As the new social media trend of the Web turned from Facebook to Twitter, Intuit quickly entered the fight with a turbocharged TurboTax Twitter campaign. The banner, born out of a strategic partnership with Twitter and Google, smooths tax-time stress by streaming real-time, dynamic feedback straight from the TurboTax Twitter account. The response was good for Intuit and perhaps bad for Microsoft. While the TurboTax Twitter account was a clever idea, the way in which it was rolled out – to customers without the knowledge or input of the original TurboTax creators – was less than desirable.
The problem with the way in which TurboTax touts its Twitter service comes down to two things: the way in which it advertises it and the way that customers are taught to tweet. In other words, with no educating the user on the basic uses of Twitter – how to send the right message, how to respond to certain questions – and then instructing the customer on how to reply to other users makes the whole process rather illogical. And the same goes for the way in which the tool is marketed to individuals. It’s difficult to imagine an advertising campaign that would be so poorly conceived. What follows are some observations on the manner in which the marketing strategy of Turbo Tax (as presented on the TurboTax website) and its Twitter application were misconstrued.
To begin with, the way that the website was promoted – through a series of video links on the right-hand side of the home page – seemed designed to encourage people to click on those links in order to gain more information about Turbo Tax. Indeed, the promotional strategy did seem to work because a number of people clicked on those links, but that actually created a deeper problem. Because those who clicked on the video links were told to “tweet” about the Turbo Tax website, they were in effect given the instruction to tweet about anything – and that extends to their use of social media in general. Given that this was the main selling point of the website, this was a bad idea.
Because those who retweeted the Twitter links to the Turbo Tax website were instructed to tweet about anything and everything that came up on Twitter, what they did was basically create an enormous clutter of retweets. Because every time a new tweet appeared – which was likely to come up within the first few minutes of being tweeted – someone in the crowd was bound to retweet it. The end result was a great deal of traffic to a single Twitter account – but this was definitely one set-up for disaster. Because if someone in the crowd decided to follow the account, they were effectively locking their followers out. Once a follower decided to follow a tweet from the” Turbo Tax Twitter” account, all of the following tweets from that person’s followers were ignored, and if that person didn’t follow their own followers back in time, they were kicked out of the Twitter community as well.
Of course, those who followed the Twitter links from the Turbo Tax YouTube video couldn’t help but see the video and click on the Twitter links for the videos. But what happened next is what really created a firestorm. When the YouTube video went viral, so too did the Twitter traffic. And of course, this only meant that the “Turbo Tax Twitter” account was suddenly flooded with numerous followers. The problem was that because the “Turbo Tax Twitter” account was so quickly and violently promoted on Twitter – many people and businesses that were legitimately following the Twitter movement saw their followers get added to the “Turbo Tax Twitter” list.
Indeed, it is understandable that the video may have had some correlation to those who followed the link on Twitter, but when you look at the real number of people who followed the Turbo Tax video, there simply wasn’t enough to “flood the channel”. This does not mean that the “Turbo Tax Twitter” business model or program was wrong, but rather that there were better options available to follow and promote. It is all just a reminder that when using social media – it is important to follow your target audience. And, no matter how fast and easy-to-use Twitter is, you still need to be able to control your message and not drown it with unrelated tweets. This means that if you are promoting a Turbo Tax video, you should stick to speaking directly to the viewer and leave all of the bells and whistles for your customer.