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Do you trust the marketing robots? Automation can be helpful, save a ton of money, and even cut down on errors, but you have to know how to push the ‘stop’ button.
N ot long ago someone at Zweig Group was scheduling posts for the civil + structural ENGINEER magazine Twitter handle. She noticed a company we were following was posting “thank you” tweets. They said something along the lines of, “Thank you [XYZ Firm] for following us.” Unfortunately, someone out in the Twitter-universe got wind of this company’s automation and was creating fake Twitter handles and following the company from each of these at a rapid pace. I won’t type them here, but you can guess what some of the names were, and the results weren’t pretty.
Christina Zweig
manage, and bad for your business, but marketing automation can be helpful, save a ton of time, and even cut down on errors. There are definitely some lessons to learn from this experience. “Everyone watched in horror as the company’s Twitter feed got progressively more out of hand over the next few hours.”
This employee has a kind heart, so she immediately called the company to inform them of the issue to see if they could stop it quickly. Their response: “The marketing person who handles this is out to lunch right now.” Everyone watched in horror as the company’s Twitter feed got progressively more out of hand over the next few hours. After this story you may feel that marketing automation isn’t worth the trouble, is hard to
See CHRISTINA ZWEIG, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER January 16, 2017, ISSUE 1183
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