A Missed Opportunity with Martha

If you had an hour with legendary marketing maven, Martha Stewart, what would you ask her? I recently attended The Direct Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Days Conference in conjunction with TWTRCON. I make it my job stay on top of trends and best practices, hear what's being said in the industry, meet key vendors, chat up attendees, etc. While I find the content usually (sales pitches) and lacking, I was really looking forward to the keynote from Martha Stewart. I'm a big fan. I think Martha is a fabulous marketer; she’s built an incredible empire and brilliant personal brand. She stands for and is constantly delivering value across the board in cooking, entertaining decorating and home renovating, across online, radio and TV and print platforms. Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, was created 10 years ago; she even had the foresight to be a multi-channel brand. I was looking forward to hearing her thoughts and best practices.

Instead, I was utterly disappointed. For one hour, New York Times columnist, David Pogue, interviewed Martha on her Twitter posts and habits: how, when, where and how often she tweets. We learned that Martha has 2 million followers, spends 5 minutes a day tweeting, appreciates how much easier it is to tweet from an ipad, calls it in to a colleague when necessary, tweets drink recipes and thinks all caps is acceptable. Seriously? I looked around and found the majority of people in the room looking quizzically at each other. One thing that was useful: how she uses it as a research tool. She’ll post a questions (would this store be a good choice for product?) and within seconds, get hundreds of responses and useful feedback. (Now that’s a great idea.) The rest of the hour was silly banter. Shame on David. You couldn’t think of any better questions to ask this brilliant marketer?

Twitter is just one communication channel, and it will work better for some marketers than others; it all depends on your audience, objectives and strategy. Martha’s advice was to try it, experiment and see if works for you. I appreciated hearing her say she hears people clicking all through her office (understanding some of it is for business,) but admitted she “hopes the novelty wears off and everyone will get back to work.” My thoughts exactly.