Corporate Social

by Val Vladescu on December 18, 2009

Last few days revealed a number of updates from various online services meant to serve the corporate need to produce artifacts and serve them to the social media consumers.

Let’s name just a few:

Here’s how I see this whole picture.

First point is that I’m apparently disappointed.Back when Twitter announced a solid business model, a cool advertising strategy “which we will love” I was expecting a clean and clear strategy in terms of impact towards the regular users.

Now, while I may be a fan of the SuperTwit concept, and a promoter of Twitter itself as a platform for the consumption of existing services, I cannot help noticing the  negative impact of the newly found usecases for corporate Twitter accounts.

Twitter is focused on the masses. Heck, it’s whole billion dollar valuation is counted upon the huge amount of people that use it. Ignoring basic social values and making business features publicly available in such a way that corporate account owners tamper with the timeline in an intrusive non-personal manner will draw users away!

Tweet scheduling and company accounts with special features , if not managed correctly, opens up the path for exactly this kind of tampering. Having business entities self-promote or encouraging them to post stuff in an automatic manner will make their accounts nothing better then the good old spammers.

I’M NOT SAYING MAKING THESE FEATURES TECHNICALLY AVAILABLE IS A BAD THING. All I’m saying is that wannabe social experts, including people from within Twitter Inc. are promoting them wrong. And this leads to nothing good. Imagine a twitter where most of the accounts are either spammers or corporate accounts. With no typos. No personal touch. No geolocation. Just carefully chosen 140 chars phrases that build up the company image or link to some affiliate marketing crap.

If I were to think and design such a system, I must admit I’d be more on the bit.ly approach. In the equation above just Google seems to be on the right track.And, yes, Arrington and Cashmore got it completely wrong! Google is not competing, is struggling to add real value.

PR is a good usage of Twitter, but it’s just a quarter of the pie! If I were in the Twitter for business team I’d start pushing features like analytics. That’s what business people need to see. I’m sick of all the marketing wannabes, of all the interactive agencies who say: “now your company has twitter and facebook. Riding the social wave, baby!Everything is on auto-pilot!” Did you guys even bothered noticing the new Facebook analytics for pages? Do you know which UberVu reactions you should respond to? Do you even know about UberVU?

All in all, Twitter is a powerful tool, and with the firehose open to the public, this great amount of data to analyze and build stats upon is given away to you! So what are you waiting for?

If you’re a media agency, instead of enabling “auto-pilot” start training your people to use these wonderful tools out there. Leverage the power of the Twitter stream to bring your customers touchable reliable data not only about the reactions but also about the users. Gather feedback. Set up your CoTweet today!

If you’re a developer, make use of that data, build stuff. After all Google was built on the top of the data that was already there. The success came once someone bothered to look deep inside this data and produce a comprehensible index of that data!

Think about it and if you felt the tiniest bit inspired just get moving and head towards Bucharest Hubb and let’s build a startup on top of that!

Tagged as: affiliate marketing, analytics, arrington, artifacts, auto pilot, beta, Bucharest, business entities, business team, company accounts, company image, consumers, consumption, corporate accounts, crap, existing services, geolocation, google, hubb, interactive agencies, marketing, mashable, negative impact, oriented services, personal manner, personal touch, phrases, promoter, scobleize, social values, spammers, special features, startups, timeline, Twitter, typos, usecases, wannabes

  • I also think that a feature (like almost anything else) could be used for both good and bad purposes. The issue, in this case, is that it is difficult to control the community formed around Twitter. I don't know about you but, as for me, I was more satisfied with Twitter one year ago: qualitative information shared, no spam, interesting people. Since it reached all kinds of people recently, these things have changed: plenty of spam now, the interesting people started using Twitter for chatting,etc.Good thing you can always unfollow.
    About the social values: I can't stand the chain reaction of wishes to people that have a birthday. Users that I barely know retweet a wish from some other user that I know. They don't even bother to add something to that retweet or to actually wish me something. If there's no thought into it then I am not gonna appreciate it.
  • In a many-to-many environment it's impossible to control people. Certain desired behaviors can only be fostered. My 2 cents.
  • This is exactly my point! The idea is that most of the businesses that get to interact with social media ( not just Twitter ) listen to third parties (i.e. agencies) which have few so-called "social media experts" who are themselves influenced by some notorious figures in the online environment.
    What I'm saying is that instead of releasing features and promoting stuff towards the companies, wouldn't it be great if the developers of a particular business oriented service made a very clear point that should be spread within this whole ecosystem by the most influential people? I mean they do in some way, but in most cases so far it turned out wrong! That's mainly 'cause the desire of pleasing as much of the audience as possible certain things are emphasized. And those things aren't quite the right ones imho.
  • I didn't get your idea right :)
  • Val, it's great that you actually took the time to explore the latest updates from Twitter in terms of business. What you're saying, if I understood correctly is that features such as "contributors" have the potential to empower spam and conversations that lack authenticity.

    I truly believe that Twitter has the best intentions. "Contributors" is just another small step to empower companies to be transparent. Scheduling tweets is truly necessary because you can't just throw 20 tweets about 20 different pieces of information (although useful) in the same time.

    My opinion is that any kind of thing on Earth, a Twitter feature, a gun, food, etc. can be used in the same time for good or bad purposes. It's just a matter of choice. I think that the guys at Twitter are giving their best to promote "the good".

    Regarding the analytics argument. Well there's a lot of controversy around the subject of ROI and social media analytics. Most of the companies have a bottom-up approach, experimenting various actions that would hopefully lead to a pattern/process that can be replicated in order to bring value and profit in the same time. In this context, it's easy to understand that features such as analytics need more time to be released.

    There are few companies that managed to transform social media interactions into money, but even those transformations are thought not to be successful yet. For example Dell did $6.5bln. in sales with the help of Twitter but some say that the cost to getting there was higher.
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