Lord Sugar has just promoted Viglen on Twitter to his audience of almost 2 million followers (2 hours ago). His message read – IT purchasing managers – how about buying from a British company with great service. He then included a bit.ly link and an email address.

The email address is interesting, because people can click on the email and email viglen directly. He used an email address that is probably unique to the twitter campaign but I am not absolutely sure. Either way, he did not want responses on Twitter.

Lord Sugar has been building up an audience on Twitter steadily over the last few years getting wide appeal from his TV program.

It is interesting that someone has chosen to promote Viglen (a company lord sugar is involved in) on Twitter when the target market for this IT company is so narrow. Let’s face it, IT managers aren’t on every street corner, are they?

The message has to be simple on twitter because it is so limited but why waste space talking about it being a British company and miss out the company name (although it was in the email address). Also, is Lord Sugar saying that companies in other countries don’t offer good service?

Personally, I don’t get it… Wrong audience, wrong channel, wrong message…

But then what should he have done?

Well, keep the focus of the twitter messages on Piers Morgan – they seem to rub off on each other nicely. If you must use twitter because you have 2 million people reading your messages and Viglen needs some exposure then make it subtle. A sponsorship campaign promoted via twitter perhaps, a survey and so on. Outright marketing appears desperate.

The benefit to Viglen from this campaign will not outweigh the damage an irrelevant message can cause. Abuse this channel and loose your audience is my point.

I am not saying you can’t cross talk but it must be done with care, and this wasn’t.

Although I would still like it if Lord Sugar could retweet me to 2 million people from his mobile phone in the back of his limo whilst he passes me at the bus stop…

Enough said! Now where is that bus?