I have seen several articles recently about how Dell made $3 million using Twitter (How Dell Generated $3 million in Sales Using Twitter, Social Media ROI: Dell's $3m on Twitter and Four Better Examples).  Interestingly enough, the articles stress that having the $3 million in sales is not the most important thing that Dell is doing, but rather a good result to a much bigger strategy.  The important thing Dell is doing is customer communications.  They are actually listening to their customers.  They listen for their complaints and listen for their ideas and then they interact with their customers by replying to them.  Customers love it when a company responds to them.  By building a constantly growing base of customers, Dell is earning more respect.  So it is no wonder that when they started posting promotions on Twitter they generated a lot of sales.

It is important to note that even though Dell was able measure a hard ROI of sales that came directly from Twitter, there is a more difficult measure called "soft" ROI that no doubt led to the hard ROI.  The soft ROI is measured in things like fewer support personel required to take phone calls, the value of an online community that openly discusses a company's products or services, and the value of forums where people can search for answers rather than waiting on hold for a customer rep on the phone.  I think if you can build the soft ROI's, then the hard ROI's will be easy to create.

Definition 6 is an interactive marketing agency that can help companies start with the basics to build up a strong and powerful customer base using social media and then help to start generating hard ROI's.  We can help you with your long term strategy rather than just focusing on getting a company Twitter account up and running.  Just having the account is not going to help you generate revenue or customer loyalty.  It is how you use that account that will accomplish those.