pretty easy to get the answers to. Friends with your mum on a social network or like to tweet about your cat? Yeah, you're busted.

The way to get around this is simply to use your imagination. I always pick the 'what is the name of your pet?' question because I don't actually have a pet but I do have an imaginary dog. Only I know his name and since he's not real he never appears in photos on Facebook or does something cute I need share on Twitter. He is my imaginary password recovery dog and you shouldn't wait until Christmas to get one.

4. Use KeePass and go crazy with the long passwords

If you don't have an imagination or you do and your imaginary dog is called "password" you can use the program KeePass to securely hold a list of passwords and even generate random ones for you. KeePass has one master password which allows you to copy and paste your other passwords into your browser. This way you only need to remember one password so you can make the others as complicated and as unhackable as you want.

3. Don't let your online accounts go solo

Where possible, always link a secondary email address to an account. Gmail lets you do it and it's a great idea. Even if your password gets compromised it can be possible to get your account back this way. And since another password secured account is safer than a security question you're better off having it this way. Just don't have the same password for your primary and secondary email addresses.

2. The password is dead! Long live the passphrase!

A password (emphasis on 'word') can be brute forced especially if your password is a word in the dictionary. Far more difficult to get at are passwords that are strings of words put together - passphrases. A string of random words is tricky to remember but if you pick a sentence it's much easier to recall. "ThisIsMyExcellentWorkPassword" with some numbers and punctuation in it is actually a pretty good password.

1. Hack yourself

My recent article, 'How I hacked my own life', showed that there is a staggering array of information available about you on the internet. I found pretty much everything I needed in order to give someone a good shot at cracking open some of my online events.

Only by actively trying to hack your accounts can you really be sure how it easy it is to get into them and only by looking through your public social media presences can you know what information you've divulged that might be used to crack open your online world.

Next week I lay into the 3 most irritating ads of 2009. Subscribe via RSS to make sure that you don't miss out.

Image: Matt Hamm (Flickr)

Twitter's growth has been exponential over the last year with an ever increasing army of people and brands joining the service's ranks of microbloggers. The reason for its growth is undoubtedly down to Twitter's simplicity and the way in which it allows users to receive each other's updates without entering into anything approaching the social bind of a 'friendship'; the system employed by the networking behemoths Facebook and Myspace. If you're interested in what someone's saying then you can 'follow' them and hear more and when you get tired of them you can sever your ties without the slightest twinge of social guilt.

Technology businesses have naturally been some of the first and most effective to use Twitter as a platform for brand awareness and consumer engagement. Dell Outlet UK, the arm of Dell that sells its cut-price returned and refurbished computers regularly tweets about new offers and deals. This is a win-win situation as consumers get alerted to money saving offers and Dell harnesses the power of the microblog to create an exclusive club of potential customers who are privy to the best deals and are actually more likely to purchase them because of the implied scarcity of products offered only to a minority of people.

Twitter has also allowed businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them. 5 years ago a customer might have called or emailed their friends to tell them what terrible customer service they had received; a complaint that would have cut the company out of the loop. But now that same customer might tweet about their bad experience and, as Twitter updates are publicly viewable, the company can not only listen to the complaint but also respond to it.

Indeed, Southwest Airlines recently received a slew of free advertising for spotting a tweet by a technology journalist who was dissatisfied with the company's communication regarding his canceled flight. A representative of the airline got in touch with the journalist to smooth things out and the result was a widely read article praising Southwest Airlines' use of Twitter as a customer engagement tool that hit all the major social media news portals.

In the current employment market Twitter has also become a tool of finding work. The social media site mashable.com recently ran an article on finding a job on Twitter and reports seem to suggest that many people have been successful. With the right tweets, retweets and followers it seems like Twitter really can get you a job although this also means that those still in the market for a job should take care of what they say on Twitter as employers are now sure to be watching potential employee's accounts as closely as their blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Facebook activity.

Correctly harnessed then, Twitter can be an unrivaled tool for brand awareness, customer engagement and personal gain but all would do well to remember that Twitter now has the power to make and break reputations and businesses and it would be prudent to plan your engagement strategy before joining one of the world's fastest growing networks.