ChasNote

In his latest post at the Amex OPEN Forum blog, Guy Kawasaki comes out as a Twitterhawk fan. Here’s how it works:

“you compose up to five responses to the tweets that it finds for each search condition and schedule the search intervals. An Audi dealer in Palo Alto, for example, can use this to find sales or maintenance prospects on Twitter. Twitterhawk will then tweet your responses for when it finds the right keywords in the right area.”

Twitterhawk limits subscribers to its service to sending 12 marketing tweets per day, prevents any subscriber from pinging a single Twitter user more than once based on any search query, and charges $0.05 per ad-tweet it sends, pricing that will likely limit outright spam.

“At this price and at this rate, Twitterhawk is hardly a spam tool. It is, however, a very powerful marketing tool if you use it sparingly and precisely. The Audi dealer, for example, might find that it sent out 100 tweets at a total cost of $5 and got one oil change customer out of it. That’s probably worth it — particularly if the customer returns for more expensive work or buys a car.

“Looking at it another way: How else can you find people within driving distance of your dealership who are interested in Audis? Radio, TV, and newspaper advertising? Don’t make me laugh. It’s certainly worth trying — although, in truth, you can try Twitter targeted-direct marketing without Twitterhawk by simply using Twitter’s search capability or most Twitter clients anyway.”

The key to Twitterhawk’s success, though, is how Twitter users respond. Technically speaking, I suppose automated reply-tweets (even if a business pays to have them twittered, like it would pay to have a junk-mail postcard delivered) aren’t spam. But if they give Twitter users a creepy feeling, or even if the Twitterhawk messages lack the authentic, personal voice that motivates Twitter users to respond to messages, that math won’t work out for marketers, and the Twitter community will have put the service out of business because it doesn’t add value to the conversation.