Big corporations have been quick to harness the power of Twitter in an effort to speak directly to their clients. Jesse Engle, founder & CEO of CoTweet, spoke to CNBC about the growing trend.
People expect brands to have a social media presence. We see delight and excitement from our customers every time they realize we’re on Twitter—and with CoTweet, we can help them as quickly as possible, no matter where they are
Chelsea Marti
Manager, PR and Social Media
TurboTax
As consumers adopt more and more social media tools, it’s critical that businesses meet their customers where they’re at. Are you delivering?
Take it from tax preparation service TurboTax® who used CoTweet to streamline their approach to Twitter presence and enhance customer service with a response time of just four minutes. With CoTweet, TurboTax was able to generate measurable business results, including:
Still not convinced? Find out how TurboTax also increased employee participation on Twitter and enhanced their overall social media presence by downloading the TurboTax case study now.
The art of conversation meets the science of conversion.
Today, just fourteen months after we demo’d CoTweet publicly for the first time, I’m thrilled to announce that CoTweet has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by ExactTarget, the leading provider of on-demand email and one-to-one marketing solutions. The combined companies will offer the first complete solution for businesses to manage all aspects of their online communication with customers and prospects, including email, mobile, and social media.
CoTweet will continue to operate in San Francisco and establish a new Social Media Lab for ExactTarget. The entire CoTweet team will become part of ExactTarget.
As the first Twitter application uniquely targeted to businesses, CoTweet attracted an impressive customer base, including large, established brands like Citi, Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Sprint, Starbucks, Target, and Whole Foods as well as aggressive, growing brands like Threadless, Naked Pizza and Get Satisfaction. From the beginning, we established very close working relationships with customers and have expanded and improved the product based on direct feedback from them. The level of engagement we have enjoyed with our customers has been remarkable and has allowed us to stay in lock step with enterprises, releasing new features that address their emergent requirements as they scale their social media engagement.
With today’s news, our vision remains the same. We’re committed to enabling enterprises of all sizes to engage in authentic, two-way relationships with customers, and will provide the tools so they can scale their social media operations. Combining with ExactTarget means that we can move even faster pushing the product forward and taking it to market.
Joining forces with ExactTarget makes perfect sense for CoTweet. ExactTarget has been helping companies communicate with customers for a decade. Their engagement model—serve the individual, honor their preferences and deliver relevant content—puts customers at the center and is just as applicable for social media as it is for email. ExactTarget is the leader in their space and is on a tear. In 2009 they booked $114 million in revenue and raised a whopping $145 million in venture capital. ExactTarget’s CEO (and my new boss!) is and incredible leader with a top notch management team. And they’ve created a magnetic culture. It’s hard to imagine a more attractive team to be joining.
There are so many people to thank at this milestone who have come alongside us on this journey. Specially I’d like to thank our investors: Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Freestyle Capital and Maples Investments. It’s amazing how much value the right investors can bring and we picked some great ones. I’d also like to thank our advisors: Josh Auerbach, Laura Fitton, Guy Kawasaki, John Loftus and Jerry Michalski. It’s impossible to imagine our story without these folks who have contributed so much and I know will continue to support us moving forward. I’m honored to have incredible partners: Aaron Gotwalt, who dreamed up the CoTweet concept, has done the lionshare of development and whose belief that software is philosophy formed the foundation for our success; Kyle Sollenberger, whose design ability is second to none; and David Bill, probably the smartest and most seasoned CTO I’ve ever worked with. And lastly a huge thanks to our earliest employees: Michael Kovacs, Christian Westbrook and Susan Hobbs for believing in our vision and jumping on board.
Today a new chapter begins and we couldn’t be more excited. You’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed our corporate color to reflect our new connection with ExactTarget. So both literally and figuratively, CoTweet’s future is bright orange!
All the best,
Jesse Engle
BTW: Want to know even more? Check out this site with all the details.
Did you notice anything new about CoTweet this morning?
Over the past weekend, CoTweet rolled out a new release. After logging in, you may have noticed the shiny, new user interface and icons. These changes were made to enhance your CoTweet dashboard experience. Also incorporated in this release is the Twitter Retweet integration. CoTweet is pleased to now be offering both the Twitter native retweet functionality as well as Quotes. In addition to Retweet, Quotes allows CoTweet users the ability to retweet in the traditional form of quoting another user along with the capacity to annotate the tweet by including your own comments.
CoTweet has partnered with Klout and now shares the Klout Score of the Twitter profile you are viewing. Klout Score measures the Twitter profile’s influence across the social web by calculating their True Reach, Amplification Ability and Network Score. Another exciting new feature is saved inline searches. As CoTweet is focused on the Team Platform Experience, we’ve implemented the ability that now allows you to save searches to share with your fellow team members.
Please refer to the CoTweet Support page for further explanation of the release’s useful new features. Take the new UI for a spin and let us know what you think!
Many people have asked us about Twitter’s planned commercial account offering and what it means for CoTweet. Twitter has been planning for commercial accounts for a long time. Today Anamitra Banerji from Twitter’s Product Team posted to their blog that Twitter is testing one of its new features, ‘Contributors’. We figure now would be a good time to shed a little light on how CoTweet will be working with Twitter to extend the functionality of commercial accounts as they’re rolled out.
CoTweet was the first company to recognize that businesses would require the ability to have more than one person tweeting through a brand Twitter account. We discovered this need through our own use of Twitter and designed this as a feature of CoTweet at the very beginning. We gave a lot of thought to how brands should represent themselves on Twitter and outlined our philosophy in our inaugural blog post: Making Brands Human on Twitter. Not only did we provide a tool, we also suggested a convention–that companies reveal the people communicating behind the brand and sign off on tweets. Much to our delight, this convention has been widely embraced by companies like Ford, Microsoft, Salesforce, and even Twitter itself. We knew from the outset that the approach of incorporating cotags, the ‘people behind the brand’, into the Twitter background was a little kludgy and that one day there would be a more elegant solution. Fortunately, that time is approaching. CoTweet is working closely with the Twitter API team to incorporate the new contributor API, which will further enhance CoTweet’s current multi-author functionality.
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The Wall Street Journal has just broken the news of our first paid service, the Enterprise Innovators Program.
The world’s leading brands have embraced the power of the real-time web, and CoTweet is playing a key role in their success. Today we’re announcing that companies including Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust, Whole Foods and others have enrolled in the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program, a new program that includes exclusive Enterprise Edition product features and services that help companies manage their brands on Twitter. The full press release is here.
For more information and to request an invitation to join, see the Enterprise Innovators Program page. The CoTweet public beta remains free for consumers and enterprises.
Great news! You can now you can post your updates from CoTweet to Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer and dozens of other social networks.
Ping.fm is now integrated with CoTweet so you can publish once through CoTweet and automatically send your updates across the real time web. You can set up a unique Ping.fm posting group or account with each of your Twitter accounts, so you have ultimate control over which updates go where — essential for people managing multiple business accounts or a combination of business and personal accounts.
Set up instructions are available in the CoTweet Support Forum, which you can access once you’re logged in. Enjoy!
European airline easyJet (@easyJetCare) use CoTweet to manage customer service interactions through Twitter. This interesting BBC News video covering the impact social media is having on the travel industry features Paul and his teams efforts (the easyJet piece starts at 3:45). → Watch the video
Yes we make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. It’s what we do about that feedback…and we resolve problems.
Paul Hopkins, Head of Customer Experience, easyJet
I’m excited to share the news that CoTweet has formed a partnership with Dachis Group to deliver social business solutions to enterprises.
Dachis Group is a new type of technology solutions firm. It was created in 2008 by Jeffrey Dachis to help large corporate enterprises unlock the value of social technologies to do business better. The firm takes a holistic approach to its client engagements, combining advisory services along with technology implementation across three practice areas: customer participation, workforce collaboration and business partner optimization. Today, Dachis Group announced its Alliance Partner program, including ten software companies that represent “the best technology providers and integrators in the marketplace.”
CoTweet’s partnership with Dachis Group further establishes CoTweet as the leading platform for enabling cross-functional teams to manage the front-line of their organizations’ real-time engagement with customers through Twitter.
We’re excited to work with Dachis Group to transform the way enterprises connect with their customers.
Jesse Engle interviews Lisa Horner (@GoToMeeting), Jenny Cisney (@KodakConnect), Rebecca Corliss (@HubSpot) and Khayyam Wakil (@iamkhayyam) at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 in Boston.
We could not find a solution that would enable people to jump easily between accounts… We really required a tool like CoTweet.Lisa Horner, @GoToMeeting
