The Social Media Landscape

I remember nearly 20 years ago when I first heard the phrase, "Imagine your brand were at a cocktail party. What would it wear and who would it talk to?" It sounded so smart and sophisticated. It made me want to be a brand guy. (Today it stimulates my gag reflex, but that's another story).

We've already got sticks. Introducing a new "carat." And a new tool.

Brands do have personalities. We as humans love to project personalities on inanimate objects. It helps us relate, on terms we can understand. Projecting a personality onto something, however, doesn't make it human. At least for now, social media is for humans communicating with other humans. No one I know who is actively participating in social media is hoping it becomes infiltrated by brand-bots posing as humans. Except for routine transactions like withdrawing money from an ATM, most people value that human touch - it's why we prefer talking to "Frank at Comcast" over some anonymous CSR at "Comcast."

Brands belong on Twitter

The most recent thread in the ongoing debate on whether brands have a place in social media was picked up recently on Mashable. Lon S. Cohen and others say brands do belong on Twitter. While the spirit behind Mark Drapeau's arguments concerning the need for authenticity and transparency behind brands is right on, the notion that brands should be banned from Twitter is provocative, but untenable. Here's why:

1) Brands are there already.
2) People on Twitter chose who they want to follow. Don't want to hear from a brand? Simple. Don't follow them. I've seen @guykawasaki frequently remind his own 40,000 followers of this. Many brand accounts have huge followings, so people seem to want them there.
3) While Twitter is in a rapid growth period, they're not taking their continued growth for granted and aren't likely to do things that would limit adoption of the service. Plus, brand accounts have good revenue potential for them, as on Facebook and MySpace.
4) Even if you did create a policy banning brands, how would you police it? There are too many gray areas. Is @MarthaStewart allowed?
5) Perhaps most importantly, customers need to see their brands on Twitter. When done right, a Tweet is a better way to get a quick update than a newsletter or blog. Why not give customers the choice of how to get their information, in soundbites or more comprehensive emails and posts?

So, let's move the conversation away from whether brands belong on Twitter and toward best practices for how brands should behave on Twitter. Below are two suggestions for how to proceed, along with corresponding solutions.

Get multiple people from your organization involved.
Introducing CoTweet.

The CoTweet Dashboard helps you focus on what matters and take immediate action.

The idea that the Internet would break down the walls that exist between a company's employees and its customers is not new. It was detailed in the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto eight years ago. Twitter is just the latest service chipping away at the bricks and mortar that make up that wall.

Not all companies have a twittering CEO like @zappos or someone with the sheer tweet-stamina of Frank Eliason @comcastcares. Plus, as the use of Twitter expands, companies will need to engage more people within their organization with functional expertise. It's a stretch to think that one person can manage responsibilities spanning from PR, to customer service and deep product knowledge, for instance. So even if you're not yet convinced that getting more people involved is the "right" thing to do, you'll have to admit that it's a necessity if you're going to fully engage as a brand.

But the minute you try to do this, you immediately hit an obstacle. It's essentially impossible for more than one person to tweet from the same account. If you've ever tried this, you know exactly what I mean. You end up posting about the same things and posting redundant @replies and direct messages, not to mention the problem of corporate approval for certain announcements. You need some basic tools to keep from tripping over each other,to divide up the work and to give approvals.

Introducing CoTweet, a service we recently launched into private beta and are demo'ing at Tuesday's NY Tech Meetup (incidentally "we" is Launchability, a web product development company that's also new). CoTweet is team workflow for Twitter. Unlike Yammer and Co-op which bring Twitter-like functionality "inside" the enterprise, CoTweet takes your enterprise "out" to the Twitterverse.

For now, its focus is Twitter. Over time, though, we plan to evolve it into a comprehensive "social media communications platform" that hooks up multiple social services and makes it easier for companies to participate in social media in a way that allows them to maintain their brand image while allowing multiple people inside the company to engage.

Go sign up and give it a shot. Basic accounts—for up to two people—are free.

Reveal the humans behind your brand. Introducing ^CoTags.

CoTweet brings more people from your company to the social media party — now they just need nametags. Specifically, there's a need to identify the people behind your brand Twitter account and a way to signal when each of them is tweeting.

Introducing ^CoTags, a new convention for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account. It's really simple—just the carat character followed by the person's initials, or other identifying set of characters.

CoTags, ^SM in this example, are used to identify the person behind the tweet.

The concept is like #hashtags. But while #hashtags provide a way to track tweets topically across many users, ^CoTags create a way to associate individual tweets within a shared brand account. And in the process, ^CoTags bring "humanness" to otherwise monolithic branded Twitter accounts.

The making of a legend.

While ^CoTags can exist by themselves, they're much more useful if there is a legend that associates them to the information they represent. The question is where to put that legend. For now, the Twitter profile page is the most logical place. But the current limitations that page—only one URL, a 160-character bio, and a background image—pose a challenge.

Our own solution is to include the legend in the background image. The logic is that 1) it's easy to access, 2) it allows the "more info URL" to be used to link to your company website, and 3) using the bio field would result in a messy implementation.

CoTags legend on CoTweet Twitter profile page

If you're not an image-editing expert and need help adding your legend to your background image, there are lots of people who can help. How you implement your own legend is totally up to you. Go crazy. Then tweet about it (use #cotags).

Your brand on Twitter.

Your brand belongs on Twitter. Whether you've already twittering from a brand account and are looking for ways to scale your efforts, or are new to the party, CoTweet is here to help. We're looking forward to expanding and improving it in response to our users feedback.

We hope you'll join us. Sign up now for a free account.