Marketing pros who use Twitter as a part of their mix have probably read the platform’s new Terms of Services. If they’re anything like me, they came away with a bit of a headache.
I also read the inevitable avalanche of press and blog coverage of the changes. The stories and posts ran the gamut from “best thing since bread was first sliced” to “the seventh sign of the apocalypse.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this one shakes out. Will Twitter actually change the content of tweets? I don’t think they will. If they know what’s good for them, anyways.
If they did start altering tweets, they’d see enterprise use virtually dry up within a day or two of the first messed-with tweet. After all, no enterprise wants to see its message altered by anyone — as users of our system will definitely attest to!
We’re in the final stages of development. But before we roll out OnTargetTweet, we’re adding some features that will make OTT even more of a must-have tool for any organization needing to keep their Twitter messages “on target” with their goals, policies, etc.
Then it’ll be beta time! We’ll announce via press release, go wide on blogs, etc. You know, the typical stuff us tech-type companies do when we launch products. We should be fully live in the next couple of weeks to one month.
One quick note: We’ve temporarily disabled the “Add New Account” functionality, while we’re in our final development stage. If you want to be notified when we’re up and ready, just e-mail us, and you’ll be added to the list.
Also, we’re not even “out the door,” and we’ve been interviewed by two writers at an influential blog about OnTargetTweet. We’ll link to the article here when it is published. This should be a good article for us; more important, the OTT team had a wide-ranging discussion on Twitter and enterprise tools with the writers, and we got a lot of ideas from our conversation.
And if you want to see the public face of our back-end testing, we have a Twitter account set up for just that: @ott_demo. It’s not pretty, but at least you can see that it is working.
As we here at OnTargetTweet head ever so closer to launching our beta, it occurs to us that there’s no hashtag (that we can find) for tweets regarding enterprise-strength tools for Twitter.
With that in mind, we’d like to suggest the following hashtag:
At 11 characters, it’s not too long for a hashtag. Plus it really catches the “mood,” eh?
Hopefully this will catch on like wildfire. We’re going to start promoting it in Twitter. It’d be great if others interested in the topic could do so as well. We’re not getting anything out of it … it’s just our little contribution to the Twitter enterprise tool community (and Twitter as a whole, if we may be so bold).
Personally, it’s my dream to see #twitent as a trending topic at Twitter. Hey, I dream big, okay?
(If there already is a hashtag for this topic, let us know in the Comments section. Thanks.)
Speaking of Twitter enterprise tools, Mashable has a great article on just this topic. We’re not in there yet, but that’s likely because we’re not officially in beta yet. It’s our goal to be in these types of articles once in beta and/or fully launched.
Here’s a great article I found on enterprise tools for Twitter. There’s five total, with varied success rates (according to the author).
(Of course, we’d add OnTargetTweet to that list, bringing it up to six … and hopefully the blog author will consider doing just that!)
I especially agree with the author’s main point:
One of the most important requirements to grow a meaningful B2B Twitter follower list, is cadence… having a consistent/regular content flow. Frequency is one key to driving followers, but it’s a frustrating aspect for many companies starting up a Twitter strategy. One solution: multiple users tweeting from a single account where the collective blends into an orchestrated voice around a central focus.
OnTargetTweet allows for just that, but we give you a browser-based tool that lets employees “submit” a tweet for approval before it ever hits the service.
Speaking of OnTargetTweet … we’re still testing. Watch this space for more!
We’re really coming along with the OnTargetTweet platform. The back-end processes are shaping up nicely.
We’ve found that some of the workflow that’s needed to complete the tweet-submission process is a bit more complicated that we first thought. Nothing that’s too out of our league — just complicated.
But we’re working through it all, and we expect to be out with our beta in the next few weeks.
We’ll have a full press release when we have our beta “coming out” party, so look for it here and on Twitter at our account there.
OnTargetTweet partner Bob Woods just published a blog post on our new platform, and how we see ourselves working in this post-Twitter world of marketing, communications and two-way interaction with customers and clients.
It also goes into the three main areas where we see our platform being of assistance to organizations out there. For a good read, go to the post. And if you’re interested in helping us out in our upcoming beta period, please feel free to sign up — especially because it’s free.
And a quick status update, in regards to the actual platform. We’re crossing our fingers that we’ll be out in beta in a week or two. You can still sign up in the meantime, though.
Here’s the latest status update from the OnTargetTweet team:
Wednesday, July 8th
We are thisclose to fully launching our beta platform and test period. While you are currently able to sign up, the internal workings of the platform are heavily under construction. We will announce when we are ready to release the platform in beta form – via press release and especially in our own Twitter stream. Follow us at Twitter, and keep an eye out for our beta release.
While we’ll cross-post status updates here, the quicker way to get them is to go to our login page. The quickest way, though, is to sign up for the platform while it is in beta. Use of the platform while in beta is free.
NOTE: We’re doing a lot of work on the platform right now, so the possibility exists that the sign-up form may not work for you. If this happens, please e-mail me (the guy from the video) and I’ll handle things from there. Thanks.
Before it even hits our front page (because there’s some tech kung fu we need to do before we can put it there) … it’s version 1.0 of our promotional video:
We have small, yet big plans for version 2.0 of this video. And as promised, it’ll be viral-able (if that wasn’t a word before, it is now).
We believe that OnTargetTweet will change the way businesses, organizations and even government looks at Twitter. We’ll have much more on why we believe what we do in a future blog post.
We’ll also answer the inevitable criticism we’re expecting to get, and why we feel it is unfair.
… and everywhere we go … we hope to see it. (What kind of world would it be if you couldn’t mangle a David Lee Roth lyric every once in a while?)
Anyhow, we’re hot on making a video for the OnTargetTweet site right now. Soon, you’ll see version 1.0 of the video, which will be yours truly talking on camera, accompanyed by some graphics. It’ll explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. What it won’t be, unfortunately, is buzzworthy. It won’t get the kind of views like some of the other viral videos you’ve undoubtedly seen on YouTube, Viddler, etc.
Version 2.0, though, will be a much different story. We’ve got plans for that piece of cinematic gold. Hopefully, that one will catch fire.
In the meantime, you’ll notice that we’re doing lots of work on the site. We’ll hopefully have the beta version up and running in a week or two. We’ll also be putting our marketing plan into place. So check back and see our progress.