By Guest Author
I’m frequently amazed at the frequency with which I come across people discussing their Twitter Strategy, or their Facebook Strategy. Contrast this with offline terminology… we never talk about a Press Release Strategy or a Features Tracking Strategy.
Twitter and Facebook et al are one of many channels or platforms through which we wish to engage stakeholders in conversation. The strategy, then, is the plan we set ourselves for our use of social media to achieve our business objectives.
The strategy is constructed to meet our objectives and is informed by deep insight into best practice application of social media.
The strategy sets out the framework for our current and future adoption of social Web channels, platforms, services and gizmos. It helps us work out which of these to adopt and how they might work together. It describes the over-arching ethos and policies for social media use, organisation-wide, and clearly articulates how success is to be gauged, month in and month out.
There is no such thing as Twitter Strategy, and if you think there is then you are Twittering for Twitter’s sake and not for business success.
But back to the corporate Twitter profile, by which I mean… @companyname or @brandname.
If I ask you to think about the last conversation you had, what comes to mind? Was it interesting? Did it leave a lasting impression? You will recall the characteristics of the other person or persons.
But it is always people. Try it, although perhaps you don’t need to! Ask everyone you come in to contact with today about the last conversation they had, and see how many of them say “Yes, wow, great chat with brandname at lunch”. They will say “John” or “Jane” but never “Levi” or “Porsche” or “Dell” or “Accenture”.
Does this mean there is no place for @companyname and @brandname?
No!
In many ways, although this is not a bullet proof assertion, Twitter is everything RSS aspired to be (at least for human use). It is simple, universally easy to create and delightfully simple to follow. The corporate Twitter profile is, then, a nifty way for Web-savvy and interested parties to keep abreast of your news.
So, as it stands, this approach is more monologue than the dialogue to which we all aspire, so we can’t stop here.
Now, if you have some passionate social media trained members of your BrandX team, let’s call them @john and @jane, your corporate Twitter profile @brandx should aim to direct followers looking to have a chat with real people such as John and Jane. Each Twitter profile should then refer to and converse with eachother.
This isn’t rocket science; in fact it’s much the same as real life, which of course makes sense when you consider that mankind hasn’t undergone some kind of rapid evolution or psychological metamorphosis just because we have the Web or Skype or Twitter. In the pre-social Web days I might end up talking with John because I was a BrandX customer. The brand brought us together but the conversation, the dialogue, the interaction was person-to-person.
And it still is.
April 3rd, 2009
By Guest Author
Image courtesy of Handmark.com
Our colleague RJ Bardsley (@rjbardsley), is live at CTIA this week. Here’s his report from day 2 in Las Vegas.
So it’s Day Two at America’s Most Influential Mobile Show….
…And there is still a ton of cool stuff to take in and take on. My day started shortly after the keynote sitting down for coffee with some of the folks over at Handmark. They’ve had a ton of cool news out lately and at this show they brought the curtain up on some great mobile apps for partners like the Associated Press. Handmark does a number of things, but they’re also the great grand daddy of mobile app stores – they started way back in 2000 when most phones still had cords and the iPod was only a music player that sat gazing longingly across your desk at the cell phone (which was probably the size of a small loaf of bread).
Anyway, my next stop was at a pretty unlikely booth. If you’re a mobile junkie like me, you probably walk right by a lot of those conference booths with all the phone covers and rubber protectors. I mean, really – we’re interested in all the cool apps and gee-wiz electronics on the mobile, not the pocket protector you wrap it in. It’s all about the hi-def video recorder and the new Shape Writer app that revolutionizes the way I enter data into my phone – right? Not so fast. Incipio has some of the coolest iPhone accesories I’ve ever seen. The thing that struck me first and most about this company was that it’s phone covers and hard drive socks looked more like something you might see on project runway or in a museum. There was the cool super hero line, the artistic Japanese wood block line, the executive but stylish line. Before I knew it I was snapping photos like the paparazzi at fashion week. I got the chance to chat with Kari Nishimura, one of the lead designers for Incipio and she explained a little bit about what inspires her and how she knows what will sell. “I was a studio art major in college, but my first love was illustration. A lot of the designs here are stuff that I love to draw…I watch what’s happening in music and pop culture…and I have a good idea of what will sell because I’m pretty close to the demographic we’re targetting.” For more on Kari and Incipio check out their Website.
My last significant stop for the day was with a company called E7. Check this out: E7 wants to reduce waste in the cell phone ecosystem by refurbishing your old phone and sending it back to you so you can use it again. In general this is a very cool idea – except personally, I usually switch phones because I’m lured by the latest shiny gadgets and software. E7 refurbs the battery, the GPS radio, and all the plastic and chrome parts. And, they do all the work in Atlanta, so they’re conforming with the buy American part of the stimulus plan.
Well, that’s it from CTIA for now. Catch you guys next at the iHollywood Forum’s Mobile Entertainment Summit on April 22.
April 3rd, 2009
By Kyle Austin
Michael Arrington created an instantaneous buzz last night, that spiraled across the Internet and throughout the Twittersphere, when he posted to TechCrunch that “Sources: Google in Late-Stage Talks to Buy Twitter.” As both Kara Swisher and Reuters note, Arrington and TechCrunch, have had a somewhat rocky rode in breaking so-called “rumors.” So there was little surprise in most Silicon Valley circles when he backed off and changed his headline to “Sources: Google in Talks to Acquire Twitter (Updated),” a short time later. In which, he highlighted that he still had two sources on record noting there were late stage talks in progress and one source who was framing the negotiations as “early stage.”
Kara, over at All Things Digital, quickly debunked Arrington’s rumor, as she does with most of his rumors, quoting two sources close to Twitter and Google as saying:
- “There was a discussion with [Google executive Marissa Mayer's] group about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary…and that was that.”
- “Seriously, no negotiations, no deal, nada.”
She also highlighted that Twitter founder Biz Stone was on the Colbert Report last night detailing Twitter’s desire to be a strong, profitable, independent company (embedded above).
While Arrington’s rumors, may be just that – only rumors – they come at an interesting time when Twitter is expanding its search and user interface functionality, with help from former Google design leader Douglas Bowman.
Rob Hof at BusinessWeek points out that Google is very intrigued by Twitter and the folks at Google he’s spoken with admit that they’re following the micro-blogging service very closely. However, he sees $250 million as a price tag far too high in the current economy for a company that has no revenue making plans to date.
Robert Scoble thinks Hof is wrong, pointing out that the price tag is actually low. Given what Hoff’s colleague Spencer Ante detailed in a recent piece on Facebook’s failed attempt to acquire Twitter for $500 million (albeit mostly in Facebook stock), Robert S. may be right.
However, let’s all remember Google’s chief, Eric Schmidt, is still famously on record, comparing Twitter to a poor man’s email service: so the Twitter-envy may not roll all the way to the top.
April 3rd, 2009
