• http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136662, Monday, May 18, 2009 12:16 PM

Naked Pizza is one of many small businesses that use Twitter as a marketing tool. In an Ad Age report, the company reveals that it recently brought in 15% of a day's business by running a promotion via Twitter. "Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful," said Jeff Leach, the restaurant's co-founder. The campaign targeted users who were within a three-mile radius of the restaurant. Leach says he even put up a billboard outside of his store publicizing Naked Pizza's Twitter handle.

According to Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in local-marketing, marketing via Twitter is "simpler than a blog, than setting up a Facebook or MySpace page." In fact, he says, "its very much like e-mail. And e-mail, from small-business standpoint, has been one of the most effective marketing tools."

Factor in location-based technology on mobile devices, and "the reality is Twitter's got all sorts of business models available to it," says Twitter investor Todd Chaffee, general partner at Institutional Venture Partners. "We're putting together monetization framework, things like features for commercial accounts, which could be for global companies all the way down to local companies."

One thing Naked Pizza says it could certainly use (and would be willing to pay for) is analytics tools, so it can understand the most effective time of the day or week to deliver promotional messages.

Read the whole story at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136662 »