Dell’s Twitter experiment seems to be working. After making $1 million during the holidays by alerting Twitter followers to sale items, Dell is now offering discounts exclusively to the 11,844 people who follow @DellOutlet. For instance, here is a Tweet with a link to a 30-percent-off deal on an XPS laptop. When you click on the link, it takes you to this product page on Dell.com.
The new marketing program was, of course, announced on Twitter, as well as on this Direct2Dell blog post:
Beginning today, Dell will offer deals from the Dell Outlet exclusive to Twitter in the U.S. With over 11,000 followers, our team wanted to show their thanks to the Twitter world through these new deals which will continue each week.
Signing up for what is essentially a marketing email on Twitter perhaps gives some consumers the feeling of being part of an exclusive club. (It’s so exclusive, anyone can join). Or maybe they simply don’t want this junk filling up their inbox, and can choose to pay attention only when they are in the market for Dell products.
Twitter as a marketing channel. Hmm, . . . there must be a way to charge for that.
Your message is loud & clear Erick ! It’s upto Twitter folks now….
Maybe this will finally herald the arrival of the long awaited twitter business model.
Companies like will find that they have to fight and win four battles at once in order to create truly incredible businesses:
1. First, the Battle for Attention: How much of a consumer’s time are we capturing? How engaged is the consumer?
2. Second, the Battle for Retention: How many consumers return regularly to our products and services?
3. Third, the Battle for Monetisation: How successful are we in translating attention and retention into revenues and profits?
4. And fourth, the Battle for Extension: How successful are we in leveraging our consumer base, products and services into new channels or areas for growth?
These four battles represent the new ARMEs race. Will twitter succeed?
Despite the Web 2.0 hype, very few of the companies have figured out the formula for winning this ARMEs race. Too many of them focus on just one aspect or two at most.
Of course for those that have been able to get all the pieces together, the results have been astonishing. In a space of a few short years, Google has grown from an interesting start-up company, to an advertising behemoth, already sporting a market cap over US$100 billion. But even in the case of Google, it took an acquisition of a New York based keyword advertising company to fill in the missing piece.
Anjali Sen
http://smartbab...armes-race.html
Hmm…I do not think this is Twitter’s avenue to make money. Consider this, when MySpace launched, it was a haven for musicians and bands to advertise their music for free. It remains that way to this day. I do not see how Twitter feels they can charge for what amounts to a glorified email list or a MySpace page.
Excellent. While Dell is moving forward and makes money via twitter the rest of the corporate world is sitting in their boardrooms negotiating with their lawyers what they are allowed to say on twitter and other social networks. Simultaneously HP / IBM / Lenovo shareholders try to figure out why their investments continue to loose market share …
The social media revolution hs finally come to the corporate world. Let the games begin.
Social media is all about reaching out to people who want to be touched. Dell is doing a fantastic job of making revenue of Twitter. Maybe Twitter can make it into a revenue source. If you post an item on twitter and make a sale then they get a percentage. I’m not sure how they would keep track of this, but that’s for the experts at Twitter to figure out.
The social media revolution has finally come, we have to see how far they will get, and how snotty it will be. Web 2.0 has now become the standard bar, and people (business) will try to see how they can over come it. Now we see one company step up, now lets see who else comes on board. I think twitter would stay the same, it would seem like they would try to find a different avenue to make money. Not this one, they wouldnt want to lose user’s.
It is a good development and kudos for Dell for getting some results from this. However, I would think that they could develop a tinyurl equivalent on dell.com
If this account is ever used for spam, as has happened before, or worse, hijacked for malicious use, tinyurl can take an unsuspecting follower to a malicious site.
linking to http://dell.com/xYzzy would be more secure.
Great this is all we need, more spam on twitter for ’sales’
This won’t be how Twitter makes money, you’re thinking too hard.
Companies can profit and spread word about their products thru any social network, it takes effort and investment though.
I think this is important news, because it demonstrates the start of a shift in how shoppers learn about and buy products. When everyone has email overload, stores’ email newsletters are just more mail we don’t want or have time to read. Following a store on Twitter may be a more manageable way for people to get this information.
I also think that, especially in this economic climate, a company that uses Twitter to save people money is going to be very successful. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
Exactly. Dell currently releases sales through “deals sites” that are paid for referrals. Connecting directly with the customer is what it’s all about, and cutting out the middle-man is a great idea.
Whoever decided to do this is a genius. Once Dell has the model proven Twitter can come in and charge referral percentages below what Dell is currently paying and it will be a net win.
Charge what? Twitter can’t force anyone to charge for having a twitter account, it’s free.
And cutting out the affiliates? Dell would be dumb as heck if they were to do that.
Check your facts. Dell made a million not over the holiday season, but over the last year and a half.
you want a TechCrunch writer to “check their facts”? Wouldn’t that be far too great a leap?
It’s easy to ‘miss’ tweets though, and at least you can always check out your e-mails later. So basically, I think e-mail marketing still beats Twitter marketing.
Glad Dell has found a free advertising vehicle and it’s great that they are participating on Twitter.
But I won’t be buying their XPS 1210. Dell is just trying to get rid of refurbished 2 year old notebook at a premium. The spec’s are: Intel 1830, 80GB EIDE 7200rpm, 2GB of RAM, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400. Save yourself some money and get a netbook such as Asus N10 or Samsung NC10.
Get pass the fluff of the message and examine the offer. It’s just marketing and wordsmith. I’d be totally in if Dell offers 30% off their Adamo laptop on Twitter as part of it’s launch strategy. Now that would be truly exclusive. Twitter membership would sky rocket. Win/Win/Win.
Why does Dell have 80 Twitter accounts?
Interesting story, but consider this, Dell reported ~$63B in annual revenues, while Twitter accounted for $1M in revenue in 1.5yrs (self-reported) so while it may seem like a huge deal, it’s just a drop in the bucket for Dell.
I would love to find out how they figured that this is incremental revenue and Twitter’s not cannibalizing revenue from other channels like email marketing?
Nevertheless, it’s a great PR ploy, money can’t buy this kind of publicity.
Boy, you virtual soapboxers sure get excited at any sign of Twitter making sense. Well, I guess it is a marketer’s dream to target people dumb enough to follow other’s every senseless tweet.
How much does TC own in Twitter anyway?
The people who say the “social media revolution” has arrived are idiots.
Its not a revolution, its about a handful of self involved, ego maniacs in a big circle jerk.
everyone else is on facebook , and facebook makes no money, and consciously killed their app system via the redesign.
u guys are up in arms over 1M after how many fucking years?
big joke. if its not a REAL accomplishment e.g a google search, then fuck off and get a real job because the hype machine is out of gas (leverage)
The link to the tweet about the 30% off deal on an XPS laptop doesn’t go anywhere, FYI…