Interesting example of company using twitter to inform a community [link to post]

– Posted using Chat Catcher

While I would generally agree with Scott Monty, Doug Haslam, and others in saying that Twitter users need to be conversationalists (using the @ symbol to respond/answer others), this isn’t an absolute.

Here are a few examples:

* I follow Tweets from @RedSoxCast. I don’t remember ever seeing him interact with others, and I don’t really want him to. I often check his Tweets on my mobile phone when I’m away from a TV, computer, and radio and want a quick update on the game. I just want to get the score and highlights and move on.

* Ditto for @wxBoston, which provides weather updates for my city a couple of times a day. I’m not looking for any personality there — just the weather forecast.

* Same story for updates from my webhost, Dreamhost (@dxStatus)

* I subscribe to Tweets of ESPN headlines (@ESPN). They provide me with an occasional glimpse into the latest sports happenings. If a certain message interests me, I’ll follow the link. It’s very helpful.

So put me down as saying there’s more than one approach to being successful on Twitter. And making good use of tools like Terraminds to find the kind of people whom you’d want to reach with your Tweets just makes good business sense to me.

Regarding the notion of Twitter being “public”: Firms that try to exploit people’s public utterances in a personally-oriented medium are doing both themselves and the public discourse a disservice. Yes, of course, the posts were made publicly, but the effect of that is for people to withdraw from or abandon it because of its negative effect on them. This is exactly what happened to UUNET newsgroups and what’s now happening to email. More and more people are abandoning email because it’s become mostly stuff they don’t want. And I lump in that category so-called “legitimate” unsolicited email. You can talk all you want about companies having an “obligation to inform” people about their products. That’s just a self-serving rationalization, in my opinion.

There is clearly a vast shift going on now toward what I would call white-list or purely opt-in communications. That’s what Twitter is, if you make your posts private. In fact, that’s why mine are private. I think soon you’ll see telephones that will block any unapproved number.

Twitter, as well as Facebook, MySpace and any number of other social networks have proven a very important point. Unsolicited communications are unnecessary for personal use. Indirect first-contact (e.g., the friend request through the service itself), coupled with reputation statistics are all one needs to know.

It’s an opt-in world and companies need to adjust. It’s going to call for real creativity and true focus on what people need and want, not what you want to sell them.

Twitter, and other social communities, garner their popularity through the power of collectives. Any company can determine a use for something like Twitter; but it is for the community to decide whether they ‘follow’ or ‘friend’ these individuals/company-bots. The great thing about social media is that the best ideas truly float to the top; even when others are abusing the privilege.

If a company such as Pfizer, no matter how ‘evil’ some may think they are, figures out how to create a solid following within a social network (and I think Todd has some great ways to actually make that happen) then I believe they deserve that success.

The one aspect of all of this that is interesting to me are how the FDA and FCC regulations would apply when it comes to compliance of drug information? Pharma has a hell of a time simply doing proper SEO compliance b/c of regulations…teaching them how to comply while using Social Media could be an entire cottage industry.

/kff

Now the PR side of me is saying, “Yes!”

I agree with you Todd that using allergies may have been a better option to keep people from getting “hung up” on the idea of depression, but I also disagree with some of the comments in this regard.

I tend to disagree with JoeC …to a point. I mean, yes it is a personal condition and a debilitating one. But, I think posting it on Twitter is very different from talking privately to someone at a party. You know that ANYONE can find the post on Twitter, but may not expect an eavesdropper at a party.

Ultimately I agree that it would need to have a personal voice to be successful and not just a repository for Pfizer press releases.

Is this offensive or creepy for a company to approach people in this way? I think it depends on the company. If the company/person that is using this tactic TRULY believes that their product will help people suffering from this disease, isn’t it more irresponsible to NOT tell someone about the product and how it can help? It certainly must be done tactfully but I think it can be done.

I love these kinds of posts especially because of the industry. I think that so many times the usage of new “social media” tools focuses on the tech industry primarily. If they will truly overtake other tools, they will need to be applied to most industries. Unfortunately, I struggle to find usage in my industry (insurance) so these types of posts encourage me to try to find a way.

Thanks Todd!

Haslam is right on about the importance of “using the @” to really make it a conversation. That should be included as a critical part of what is an otherwise outstanding approach to using Twitter.

Also above, JoeC says: “I’m not sure there really is a way that a corporation can try to have a presence on Twitter and not be seen as exploitive.”

Maybe not. But I certainly think it’s possible for a person at a company to “do the Twitter thing” on behalf of that company well enough that the people getting value out of the effort would outweigh the people getting creeped out by it. (Does that make sense?)