Job Description

The Director of Product Management will play a key role in driving CoTweet’s product roadmap, feature set, and market success for our solutions. You will be responsible for the product throughout the execution cycle, including: gathering product requirements, defining product vision, creating preliminary design concepts, and working closely with development to implement and iterate.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Research competing products and trends in on-demand application development market
• Work with customers, sales teams, and services teams to identify product use cases and drive key enhancements and requirements into the products.
• Participate in release planning process to determine contents of each release
• Participate in a cross-functional feature team chartered with:
  • Writing the functional requirements
  • Creating prototypes for usability testing
  • Working with the development, documentation, and software quality assurance teams through delivery of the feature
• Quickly fix bugs & solve problems

Required Skills/Experience:

• Work collaboratively with product and corporate marketing teams to develop marketing plans, positioning, core messaging, presentations, demos and sales tools to support the launch of new products and new product features
• Familiarity with the Product Owner role as defined in Scrum and related agile methods
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven experience developing solutions to complex and unusual technology challenges
• Lead sales training efforts for new product releases
• Work with industry analysts and product reviewers to articulate the value proposition and differentiators in the offering
• Participate in customer-facing events and user conferences as a product expert

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• 2-4+ years experience in product management
• Experience in on-demand and/or marketing applications
• Experience with functional requirements and specifications
• Self-starter, broad thinker, strategic planner, analytical skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Active in social media, personally and/or professionally
• Bachelors degree, MBA preferred
• Some travel required (5-10%)

If this sounds familiar, it’s time to test drive the new CoTweet CRM Connector. Imagine converting conversations that occur in Facebook and Twitter into leads or cases within your CRM system. With a single click, you immediately gain access to a broad history of interactions across online and offline channels. This is powerful data that can be used to better target campaigns, increase product demand, improve client satisfaction, and quantify the true ROI of social media.

Linking consumer profiles through cross-channel data, creates a full view of each individual customer. This means customers are no longer forced to repeat conversations, questions or frustrations when interacting with different members of your organization. How’s that for improving the customer experience.

The same study by eConsultancy states that 98% of marketers use at least three channels to deliver multichannel messages to their customers but more then half store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. At ExactTarget, we firmly believe in the concept of breaking down silos. Every customer record, every email you send, and every Twitter conversation is a piece of the puzzle. If you put them together properly, you now have a comprehensive view of the customer, allowing you to create meaningful, long term relationships. CoTweet’s CRM Connector does just this, offering integration with CRM, web analytics, and other tools to better understand and interact with your customers.

For enterprises looking to succeed in the real-time web, proactive engagement is key. CoTweet’s CRM Connector turns conversations across online, offline and social channels into meaningful and actionable customer data. There are thousands of customer conversations taking place across social, and many revolving around your brand. Join the thousands of customers already using CoTweet today to manage their social media conversations.

Ready to quantify your social ROI with CoTweet CRM Connector? Download the free guide.

The event was wildly successful – we had a diverse group of attendees representing agencies, b2c, b2b, and non-profit organizations. No doubt the interest in social media is sky-high. The room was packed and the crowd – about 170 marketers – was highly engaged and interested in learning as much as possible about the best practices in social media.

Briefly, I wanted to highlight the big themes/trends bubbling up out of our presentation, interaction with the attendees and questions asked by the crowd.

• Do Social Media best practices differ for a B2B, B2C or non-profit organization? The short answer is in most cases, not much. Many of the principles for a successful social media program are remarkably consistent across B2B, B2C and non-profits. In fact, the difference between overall best practices in the marketing mix for different business models and industries is becoming smaller everyday.

• Breaking Down Silos or keep Social Media independent? More and more, organizations realize that an effective social media program is tightly integrated in the overall marketing mix. And you can only realize the full value of social media if adoption is distributed across your organization and integrated with existing systems and process. Today’s crowd definitely understood that concept and was eager to continue breaking down silos internally. Joel Book did a particularly compelling job showing how long-time ExactTarget customers are using email and social to drive incremental revenue.

• How do you treat a lead coming from Twitter, Facebook or other Social Media channels? Just like any other lead! Granted, the characteristics of Social Media lead admin

  We encouraged the audience to take the time to understand the characteristics of the lead – conversion to customer win, average contract value, the amount of time in the sales pipeline – but in general, a social lead should be treated with the same amount of care as a lead coming from your other lead sources.

• Customers Service is simply great marketing. Joel and I touched on several case studies showing how organizations are providing a level of customer support and service on Twitter and Facebook which actually strengthens loyalty to their brand. Service is really the new marketing and amazing customer service and support should be the goal whether you are a B2B, B2B, or non-profit organization

Thanks to the group in Calgary for greeting us with such an engaging conversation!

Social media has become the fundamental link between brands and customers allowing companies to respond in real-time. In addition to our iPhone application and iPad support, CoTweet now offers applications on several mobile platforms helping clients engage with customers anytime, anywhere, across the social web.

In addition to the ability to leverage the tools and features available on our web app, the unique form factor of mobile devices have allowed us to create a unique user experience for our newly upgraded iPhone, which includes new capabilities for Facebook. When you’re in the messages folder, hold your iPhone in landscape mode and you will see a completely different view where you can flip through messages and quickly archive or claim them. Our new design makes it as easy and fun to flip through a large number of messages, and either archive or claim.

CoTweet Enterprise customers can download the new mobile applications for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Also, for more info check out today’s press release.

CoTweet and ExactTarget are excited to pair up with Klout for our 2nd annual SXSW brunch, at the Whole Foods Headquarters in Austin. Entertainment will include performances by nationally renowned singer-songwriter Sahara Smith, as well as Austin’s own Americano duo Lee Edwards with Claudia Voyles.

Click here to see more photos from last years SxSw Brunch

We’ll back again for our next event on April 21. Stay tuned for updates on an exciting lineup of speakers and topics! In the meantime, are you interested in leaning more about why consumers engage and disengage with your brand online? Join CoTweet + ExactTarget on Wednesday, March 15th at 2pm EST for “The Audience has Spoken!”, a free webinar presenting the best insights from our research series, Subscribers, Fans and Followers. Register today.

At 11:30am a well established ‘mommy blogger,’ @crissy, tweeted a post from her blog, Dear Crissy, calling out Toyota for a shady email pitch she received.

The email came from MommyNetworks.org and it offered bloggers a chance to “score” a $10.00 Amazon gift card for helping to spread positive news about Toyota. The email provided links to positive content about Toyota and asked the bloggers to rate, share or otherwise promote these links and report the activity back to MommyNetworks to claim the gift card. (Read full text here)

In the text of the email a direct connection with Toyota was never established, but the language of the email heavily implied that Toyota was behind the effort. Of course, Crissy found this communication to be offensive and so she shared the story on her blog and with her 33,000+ followers on Twitter. Before long other ‘mommy bloggers’ had picked up the story and #toyotafail was on it’s way to becoming the next #motrinmoms or Domino’s Pizza disaster.

That is, if Toyota hadn’t been actively monitoring their Twitter conversations in their CoTweet inbox. Within hours of Crissy’s tweet, @Toyota issued a response

And the result was an overwhelming turn in the tide of sentiment related to the incident.

Toyota used CoTweet to track incoming messages and the data shows that their timely response made all the difference:

There are several important lessons to be learned here.

#1 – The entire incident took less than 15 hours from first tweet to negligible levels of volume. Speed is critical. As soon as Toyota responded, the sentiment reversed dramatically and total volume peaked only an hour later.

#2 – Honesty is a virtue. Toyota had the truth on their side and was able to clear their name simply by setting the record straight. They had no affiliation with the company that sent the email, and that fact was later confirmed by that same company. However, had that not been the case, lying would have only stirred the pot.

#3 – Fact checking is hard in situations like this. MommyNetworks never claimed to be sponsored by Toyota, but they did use a brand name in such a way that it was represented as if it was affiliated. Crissy had no reason to think that Toyota hadn’t been involved and blogs aren’t held to the standard that traditional journalism is. She presented the story as she saw it. Social media is a fantastic tool for spreading information, but there’s no guarantee that the information is correct. Brands have to be on alert in order to correct any false assumptions before they reach critical mass.

#4 – Track it. Toyota immediately set up custom tags within CoTweet to track the conversations around this incident. That information can now be used to create internal insights – training material, PR follow up and measurement.

This story has a happy ending. But it should serve as a warning. Are you prepared to tackle an incident like this? Do you have systems in place to surface these types of messages before they go viral? Who would respond? How? If you can’t answer those questions, now is the time to put a plan in place.

Need help? Let us know!

Primary Responsibilities:

• Work closely with product designers & software engineers to implement new features from controller-level to UI
• Write front-end code in HTML/CSS, Javascript & Ruby
• Build reusable front-end abstractions & systems
• Participate in design & code reviews
• Quickly fix bugs & solve problems

Required Skills/Experience:

• Expert-level knowledge of front-end web technologies (HTML/CSS,Javascript)
• Experience with Ruby on Rails templates (ERB, HAML, etc)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proven experience developing solutions to complex and unusual technology challenges.
• Knowledgeable foundation in interaction design principles
• Thorough understanding of developing for cross-browser support
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• Intermediate/expert-level proficiency with agile methods, git, or continuous integration
• Passion for performance debugging & benchmarking
• Visual-design skills

I am proud to announce that that day has finally arrived. Today we officially opened the beautiful ExactTarget Social Media Lab, right in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood!

The ExactTarget Social Media Lab, will serve as our social media center of excellence, where we drive innovation in social products and services. We’ll work closely with our customers to negotiate the latest challenges and opportunities and define the future of enterprise social media. The innovation that comes out of the lab will not only impact the way we communicate, but also how companies interact with their customers and other constituents.

In addition to product innovation, training, sales and support, the new facility will serve as a venue for social media experts to collaborate on best practices and new innovations. Each month, we’ll host theCoTweet Conversation Series, a series of intimate, one-on-one conversations with social media industry thought leaders. We’re kicking off the CoTweet Conversation Series this Thursday, February 10th with Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Altimeter Group and author of the popular blog “Web Strategy”, who will join me in an engaging discussion around the definition and implementation of social CRM and how social media impacts business.

We’ll be announcing our March Conversation Series speaker shortly, so stay tuned. We’d love for you to join us!

Today’s launch is just the beginning. The team is full of energy and we’re looking forward to making an unforgettable impact within the San Francisco community. We’re also hiring, if you are interested in joining us on this journey, check out our Jobs page!

CoTweet’s proven business model and market-leading solutions allows us to maintain our early leadership position in the social media space, constantly growing the business as the market expands. We’ve established our Social Media Lab in the SOMA district of San Francisco and are rapidly growing our team to meet the incredible market opportunity ahead of us.

Job Description

The CoTweet Social Media Sales Consultant will be responsible for assisting top customers and prospects build their social media strategies and align ExactTarget Social Media Solutions and the CoTweet Product to the business goals and technical requirements of the customer. Specifically, the CoTweet – Social Media Sales Consultant will work closely with our Global Sales, Relationship Management, and Professional Services teams to assist in closing CoTweet sales and service opportunities. As an individual who represents CoTweet and drives the revenue of our firm, the CoTweet – Social Media Sales Consultant must be a self-starter who is passionate and knowledgeable about the social media landscape with the ability to manage a large sales pipeline and a focus on closing business.

• Work with ExactTarget’s Global Sales team, Relationship Managers and Professional Services team to sell ExactTarget’s Social Media Solutions, including CoTweet
• Gather technical and business requirements, positioning ExactTarget Social Media Solutions in order to meet those requirements, and building customized product demonstrations of CoTweet that address the identified requirements
• Create PowerPoint presentations to support custom demonstrations. Present a high- level overview of the application architecture and integration capabilities
• Understand sales process and methodologies; Meet and exceed all quarterly and annual sales quotas
• Generate business opportunities through professional, dedicated prospecting and networking

Required Skills & Experience

• Minimum of 3-5 years experience in sales, ideally in SaaS-based products in the enterprise space. Agency experience and solution selling a big plus
• Proven track record of regularly exceeding annual sales quotas and targets and significant experience in developing and delivering presentations to senior-level personnel
• Deep domain expertise in social media and interactive marketing; social media enthusiasts
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced, rapidly-changing environment
• Ability to travel up to 50% of the time

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Through the partnership CoTweet will be made available in Japanese and will rely on NTT Com’s Online Marketing Group sales team to sell the localized application.

Social media is growing rapidly in Japan. Last September, Forrester Research reported that 36% of Japanese adults are active creators on social networking sites and 75% percent of online Japanese adults view content on social sites as spectators. (A Global Update of Social Technographics – Forrester Research Group, Sept. 2010)

Corporations recognize the need for an enterprise solution to authentically and efficiently manage the growing number of online conversations. NTT Com’s partnership with CoTweet and ExactTarget will provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and the global expertise they need to successfully engage with customers through social media.

“Social media is rapidly growing in Japan, and enterprises need a solution to help their teams manage the online consumers,” said Yoshie Tsukamoto, head of the marketing solution office, NTT Com. “By partnering with CoTweet and ExactTarget, we can provide NTT Com customers the scalable technology and global expertise they need create, manage and measure social media engagement with customers around the world.”

Press release: ExactTarget, NTT Com Sign Partnership to Bring CoTweet Social Media Marketing Platform to Japan