This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Sanjeet Matharu is the Lead Technology Creative for Brand Strategy, Europe, Middle East and Africa for Twitter, has also worked with big brands like Samsung and Vodafone, Sanjeet is an ecosystem builder and has experience working in EMEA. He was present at Startup Istanbul 2014 and delivered a session on the power of data and ad-tech to companies.
Sanjeet’s experience working with several big brands including Samsung, Vodafone, and Twitter has exposed him to various insights, he is a strong advocate of ecosystems and partnership, and has been able to work across cultures and geographies to understand how the application of technology is important throughout the course of his career. Data has come to stay and companies are beginning to understand that using data the right or wrong way, can make or mar a business, Sanjeet Matharu explains the concept of using Twitter ecosystems and companies currently playing in this space.
A company called Style On Screen runs Retail Therapy, you send a tweet with a particular hashtag around a particular show and then someone comes back to you and says “hey this is where you can buy it from”, @Styleonscreen has struck a lot of partnerships with retailers, this way they can monetize what people are tweeting about, targeting the right people o Twitter can lead to buying products and proper monetization.
Calendar Reminders is a company based in Australia, you send a tweet and end up getting a link to download an entire set of calendar entries to your mobile phone, works really well, it’s used for various Tv shows and sporting events, but again it’s another way to drive the mechanic that’s there to help the conversion from users just being passive viewers, into people who will engage and do more afterward.
As an entrepreneur looking to grow your business, you need to be in a position focus on whether it’s media, brands, consumer or business, you need to ask “is it going to take more than 12 months?”, “maybe 18 months?”, how easily can you prototype and build something? Most times entrepreneurs think they need the whole Twitter Firehose, but they probably need a section of the Firehose, Twitter publicly accessible APIs are easy to get a hold of, there are two different types, Streaming APIs allow you to ingest what’s happening right now, and you can build your own logic on top of that.
The REST APIs let you perform actions and look at what happened, these allow you to get detailed analytics data, you can follow graphs and understand social communities, what people are talking about in certain camps, what people are not talking about in certain camps, the reason why an event happened.
It is important to not forget the basics, there are a lot of companies who don’t have version 1 products for Twitter, but they excel at customer service, and they keep coming back, growing and getting better. Metrics are very important if something failed you can find out why it did.
