The rules for corporations getting onto Twitter
I think this post about US airline Jet Blue using Twitter perfectly demonstrates how corporations need to tread very carefully when they begin to engage with customers using the microblogging service. They didn’t make any huge gaffs, but this got me thinking about what the rules should be for corporations thinking about using Twitter. Here’s what I came up with:
1. Be a human
It’s better to be a person than just a company name. After all, Twitter is a conversational medium, and conversations are best held between people. So, all corporate Twitter usernames should be human, but it’s OK to get the company name in there as well so it’s clear who you are. Something like “Tom – MegaCorp” works well I think.
2. Say hello first
The users in the Jet Blue example found it a bit freaky when they mentioned the company name and shortly afterwards received notifications that Jet Blue was following them on Twitter. It seemed like it was a ‘bot’ doing this automatically. I think the lesson here is that if you use a service like tweetscan to look out for mentions of your company (you are listening to what’s being said about you, right?), send the user a message first to say hello, disclose who you are and encourage further conversation. If the user replies to you, then it’s OK to follow them. Or if they follow you first then you can reciprocate.
OK that was only two rules. What should we add to this list? Or do you disagree with anything?
Tom wrote this on 17.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Social media box
On April 18th, 2008 at 11:11 am, Trevor May responded:
Amusingly, I was twitterspammed by mybloglog this morning. You’d think they’d know better.
On April 18th, 2008 at 12:27 pm, Barry responded:
I think the most important thing is to be honest about who you are.
In general, I think people feel much more at ease when they know that there are actually real human beings with real personalities working at ‘MegaCorp’.
They also don’t like being mislead. I’ve seen marketing people from big companies try to pass themselves off as teenage consumers with embarrassing results.