Ustrategy

Dell Says ROI on Twitter is $3Mil

In today's New York Times' bits blog, Claire Cain Miller writes about Dell's stated revenue from its use of Twitter.

"Dell said Thursday night that the company had earned $3 million in revenue directly through Twitter since 2007, when it started posting coupons and word of new products on the microblogging site. In the last six months, Dell Outlet earned $1 million in sales from customers who came to the site from Twitter, after taking 18 months to earn its first $1 million. Dell has also earned another $1 million from people who click from Twitter to Dell Outlet to Dell.com and make a purchase there."

The full blog post is here.

Twitter Finally Brings Back People Search. Mazal Tov.

I have been complaining bitterly about Twitter's ridiculous inability to provide simple features like organizing and searching your followers, being able to page through your Tweets, etc. Others have covered Twitter's shortcomings as well, such as during the MacWorld conference back in January 2008 when Twitter was down for three whole days.

Having worked on various web products from concept to launch, it's both aggravating and fascinating to me how Web 2.0 has brought with it an unspoken agreement between companies and users that Beta state can last forever and that sub-par functionality (at least until someone comes up with something better) is the new baseline.

Today, ReadWriteWeb reports Twitter is finally making good on its promise to enable people search. Hurray. You can now actually enter a person's name and get results. Ground breaking, I know.  Maybe next will be a choice of how many tweets your page display. Oh wait. That's in the roadmap for 2012.