Helping specialist tour operators and activity providers with travel ecommerce
Twitter and the dead mouse sandwich
If you are on twitter in a personal capacity (rather than your travel company brand) you know it is somewhat frowned upon to extensively tweet about your own business
However, within reason, it is acceptable as if people are interested enough in who you are, then what you do is an important facet of that. Besides, its kind of "payment in kind" for all the great tweets you send out as well.
Hugo Burge, Executive Chairman Cheapflights introduced the concept of a dead mouse theory on twitter during this years Travel Blog Camp (during World Travel Market). His inspiration was Giles Coren from this tweet
"how nice you all are. i worried it was a bit wanky putting my columns up - like a cat bringing a dead mouse into the kitchen to impress you."
Lets merge this dead mouse concept with another well worn teaching trick. When you give someone advice on an skill (such as a teacher would do to a pupil) you tend to start with something positive, then you mention something they can improve on, then you reinforce the original positive theme.
So - if you are running a personal twitter account - and you want to tweet about your business every so often - ensure that it is wrapped by a couple of good interesting tweets that are not about you.
From henceforth this is known as a "dead mouse sandwich"
Enjoy
Alex
@alexbainbridge
However, within reason, it is acceptable as if people are interested enough in who you are, then what you do is an important facet of that. Besides, its kind of "payment in kind" for all the great tweets you send out as well.
Hugo Burge, Executive Chairman Cheapflights introduced the concept of a dead mouse theory on twitter during this years Travel Blog Camp (during World Travel Market). His inspiration was Giles Coren from this tweet
"how nice you all are. i worried it was a bit wanky putting my columns up - like a cat bringing a dead mouse into the kitchen to impress you."
Lets merge this dead mouse concept with another well worn teaching trick. When you give someone advice on an skill (such as a teacher would do to a pupil) you tend to start with something positive, then you mention something they can improve on, then you reinforce the original positive theme.
So - if you are running a personal twitter account - and you want to tweet about your business every so often - ensure that it is wrapped by a couple of good interesting tweets that are not about you.
From henceforth this is known as a "dead mouse sandwich"
Enjoy
Alex
@alexbainbridge
Views: 17
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Simon on -
I fear you think about Twitter too much Alex!
I don't think you can compare people who run small businesses to celebrities. Celebrities on Twitter get a large number of followers and much of what they tweet about is loosely related to their "work". So if Giles Coren, for example, puts a link to an article he has written, then it is often a logical follow-on from his tweets. I think if most people follow you on Twitter because of your day job, then it's probably fair game to mention your day job without having to camouflage your tweets.
I don't think your theory holds for the majority of people on this site. It might work for you because you have the second gig writing for Tnooz, so if you throw in a bit about Tour CMS there might be people out there who don't know about it and follow you for your writing. But I'd be surprised that if it were a strategy you were following it was worth the time and effort.
Do you really suggest that people can build a personal following on Twitter, whereby most of the people that follow them don't know what their day job is, then shower the world with wit and wisdom, to the extent that they have thousands of followers, then slip in "oh we've got a special on tours to Nepal at the moment, pop over to......."? I'd suggest it's all a bit cynical and a huge waste of time.
If anyone on this site has a huge number of followers, its probably related to what they do and not despite what they do. If that's the case, why be coy about it?
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