Twitter Take-Out For Financial Services Marketers

The “art of the possible” is one of my favorite expressions. It’s an apt description of the work of financial services marketers who work in highly regulated and otherwise controlled environments.

Is Twitter.com is one of the many social media sites blocked at your company? We encourage you to work with your Compliance and IT leadership to find a way to be able to access Twitter and other social media sites at work. Participating in Twitter in real-time is the authentic experience, and our fervent hope is that you can someday fly like the Twitter bird.

(What’s Twitter? Some of you might have that question. Twitter is a means of posting content online in 140 characters—called microblogging because the posts are blog-like but with a finite character count. You'll find a lot of information on Twitter--which is experiencing phenomenal mainstream growth in 2009--on the Web. To start to learn about it, see the Wikipedia entry for the background and the current state of Twitter. Soon you'll be ready to move on to the Twitter wiki.)

Until the day when there’s peace in the world and social media sites are freely accessible by financial services marketers, Rock The Boat Marketing is introducing a new feature: a running Twitter summary of our RockTheBoatMKTG tweets. Think of it as Twitter take-out--if you can't go to it, we'll bring it to you.

IMPORTANT: While this feed is similar to the tweets (Twitter posts) streaming on Twitter.com, it is being published separate and apart from Twitter. If you are able to reach this site, you should be able to click on any of these links without impunity. (To economize on the characters used, I use the bit.ly service to shorten the URLs of content I point to. One advantage of this service is that it provides a preview of the Web site the link will take you to. See the illustration below.)

Twitter is a rich, ragged real-time stream. This skinny one-poster Twitter feed is the antithesis of Twitter’s real value. But I use the RockThe BoatMKTG account to call attention to less perishable Web content so any delay in your reading the feed (assuming that you don’t make yourself a stranger—another one of my favorite expressions) should be within an acceptable range.

With this digest we’re acknowledging that you can’t fight every battle right now but we don’t want you to miss information you could benefit from. As I've described previously (see the #6 entry on A Belated Valentine for 10 Sites You Could Learn to Love), Twitter provides a powerful way of keeping up.

What this Twitter feed can't replicate is the power Twitter has to connect us--especially marketers--directly with the audiences we need to better understand. An accessible, approachable community of your customers and prospects is what's waiting for you once you successfully appeal your gag order.

Enjoy and check back often, until you don't have to.