Saturday, January 17, 2009

The list of Brands Tweeting keeps growing

But is not about the number of brands only; is about how it is being used....

Twitter, like many other social tools, enables the aggregation / acceleration / amplification of already existing human behaviors; and can be used in many different ways by brands.

·Do you wan to engage? (i.e. have deals to announce?) Use it like Dell does. Or maybe you want to have a certain image and openness to engage with the consumer; check Zappos approach.

·Do you want to embrace & encourage? Use it like Southwest does.

·Do you want to get your message out there and your followers to help propagate? Check what Business Week is going.

·Do you want to support? Check what Comcast does

·Do you want to energize? Obama, enough said (shame it was not elegantly migrated into the next phase).

Standard social media rules apply: be authentic, transparent, carefully listen before jumping in with two feet and be ready to be humbled and learn from it.

Twitter, like any other Social Media approach, needs to be used as part of something bigger; no Social Media approach totally replaces traditional media; instead they complement and support each other nicely.


Filiberto Selvas

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good observations on the four you covered.

I agree with you that a controlling mindset should really focus on how current business policies are impacted by the new communication channel.

I also added a new one from the New York Times having specific policies about Facebook. This is interesting as some companies are choosing to have dedicated policies on specific sites. I would believe that Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and Linkedin all have enough of a presence to justify some specific policies rather than generalized ones.

For instance: I didn't note in any of the 15+ policies "who should be friended" on a network. I suspect we will see that being added to some policies in 6 to 12 months.