Jesse Engle discusses the power of Twitter for business with CNBC Squawk Box Europe

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:

• 48% effectiveness in helping complete tax returns
• 46% follower rate of Twitter users specifically seeking tax help
• 71% likelihood of customers to recommend TurboTax

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.

Jesse Engle, CoTweet & Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget

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.

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!

CoTweet’s Multi-Author Functionality is Strengthened

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.

CoTweet’s Value Add

While we aren’t at liberty to discuss the details of Twitter’s commercial offerings, it’s clear that there will be a continued need to provide collaboration tools necessary for businesses with cross-functional teams that communicate through one or more brand accounts. Businesses will continue to require functionality such as CoTweet’s advanced work flow and conversation history that allow them to engage in authentic, two-way dialogs with their customers and communities–responding to inbound inquiries and reaching out with news and information of value to their customers.  They will require increasingly sophisticated means for managing dozens–and in some cases hundreds or even thousands–of Twitter accounts across the enterprise. There is a large area of opportunity between what Twitter will be offering and what businesses require.  CoTweet will continue to develop enterprise-class functionality on top of Twitter’s commercial account APIs.

Twitter is Committed to the Success of its Ecosystem

It is worth pointing out that Twitter has repeatedly stressed its commitment to fostering a thriving ecosystem of applications built on top of its platform.  CoTweet’s strong relationship with Twitter has been highlighted in recent weeks by Twitter leadership  at conferences such as TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp, Supernova and Le Web.  Video clips from those events are included below.

Dick Costolo at TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp on 11/20 (full video)

Dick Costolo at Supernova on 12/2 (full video)

Ryan Sarver at Le Web on 12/9 (full video)

CoTweet has always enjoyed a close working relationship with Twitter–at all levels of their organization. The CoTweet team has provided feedback on new features, assisted in troubleshooting challenges with the API, and has shared insights related to CoTweet’s core target audience: businesses.

Twitter has been a great partner to CoTweet, supporting and encouraging us at every step of the way. We have every reason to expect our partnership to flourish as our companies roll out complementary fee-based services to businesses.

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.

Here is what some of our customers and partners are saying:

“In social media, the experience you give people on their first effort to reach you had better be the way you want them to remember you. CoTweet helps us engage customers in authentic two-way conversations that ensure we’re consistent and coordinated as a team and that we leave a positive impression.”

Scott Monty, Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager at Ford

“McDonald’s is mentioned on Twitter every 10-20 seconds. We are embracing this tremendous opportunity to engage in conversations with our customers and others through @McDonalds each and every day. CoTweet enables us to have those real-time conversations across multiple business units, including our marketing, customer satisfaction, public relations and media relations teams.”

Bill Whitman, vice president of communications, McDonald’s USA

“We’ve got dozens of Microsoft-branded Twitter accounts, each with a unique focus and set of followers. All together, that represents a significant volume of tweets. We love CoTweet. It’s been the key way for our teams to tweet as individuals and still retain our brand identity.”

Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager at Microsoft for Windows 7

“Social Media based service is being woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Over the next several years it will be as ubiquitous as the telephone. At SunTrust, we strive to help our clients Live Solid and Bank Solid, which includes leveraging Social Media to connect with our clients, wherever they are, communicating with them on their terms, rather than ours. Co-Tweet helps us hear the voice of client from within the Twitterverse and respond to their questions, concerns, compliments, and complaints.”

Robert W. Ross – Relationship & Planning Manager, Enterprise Client at SunTrust

“Successful social business design requires focus on people, process and technology. At a time when so many social technology companies are struggling to prove an effective business model, the CoTweet team has shown they know what it takes to help a growing number of companies derive measurable value from their social media initiatives.”

Peter Kim, Managing Director, North America at Dachis Group

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!

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

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.

Links:

• Dachis Group Alliance Partner program
• Dachis Group Alliance Partner release

See more testimonials on CoTweet’s YouTube Channel