Kevin O’ Keefe offered some useful commentary on these results through his blog.  He pointed out that blogs help with search results. If your provide valuable content you will generates incoming links which supplies more traffic and even better search results. If your provide valuable content your blog will generate a social network for you. People regularly share posts from blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Twitter is my main source for finding out about what is happening on relevant blogs to my interests. I no longer have patience to sort through a RSS feed.  

Has Twitter changed these reasons to blog? I think that Twitter complements blogs and does not replace them. Here is a useful post by Adam Singer that goes into detail on this point, 19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet. Twitter offers the sound bytes and blogs can go into depth. As noted in this blog post, many of the most useful tweets contain links to blogs and other content that goes into more depth.

Adam notes: “Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.” I think these non-blogging Twitters are missing the chance to have a substantial conversation with their audience.

Case in point, the 19 reasons to keep blogging could not be conveyed in Twitter but the title should draw a lot of RTs and click throughs to the actual post. Which is better to be a RT pointer or the owner of the content where the reader ends up? I encourage you to check on Adam’s 19 reasons. I agree with all of them. Blog on.

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In the short term, this leaves you with an interesting challenge that there just isn’t much advice for – the moment when you realize that you still need to promote your business despite having a website that you hate and which you know is less than ideal. Can it really be possible to use the Internet effectively for marketing without a good website?  Yes, definitely.  Here are a few ideas on how to do just that.

1. Announce a non-existent redesign. The first thing you need to do with a subpar website is to give customers the impression you are working to improve it (which hopefully you are). The only thing worse than a bad website is one that seems like it will be bad forever. So put a note on your homepage in some way sharing that your redesign is “coming soon.” If you think about it, this is exactly what retail destinations do when they hang those signs saying “please pardon our progress.” Progress takes time, but the first important lesson is that your customers need to know that it is coming … even if you have no idea when. Just by putting that sign up, you may also find that it helps motivate you to get that redesign done sooner.
2. Create other homepages. The nice thing about the web today is that you can get up and running on a host of other sites to create a branded presence for your business in less than an hour. What this means is that your website doesn’t need to be the only place that you share information about your business.  Need a page telling people where you are located? Populate that information into Google Maps and use that link. Want to tell people about your business and share some images? Create a Facebook fan page for your business. There are lots of sites out there where you can share information about your business without needing to just point people to your site.
3. Fix your homepage first. The homepage of your site is the gateway to your business and the first impression someone is likely to have. While a full redesign may be some time away, getting some help to recreate your homepage can be a good investment to start people with a positive experience of your site and then potentially drive them to other homepages as mentioned in #3.
4. Use more direct communications. When you can’t rely on your website to reach your customers, you may want to consider a more direct model. Email marketing certainly fits into this category – but starting a Twitter account and sharing updates directly can also be a way of offering a more consistent stream of content or information without relying on your website to do it.
5. Leverage your other materials. I have seen more than a few small businesses struggle to create a quality website while at the VERY SAME TIME they have an expanse of good printed materials such as brochures and other collateral they use in the real world to promote their business. If you have these kinds of materials, work with someone (or buy a relatively inexpensive scanner yourself) to digitize some of the best of your content. Then you can upload to your site or post it online in another location to make it available for customers and prospective customers.

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Take a look at the five images below – each one belongs to a Twitter account that I was notified was now following me.

Every single message is the same, from how old the girl is, where she’s from, what she wants to do this weekend and what video she’s just watched.

Now, either the UK is currently enjoying a great spell of Twitter awareness in provocatively dressed female teens or there’s a little bit of shenanigans going on here. I’m going with the latter.

Looking at the accounts themselves, it would seem that it’s a marketing push for web host Cool Blue Solutions. Each account has a background designed by the web host company, and Cool Blue’s Twitter account mentions designing the background for our teen friend Sandra B. Smith.

But then you look at the URL for each of the five girls. That takes you to RevTwt.com, which used to be known as TwtAd, an advertising model for paid tweets.

They’re in the process of a relaunch of the service and are looking for advertisers. They claim to put your ad in front of more than 23 million Twitter users – pretty impressive considering that’s about the estimated number of all Twitter users at present (including bots and spam accounts).

So what’s the story here? Is it a marketing push to promote the web host services of Cool Blue Solutions? Is it an advertising push by RevTwt on behalf of Cool Blue Solutions? Is it a little of both?

Whatever it is, here’s the thing. Marketing your message properly means targeting your audience properly. It means knowing who would use your services and what would attract them to that service, and why it stands out from the rest.

Does a semi-nude teenage girl create the right message for Cool Blue Solutions if it’s their campaign? Are they looking for business users of their web services or teenage boys hoping to hit it off with a girl just like the one in the above Twitter accounts?

How about RevTwt, if it’s their push? Did they target anyone with these Twitter accounts or is it just a hit and hope approach? I only ask as I had all five accounts follow me in quick succession, and their bio’s just make your BS spider senses tingle.

Whatever the deal is here, I don’t think it succeeds. The majority of people have moved on from booth babe advertising and marketing pushes and are looking for real people behind the products. Teenage girls in bikinis don’t quite shout web host to me.

What do you think – is this kind of marketing still valid? If you’re a consumer, would you be convinced to sign up to Cool Blue Solutions from the recommendations of these Twitter accounts?

What if you’re an advertiser and RevTwt is behind these accounts – do they make you want to run a campaign with them? Or would your approach differ?

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Since I’ve been in the digital industry, which by all accounts has not been that long, I’ve seen agencies SLAMMING their clients with “the next big thing.” Social Marketing using MySpace was the be all, end all, until roughly two years ago when Fox took a chunk of it and Facebook was opened to the public. Then there was Second Life and all the MMRPGs, which never panned out for the advertisers, so back to buying Facebook.