Accounting firms can use Twitter effectively

Our 100th post is a guest post by Debbie Andrews, Owner and Managing director of Marketri, a provider of outsourced marketing services in Doyleston PA.

Are you charged with Marketing the services of an accounting firm?

Are you looking for innovative ways to leverage technology in order to reach more clients & prospects?

If so, your Accounting firm should be on Twitter. Twitter is a great tool for B2B organisations that leverage it properly.

Many of firms out there think of Twitter as just another electronic billboard. This is so far from the truth. After only a few months, it's those same organisations that tell you that "Twitter doesn't work for B2B businesses". They are 100% correct. Using Twitter as an electronic billboard doesn't work! In this article we are going to provide accounting firms with a few tips for using Twitter effectively.

Accounting firms use Twitter to promote services

Does your accounting firm offer audit services, litigation support, business valuations, tax planning & compliance services, mergers & acquisitions, business consulting, or employee benefit plan audits? If so, then you have A LOT of educating to do.

Having a B2B blog for your accountancy practice would be a great way to educate clients and prospects about your services. After you publish each article, you can hop onto your Twitter account and tweet each new article. You can then engage your followers in discussions around the article based on those who ReTweet it & provide comments. Twitter is an AMAZING tool for sharing relevant and valuable content with your clients & prospects.

As an added bonus, the more educational the material you produce, the higher you will rank on search engines and the more prospects you'll be able to add to the top of your sales funnel.

Accountancy practices use Twitter to provide tax tips

Corporate and personal tax law seems to be constantly changing, which means most business owners and private clients cannot keep up. These people are looking to hire an Account that is knowledgeable on current tax law.

By taking the time to provide tax tips, tax advice, and links to relevant tax-related articles on Twitter, you will get your services in front of more prospects than you would without using it. Twitter is a great tool for connecting with total strangers, turning them into friends, and ultimately from friends into clients. By providing those strangers with helpful information through Twitter, you may find that you have many more clients come tax time next year.

Accounting Firms use Twitter to educate B2B clients on the latest industry news

Just as your Accounting firm should be taking time to educate your clients and prospects on the latest corporate tax laws, Twitter is also a great tool for educating them on ALL of the latest industry news (that's directly relevant to the services you offer).

New technologies coming out to help protect organisations from cyber fraud? Tweet about it. Tighter corporate audit regulations on the way? Tweet about it. Upcoming changes to health and safety laws effecting businesses? Tweet about it.

Use Twitter as your primary tool for sharing information and providing opinions on industry-related information. This will position you as a leader in your space as it shows just how up-to-date your accounting firm is with everything going on in the Accounting Industry.

(Editor's note - Look up the services of The Marketing Eye's client Bizezia if you want a source of regular industry news for your website.)

Is your Accounting practice using Twitter?

Is your Accounting practice using Twitter? How has it been working for you? Have you been using Twitter in the ways described above OR are you using Twitter in other interesting ways?

Please share your stories with The Marketing Eye and Marketri community by leaving a comment below. If you're not using Twitter at your Accounting Firm yet, get on board as soon as possible (ask The Marketing Eye or Marketri for advice if you need it). Twitter is a very effective marketing tool for B2B organisations who use it properly.

Social media for Accountants: an opportunity for publicity or a threat to your practice?

Martin Pollins, founder of Bizezia and a client of The Marketing Eye, shares his thoughts on the use of social media by professional services firms.

Earlier this month, Ryan Babel became the first Premiership footballer to be fined for 'inappropriate' use of his Twitter account. To bring this issue closer to home for the professional services community, accountant Paul Chambers lost his job and was fined £385 when he jokingly tweeted he would blow up an airport back in November 2010.

In their effort to keep up with the times, people launch themselves into using social media without any clear idea of 'why'. Accountants are no different. Paul Chambers' defence is evidence of the naivety still present when using social media, he said: "It did not cross my mind that Robin Hood (airport) would ever look at Twitter, or take it seriously, because it was innocuous hyperbole."

The fact is, people are taking it seriously, and this can work to your benefit as long as you approach it in the right way.

Mark Lee, former chairman of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, is now one of the most networked professionals in the UK. He runs 3 professional networks, has 3 blogs and has long been active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, accountingweb and ecademy - he is living proof that it works

And accountants shouldn't believe that their clients and prospects don't use it, A

new study has shown that the over 50's are adopting social media faster than the younger generation and they are three times more likely than the average 50+ person to earn £50,000 or more.

Like anything new, there are a few things to remember when setting out. Here is a short list of do's and don'ts that should be considered before embarking on a practice social media account.

The list includes:

• Do set clear communication objectives and question whether your 'posts' are working towards them.
• Don't start a Twitter account, LinkedIn or Facebook page for your firm and then forget about it.
• Do communicate clearly and consistently
• Don't make spontaneous or ill-informed posts
• Do consider creating a social media policy.

Social media is both an opportunity and a threat, it just depends how you use it. Like any form of communication you need to have a clear objective in mind, communicate simply and stay consistent.

Notes

• Bizezia provides high quality website marketing applications and practice management tools to professional services firms. Bizezia's products are designed to make business easier and encourage people to to visit a firm's website through the provision of relevant and up-to-date content.

Forget digital domicile, it's social domicile that counts

Earlier this month Matt White posted on the topic of digital natives and digital immigrants and sparked some lively discussion from people born on both sides of the age divide. (I am, by some considerable margin, a digital immigrant).

In many respects, Prensky’s concept can be applied to any period in modern history. We have been adapting to the constant march of technology since the days of the industrial revolution and one has to ask if there is anything fundamentally different about this latest evolution in our development.

The identification of a new socio-demographic group is, after all, only useful if it gives us fresh insight into behaviours or likely future trends.

Norman Tebbit once famously argued that the test of how well one has adopted a new homeland is which cricket team is supported when the current meet the former. To apply the analogy here, how many digital immigrants would support a fax over email or a set of encyclopedias over the Internet? By this test, immigrants we may be, but our longing for a distant digital place of birth has long since been left behind.

As immigrants too, those of us born before 1980 have become naturally attuned to finding information on a website or working out how a new mobile phone works with little or no need for instruction. Partly a victory for good design, this also demonstrates our rapid naturalisation.

To see any fundamental differences in the natives and immigrants of Prensky’s study, therefore, is difficult. Those of us born before 1980 have become so comprehensively naturalised to a digital world that there is little to be gained by treating us differently for marketing purposes – or certainly no more than traditional demographic groupings would provide.

While the date is wrong, the concept does, however, provide some insight if it is brought forward a number of years.

The evolution of Prensky’s analysis would be to set the dividing line at around 1995 and ask whether one is a social native or social immigrant. The real generational gap is not in the use of digital technology per se, but in its use for communication, file sharing and networking.

When I left school, I had about a dozen friends that I could be readily in touch with. I knew where they lived and it was possible, but unlikely, that I had their telephone numbers written down. The passage of time has meant that this dozen has dwindled away to only one (I hasten to add that I’ve made some new friends along the way!).

As my daughter now reaches an age when she could technically leave school, she has more than 1,000 friends of Facebook. Some of these contacts will be a lot closer than others, but the point remains that she can follow their movements and get in touch with any one of them at a moment’s notice.

I doubt my daughter recognises the power of her network and certainly hasn’t built it with any sense of the future in mind, but imagine how useful this could be as these contacts become the lawyers, teachers, politicians and entrepreneurs of tomorrow: people she can turn to for jobs, advice, referrals or social interaction in a very speedy and natural way.

But we immigrants have not stood frozen in the lights. As social immigrants, we have not only strived to catch up, but have developed or monopolised certain networks and free resources of our own.

LinkedIn is positioned unashamedly for professionals that want to keep in touch and Twitter is dominated by 35 – 50 year olds who want to promote their businesses or demonstrate their pithy wit to a set of followers. Now we see new geo-location facilities such as Foursquare being harnessed by a more mature audience than their creators might have anticipated.

The immigrants’ use of these facilities might lack the natural behaviour of the social native, but we are embracing the technology and adapting it for our own purposes.

Which brings us to the terminology, for it is often the immigrant that recognises the opportunity in a new land and works hardest to prosper from it, while the native watches in the wings taking for granted what has always been around them.

So what does all this mean for marketers?

For marketers and businesses in general, the principle challenge when dealing with the social native is going to be how to make a commercial gain from a group that has come to expect so much for free.

Communications, music, video, news, research and games are all now accessible entirely free of charge. This is already proving itself to be unsustainable and we wait to see who is going to be brave enough to break the mould and how they will do it. With the notable exception of Google, advertising is not proving itself to be the answer.

Secondly, marketers shouldn’t forget that we have an aging population in the UK, in which the social immigrants are the largest group and the holders of the wealth. We need to continue to focus on this group and use available media appropriately to ensure its engagement with our brands.

2009: A year in review - and our predictions for 2010

2009 was a challenging year for marketers. This time last year we were talking about the collapse of Woolworth's and still recovering from the shock of Lehman Bros; the banking crisis was in full swing and we were surrounded by fear and uncertainty.

Fortunately, we seem to have been spared the worst fears of the naysayers. Whether this is because of, or despite, government intervention divides opinion and we will all get our chance to record our point of view in 2010.

In a tough and uncertain climate, marketers were called on to perform in a way that we haven't been for some time. The pressure for short-term, measurable results financed with slender budgets overpowered any sense of long-term planning and brand building. We rushed head-long into social media, not I suspect, because we knew how it would work, but because it was trendy and cheap.

In the office, we had to improve relationships with sales and finance to ensure stakeholder buy-in and a seamless progression from concept through to delivery: it is bizarre to think it might ever have been any other way.

Unfortunately, little progress has been made with improving marketers' sense of self worth. The hand wringing continues, with many marketers bemoaning their lack of influence at senior levels within their organisations, yet seemingly unable to devise a strategy to put it right.

On a more positive note, the summer months saw The Marketing Eye engaged in the debate about marketing automation. Led by the US, this still has some way to go in the UK, but it is encouraging to see people trying to harness technology to support sound marketing principles.

Our involvement came about via this blog, which has proved popular in many countries and has a particularly strong following in the US. The appetite for new content in the US appears insatiable. Our post on the differences between B2B and B2C marketing still attracts more than 100 readers a month and a plethora of comments.

The year saw fewer than normal corporate re-brands, but the controversy they created was no less heated. AOL, Kraft and MSN where amongst those that offered us evolved identities. Starbucks sent bloggers into a spin with their experiment with un-branded coffee shops in Seattle.

The big story of 2009 was, however, the explosion of Twitter, which came of age with the revolution in Iran. Twitter is still growing and is now finding its natural level. We have still to see the first Twitter-born brand, but the growth in the personal brands of people like Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher suggests the potential is there. Compare the Market is the best example we have seen in the UK so far of Twitter being incorporated into a broader marketing strategy, building the personality of the brand via the incomparable meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov.

As a business, The Marketing Eye has come of age too. We have new people, new offices, and a recently appointed Chairman designate who will help steer the business towards its full potential. We are firmly set on a road to growth and the final few weeks of 2009 were spent immersed in strategy and operating models. Our goal is to grow the business four-fold by 2012, which we will achieve by hiring the best marketing people and staying true to our philosophy of 'every client is our only client'.

So what will 2010 hold for us? As a business, we will take on more staff, enter new markets and strengthen our internal processes so that we can continue to put customers first. For the world of marketing, our crystal ball reveals the following:

• Twitter will continue to grow globally: its value for search and news will be realised. Marketers will still struggle to harness it for commercial purposes - but will keep on trying


• The shift towards spending on digital marketing vs. off-line will increase, probably because it is cheaper, not because it is proven to be better


• There will be some renewed growth in branding. Businesses that have neglected their brands over the past couple of years will now be finding that a revamp of the external and internal brand is overdue. At a visual level, an updated identity will signal renewed optimism as we claw our way out of recession. The business case will still have to be made and investment will be hard won


• Marketing budgets will nudge gently upwards as we come out of recession or as businesses start to adjust to, and accept, the 'new normal'


• A change in Government seems inevitable. As a marketer, I'm interested to see how the parties make use of new and old media to win our votes. As a businessman, I want to know which is the party for business.

What were your main marketing memories of 2009 and what do you predict for 2010? We'll be interested to hear your views. Whatever your role and wherever you are, may we take this opportunity to wish you a happy and healthy 2010.

Happy New Year!

Tweeting about a revolution

As the events in Iran unfold, we are witnessing what many will claim to be the first Twitter enabled revolution: a situation where the social networking tool is credited with sidestepping the censorship efforts of an authoritarian regime to allow democracy and people power to win out.

Monitoring #iranelection over the past week has been fascinating and disturbing in equal measure. The tweets are so numerous and so rapid that it is almost impossible to keep up with them.

"Iran Khodro workers on strike, Vahed bus drivers announce solidarity. If oil workers join movement, this can change history."

"Basij marking homes again! Check before entering, & wipe it off w/ oil"

"We've been beatn, tortured&killed for the last 30yrs. Nothing supreme liar says can break our will for freedom"

"#Neda video, a girl being shot in Tehran by Basij sniper http://bit.ly/4GxhY"

We are told that the government in Iran has slowed internet speeds to a crawl and is blocking popular communication sites. Twitter, which can be updated from mobile phones, has allowed the messages to keep coming out.

"RT @persiankiwi Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail is now completely out of service in Iran"

Tweeters are turning their avatars green in support of the people of Iran, a call that has been widely taken up as a tide of emotion and solidarity sweeps across the globe. President Obama warned Iran on Friday that "the eyes of the world are watching you" and nowhere is this more true than on Twitter. Time magazine said: "President Ahmadinejad finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial".

As Andrew Sullivan observes in today's Sunday Times, it is tempting to reflect on how things might have been different in the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 had Twitter been around. One wonders too how the government of the day would have reacted - would it really have been any different to the way Iran is reacting now?

There is a need for caution, however. For all Twitter's influence we have to be careful that we don't get swept up in a one-sided view of events.

Twitter is a populist media. Uncensored and unedited, people can post anything to it they want. Identifying the truth from the rumours, lies and misinformation is almost impossible and while it is wrong to question people's intentions, it is evident that there are a number of people jumping on the 'go green for Iran' bandwagon without a proper analysis of the facts.

If Twitter is going to be a true tool for democracy, tweeters and their followers have to be discerning in what they post, read and believe. However distasteful it might seem on occasions, the medium also has to be available to both sides. Whenever we see any hint of support for Ahmadinejad, or possibly even an attempt by the regime to use Twitter for it's own ends, it is quickly denounced.

"DO NOT RT anything U read from "NEW" tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo" was a popular tweet last week.

Ashton Kutcher called the creation of Twitter "as significant and paradigm shifting as the invention of morse code". That may be the case, but the role of 'old-media' journalists in gathering the facts and giving voice to both sides of the argument is now more important than ever.

Not such a twit after all

A few months ago I posted about Twitter and asked if Twitter is for twits: a fair question at the time and reflective of my healthy cynicism towards anything that feels more suited to people with an unhealthy aversion to daylight than a growing business.

Friends, colleagues and followers will have noted that my use of Twitter has increased in recent weeks and it’s fair to say that some of my initial views are changing. Hands up, I’m genuinely enjoying Twitter. I’m not a voracious tweeter, but I do try to post regularly and it’s becoming a lot less taxing to remember to do it.

In these days of information overload, it is indisputably helpful to have delivered daily a selection of items that inform, inspire or amuse me by people that I follow and respect.

An interesting an unexpected side effect of Twitter is that I feel closer to the people that I follow. There is an immediacy and dare I say, intimacy with the medium that I’ve not found elsewhere. I don’t think I’m alone in this: yesterday, and for the first time, I was discussing supplier selection with a client who said to me that she preferred one supplier over another because he tweets. Clearly a level of trust had formed through observing and engaging with the individual’s 140 character pearls of wisdom. Is this a one off, or a sign of things to come?

A businessman at heart, I still approach Twitter with a commercial mindset. I have objectives for Twitter and if I don’t fulfil them, I will stop. (The businessman in me also can’t help wonder when and how the founders will make money from it).

For the record, and so you can monitor our success, my goals for Twitter are to:

• Build The Marketing Eye brand
• Earn the respect of my peers
• Be visible
• Chart our progress

Twitter shows great promise as a tool to build the brand. The power and excitement is in its viral nature and there is a glow of satisfaction whenever a tweet or blog post is re-tweeted. This is still a rare enough event for it to be a real buzz.

Traffic to the blog and the website has definitely gone up. I can’t specifically attribute a new client to Twitter yet, but I’m willing to be patient. At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s a tool for direct selling – or not that I’ve discovered yet. If all else fails, Twitter is fun. To say that it disconnects us from real contact and relationships is nonsense. I also think it is harsh to say that people who Twitter don’t have enough real work to do. For some maybe, but Twitter for me is part of a strategy and merits the time that I apply to it.

An article in The Telegraph today (thanks @sammcarthur) says that 700,000 small businesses are now on Twitter. Surely we must be able to sell to them somehow.

Brands without chains

Jo and I had lunch today with Erika Uffindell, brand guru and founder of leading brand agency, Uffindellwest.

While we were speaking, I couldn't help wonder if it is possible to create and manage a brand anymore: it strikes me that we are entering a new paradigm where brands aren't defined by businesses, but by their customers.

Twitter has been thrown open to the world - and look at the results. Everywhere, people are creating applications and 'follow me' icons to turn Twitter into what they want it to be. What would have happened if it had been locked down with brand guidelines and IP protection?

David Meerman Scott talks about losing control in his World-Wide Rave - having an idea and releasing it on the basis that the rewards will come later from advocacy and followership. Perhaps it's not suited to every business, but it does seem that the organisations that are opening themselves up are the ones creating a new kind of brand awareness and loyalty, setting the stage for the next economy.

Is this a revolution or a return to basics? Listen to our customers, act with integrity, abandon manufactured values and deliver a brand that customers want: perhaps it's not rocket science after all.

Uffindelwest

David Meerman Scott - World Wide Rave

Is Twitter for twits?

I have generally avoided too much comment on social networking in this blog as it is amply provided for elsewhere. My colleague, Sam McArthur, posts some excellent content in her Savvy Marketers blog, which we include in our blog list.

Twitter, however, is one phenomenon that leaves me increasingly bamboozled as to what its best use might be.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social networking tool that asks the simple question ‘what are you doing?’ You then have 140 characters to say exactly that. You can ‘tweet’ as many times as you like and cover things as inane as putting the kettle on to as profound as saving the world. You can follow other twitters and other twitters follow you.

I signed on to Twitter in August in the interests of exploration and since then have miraculously acquired 12 followers. 10 of the 12 I have never met in my life. Quite why they are interested in what I have to say, I don’t know, but they are welcome. There was a mini-surge in followers after I posted a Squidoo lens on Corporate Social Responsibility, which, in itself, provides a clue as to the types of people who are sharing their lives on Twitter. Rather sinisterly, I have received 3 notifications this morning of new followers whose profiles I discover are under investigation by Twitter for strange activity. I’m not sure what this means, but it makes me cautious.

Some discernment is required in deciding who to follow. Blindly agreeing to follow anybody who follows you only leads to your Twitter page being filled with rubbish. I am following 4 people: the best user is Ethics Blogger, aka Chris McDonald, who provides regular tweets on ethical malpractice that he discovers around the world. I only wish I had time to read more of what he promotes. LouiseBJ on the other hand shares with us that she is logging on in the morning, un-jamming the printer and logging off at night. Very chatty and Louise is no doubt posting some very useful tweets amongst all this minutiae. They are, however, lost and I for one don’t have time to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The Marketing Eye tweets have generally been business focused, covering promotion of posts on this blog, developments with clients and recommendations of services or web content that I have discovered. Perhaps this is too straight-laced, but I want anything that I impose on the rest of the world to add value in some way.

As marketers we have a responsibility to explore and be at the leading edge of new methods of communication. At the same time, we have to avoid undermining our profession with the promotion of activities that won’t deliver a commercial return for our clients.

So, where are the business-related benefits?

• Twitter for common interest groups could provide some payback: the prompt and succinct sharing of information and updates with agreed terms of engagement about what is to be posted would aid communication and not waste people’s time with nonsense.


• I can see too, that Twitter has benefits as an online PR tool as it is very popular with journalists. This then demands the same focus on quality as would be applied to a press release. I don’t see ‘The dog needs a leak’ cutting it as a press release, so why should it cut it anymore as a tweet?


• As a brand builder, Twitter can reveal the person behind the company. This will only become genuinely useful, however, when Twitter is adopted beyond the world of marketers and social entrepreneurs. A client in the demolition industry will need some convincing that they need to start tweeting to reveal the human side of their brand to their target audience.

The clue for Twitter, and large parts of other social networking media, is in the title. I read in yesterday’s Guardian that Twitter has been used extensively in India over recent days to appeal for blood for the injured in Mumbai. This is an undeniably brilliant use of the facility. Barak Obama used Twitter widely in his presidential campaign to mobilise the population to vote. If it can enfranchise the disenfranchised, we are looking at something very powerful indeed.

Some forms of communication are designed to be ‘social’ and need to remain that way. Care and moderation needs to be applied when seeking to exploit them for commercial purposes.