Yesterday I talked about how broadcasting – contrary to popular belief – can be a very effective strategy on Twitter. I gave two examples – Amazonmp3 and Whole Recipes – and decided I should provide a few more over the coming weeks. So today I thought I’d highlight another in woot.com, which is a pretty cool company anyway you look at it.
Woot.com, in their own words, is “an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap.” What’s different about it is that the company sells one new item every day, and it stays up for 24 hours or until it sells out. For example, today’s offer is a Gateway computer – if you want one better get it before they’re all gone. And before I get to the Twitter account, you know how people argue all companies need to be nice, provide good customer service and all that? Check out there “what is woot?” page. Hilarious. Among other things, no you cannot talk to a live person, you can post a question on the board but there is no guarantee they will respond, there is no customer support, you can’t return anything, and if you think there’s a problem the product it’s probably your fault – so just Google it (though if you dig far enough defective products can be returned).
So basically they do everything most people recommend against, while attracting tons of traffic and customers – and tied to my underlying argument, their twitter account follows the same “against the grain” model. What they do each day is broadcast the deal -period. No @replies, no RTs, no conversations, just the deal. And they have 1,268,731 followers – good for #51 on the twitterholic rankings, right after the Zappos CEO (who as I’ve noted before, is a broadcaster himself). And what’s interesting is that even though they’re not “really” engaged, a lot of their customers are – you can check out some of the comments and stats here. Wikipedia highlights a variety of things that customers have contributed over time – status checkers, widgets, bots, etc. And if you dig through an @woot search on Twitter, there’s lots of people promoting their various sales for them.
Now Woot might be a bit of an extreme case – but I would argue a lot of the examples from the “other side” of Twitter (extremely active, conversational, “always on all the time”) are extreme cases as well. For woot, broadcasting seems to work – and it’s an approach that makes sense given what the company does. And I’d also argue many companies could learn a lot from them…
(side note on Woot – check out this interesting “treatise” on whether or not they’re an indicator of financial stability).
