Yesterday B.L. Ochman over at Advertising Age [UPDATE: Ochman is an independent blogger at What's Next and cross-posted to Ad Age. Sorry for the confusion] published a pretty good list of the Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet. The list has some obvious reasons – “1. You think using Twitter is a social-media strategy,” “8. You want to protect your updates” – as well as some useful reminders of things to avoid– “2. Every tweet has to be approved by legal,” “7. You think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you.”

There were a few, however, that left me scratching my head. First, #3: You plan to use Twitter for nothing but broadcasting headlines or deals. This scenario is a popular one among companies as well as bloggers, and has good traction among users. Case in point: DellHomeOffers and Dell Outlet. The main draw in both cases are deals, plain and simple. While the venerable Dell Outlet does respond to questions directly and offers to help users, I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and hypothesize that of the 297,883 followers Dell Outlet has generated, maybe 200-300 follow for the non-deal content. The newer DellHomeOffers is deal content, plain and simple.

Last week Jeff Nolan wrote an interesting blog post titled Is Twitter Killing RSS? While killing is a bit over the top, I think the short answer is yes. Many companies in high tech products are finding that it is very easy and convenient to dump blog, wiki, discussion forum, and other content right into Twitter where more people will find and read it. Just keep an eye out for the telltale sign: from twitterfeed.

Next, #6: You think Tweeting as XYZ Corp. and using the company logo as your avatar might be a good idea. Organic conversations between real employees and customers is clearly laudable, and is typically the goal of a social media initiative. However, it’s clear there are some cases where customers want and need to connect with a “company.” Comcast Cares? While Frank Eliason, the main force behind the initiative, clearly identifies himself and does not claim to speak as “Comcast” it’s no mistake that his Twitter handle is not FrankEliason.

Further, look at Colonel Tribune, the mascot of the Chicago Tribune company. This fictional character does a nice job of aggregating content relevant to anyone living in or interested in Chicago and accretes value back to the newspaper, not an individual employee.

And what happens if you take a hands off approach to its logical conclusion? We end up with what has happened at Cisco and HP: practically every employee with internet access has set up a semi-official account, fragmenting the user base, and decreasing the overall corporate value. Its no shock that both companies are now working to rationalize the mess. Does it make sense to have one single account? No more than it makes sense to have one single company blog. But to let the gates swing wide open and declare you should not have an official corporate presence is reckless.

Finally, #9: You plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Ochman’s point here is not 100% clear, as it is difficult to tell if she is advising against tracking or against tracking with Google Analytics. But for the sake of discussion, lets assume the worst: That you should not bother tracking the impact of your Twitter initiative.

Well, no shocker here, this one is far from a best practice. Yes, the analytics are pretty poor today, and a simple analysis of followers alone is missing the point, however just letting it fly and hoping for the best is a quick path to frustration and, eventually, your CMO asking what all this effort has amounted to. Thankfully the usual suspects are working to provide a programmatic approach to Twitter analytics – WebTrends and Radian6 announced a new offering to do just that.

All in all, it was a very useful list and I recommend the read. Of course with a few caveats!

View Comments

The other day I was perusing former colleague Pete Kim’s master list of social media marketing examples and noticed that the Detroit Pistons was listed as a Twitter user. Naturally, as a Pistons fan, I had to find out what was up, so I clicked in and what did I find? Why an “official” Twitter feed pushing box scores, game highlights, promotions and other run of the mill fare. I kept poking through and ran into this tweet:

Hmmm . . . Well either one of two things is happening here. Either the Piston’s marketing department has gone off the deep end — remember this is the team who’s most far reaching recent national news was the Malice at the Palace — or Warren Skukernek, the guy who added it to the list, got taken for a ride. Considering a search of the Pistons site for “twitter” returns no results I have to believe this is less than official.

That said, it begs the question, with this much trash out there why would any actual brand even bother? Other than because you read the Comcast Cares case study and set up your own, of course.

View Comments