June 3
Best Practices for Tweeting as a Company?
by Paul Irish
We’ve had a thread going internally on how we want to use Twitter as a company with @MolecularInc. We all want to open up this conversation to a broader audience and get all our good ideas together. So let me bring everyone up to speed:
Options
Some feel that one employee should own the account and can act as editor or contributed tweets. (That is, take any tweets employees wish to offer and post them).
The primary advantages of a singular editor are:
- ultimately accountable for quality
- a unified and consistent voice — not all over the place
CoTweet was offered a solution, which offers companies a unified publishing platform and (we assume) some sort of workflow option. While we don’t have access yet, a number of tweeting companies leverage it and presumably enjoy it.
A suggestion (from Bryan) is for @Molecularinc to retweet a tweet from an employee. Retweets have emerged as a de-facto standard for sharing someone else’s thoughts/links/etc. This would require employees (that wish to contribute) to have their own twitter account, of course.
Voices
Steve said, “My experience is that Twitter is a bit different than other channels in that it works best when there is a consistent human voice behind the tweets. Blogs and conferences work well with disparate voices and perspectives, but the business Twitter accounts that seem to be most effective (Zappos, Comcast, etc.) are written by one person or (in Comcast’s case) one voice that feels like one person even though it isn’t.”
Heather offered, “I understand that the ideal state of affairs for companies and brands to take advantage of the Twitter platform is to engage an audience- be it peers in the digital community, existing clients, prospective clients, or just interested parties- in a lively and active conversation.
“In doing so, the brand/company demonstrates transparency and authenticity, and as such, accepts that they have exposed themselves to some degree of risk. But, I think we’d agree that the payoff in customer trust and loyalty far exceeds it.”
Bryan said, “I second Steve that a consistent voice is an important element of organizational success with Twitter, but I also agree with Heather that the power of the Twitter platform is the potential for “lively and active conversation” – something that generally requires a diverse set of voices. ”
What are your thoughts?
The Best Practices for Tweeting as a Company? by Molecular Voices, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Paul Irish said on June 3rd, 2009
Even when it was announced Guy Kawasaki had been using ghost-twitterers, it didn’t seem like people were relieved to know because they had been getting confused.
I agree that language can make the tone of of tweet sound different from another, but I don’t think this would cause any damage as far as readability or brand image.
Paul Irish said on June 3rd, 2009
Craig Andrews said on June 3rd, 2009
1) microblog something
2) Email the person who runs the @molecularinc account
3) That person RT’s what you said
That could easily be a few hours lag, and involves email, and 2 people doing things… I doubt it would work.
There needs to be something like identi.ca’s “groups,” where Molecules’ join the “Molecular” group, then tag the notices they want to appear in the group with the “!Molecular” group tag. Then interested parties simple look the “!Molecular” group or follow it. Take a look at how identi.ca does groups… it’s way less work, and it’s actually usable.
Tim Lynch said on June 3rd, 2009
I think (maybe) there should be some sort of unified voice…at least over a period of time. I’ve noticed that recently the voice has been kind of all over the place:
http://twitter.com/MolecularInc/status/1991056300
http://twitter.com/MolecularInc/status/2016185720
etc.
But maybe that is good?
One thing I like is when BoingBoing is curated by a guest blogger for a period of time…so our Twitter account could have an “introduction tweet” about the new curator, then go with that person for a period of time (along with the regular releases and such). I do think this sort of stifles the livliness of the conversations…
Mark Badger said on June 3rd, 2009
1. Cotweet allows for Molecular to be perceived more as a group of individuals that RT’ing would. While abbreviated attribution formatting of retweets might do this, I think it sends the wrong message, i.e. that our comments/insights require filtering. (Of course, the cotweet workflow would seem to allow for filtering without the perception of filtering, but that’s another point.)
2. Management of twitter conversational threads. To this point, retweeting doesn’t invite a dialogue, really. With cotweet, the person who originated the tweet, on behalf of Molecular, could respond directly (or openly), rather than having the @Molecularinc account respond. If there is more than one thread, having RT conversations would get awkward fast.
We keep referring to “voice” here, but I wonder if we are in agreement as to the meaning. Do we mean tone, grammatical point of view, philosophical point of view, word-choice/style? As Heather has contended, if we are truly to express “intelligence at every interaction,” is that best conveyed with multiple authors or with one corporate mouthpiece?
Laurel Tripp said on June 3rd, 2009
Heather Eddy said on June 3rd, 2009
To echo Tim’s great comment about an organization (say, Molecular, for example!) being comprised of a community of experts, individuals are the stewards of an organization’s brand, and it follows that with the business and social intelligence expected of those individuals just to, you know, do their jobs, every Tweet, every blog post, every email to a client or to a co-worker is essentially demonstrating a unified voice.
Clients, prospects, and recruits crave genuine windows into an organization’s culture to affirm and build enthusiasm around the people into whose hands their success is, or may be placed. Every interaction is indeed an opportunity, when conducted with intelligence.
Tim Lynch said on June 3rd, 2009
Razorfish: http://twitter.com/razorfish
PSFK: http://twitter.com/PSFK
Ogilvy: http://twitter.com/OGILVY
etc etc…
(big list of agencies on Twitter – http://www.mojaveinteractive.com/think/list-of-advertising-agencies-on-twitter.html)
I think the clearly defined, multi-voice stream might be an interesting way to differentiate us…maybe?
Ricardo Salema said on June 3rd, 2009
Tweeting is in itself the message! It says, we are engaged, we care enough to share, and we are sharing valuable/interesting content. That is in itself a critical component of building brand, and allowing all of us in our interactions to be true brand stewards.
To that point I think the “mouthpiece” approach is not preferable. We are constantly telling our clients to “engage” in the dialugue and not “control” it. Time to eat some of our own dog food and perhaps wash it down with some Kool-Aid. (that one is for you Heather)
Riccardo La Rosa said on June 3rd, 2009
both examples you mentioned are effective because they are the voices of actual people (Tony and Frank) not of a few people mashed together.
Zappos encourages its employees to use twitter and even to create twitter accounts during their training. You can see them here http://twitter.zappos.com/employees , over 433 different accounts, and they are all very personal.
Similarly Comcast has now 10 people in twitter to help customers with problems using their own screen name: @ComcastBill, @ComcastBonnie, @ComcastGeorge, etc.
But to answer the initial question around best practices for tweeting as a company, my thoughts are simple:
- people should use their own screenname (not a company one) and add in the bio who they work for.
- a company web site should provide a way for other people to find out who from the company is on twitter (ala zappos)