Evangelising Twitter
Jinfo Blog

1st August 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Teenagers may hate it and bosses be suspicious – but that isn’t stopping Twitter from launching a toolkit for evangelising the value of its services to business. Twitter 101 includes best practice, case studies, a fact sheet and a slide show – all designed to demonstrate that business should be taking it seriously. ‘Think about Twitter as a place to build relationships’ is one tip it offers executives struggling to understand what differentiates social networking communication from a conventional marketing campaign. Understand the real time nature of the medium, it continues – and it even offers methods for applying simple metrics to measure Twitter’s value to a business (http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/). Although its company case studies cover some top brands (Dell and Pepsi for example), one issue the Twitter 101 pages don’t address is user demographics – an interesting omission, this, in the light of the recent Morgan Stanley report How Teenagers Consume Media. This was the work of a 15-year old summer intern, Matthew Robson, and although Morgan Stanley sensibly makes no claim to representation or statistical accuracy, it did find it thought provoking enough to be worth publishing (http://digbig.com/5badeb). Matthew’s by now famous claim that teenagers don’t use Twitter must give pause for thought. And – bearing in mind that young people of his calibre will be turning up in trainee posts in major companies in a decade or less – information providers and intermediaries ignore the implications of some of his other assessments at their peril. Whether or not teenagers are interested in news is a moot point – but they certainly don’t want to read pages and pages of text when they can get short summaries on the internet, for example. And they never use directories (irrelevant) or equivalent phone services (expensive), preferring to work round the problem of finding what they need with a Google search. Leaving aside teenage indifference, corporate Twittering brings other potential risks. Published earlier this summer, Deloitte’s 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey reveals serious tensions between employers and employees around the use of social media (http://digbig.com/5badec). Sixty percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organisations in online social networks, the Survey finds. But more than half of employees – and nearly two thirds of 18–34 year olds – say their employers have no business monitoring their online activity. Three quarters of employees understand that social networks make it easier to damage an organisation’s reputation – yet a third never consider what their boss or customers might think before posting material online. The risks need to be considered at the highest level, Deloitte advises. Whether you evangelise Twitter or not, getting embedded into corporate social media policy sounds like a smart career move.

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