Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I recently blogged about consumer brands that had come up with successful Twitter strategies, highlighting ASOS and Nike among others as companies that knew what they were doing with social. Many commenters mentioned that it would be useful to see a similar post focusing on B2B examples and I was obviously happy to oblige.

Twitter is a difficult medium for B2B companies as it’s all too easy to simply view the platform as a broadcast medium and churn out dull corporate messages. But here are six examples of businesses that have managed to buck the trend and create interesting or useful Twitter feeds...

Double standard much?

Debate has heated up in Sweden regarding American Apparel's sexualization of its female models. The retailer's shock-tactic ads featuring naked women are certainly nothing new. But this week Swedish blogger Emelie Eriksson made headlines by juxtaposing male models' poses in unisex American Apparel Clothing with the R-rated images of women wearing the same shirts (often sans pants).

To show how American Apparel's double standard works, a small Swedish clothing company named byPM decided to do a photo shoot in which a man posed in the same position....

...In online advertising, some KPIs include click-through rates, brand awareness and engagement. Drew Meyers, president of ad agency Gyro's San Francisco office, says the typical online marketing campaign these days usually has about five KPIs. However, it's not unusual for there to be more.

"There's a tendency toward a profusion of KPIs," he says, which leads to "an increase in noise versus an increase in intelligent analysis." Part of this is because online media and social media in particular are still so new that there are no real established metrics. Yet digital offers myriad ways to track a campaign's success. Until recently, the default metric was the click-through rate (CTR), which gave a clear indication of an ad's engagement. The staggering success of search advertising in the 2000s led to the rise of the CTR. After all, what better way to show that your ad worked?...