Do Brands Belong on Twitter? Sure!

Just want to jump into the debate about whether brands are appropriate entities on social media such as Twitter.  Dave Knox sums up the sides of the issue nicely here. The crux of Mark Drapeau’s argument for banning brands from Twitter seems to be that Twitter is for people and brands are not in the spirit of sharing information and connecting people that is so central to Twitter’s success.

Like many others, I must disagree.  As a personal tweeter and as someone who tweets as a brand – Web 2.0 Summit – I think there is absolutely room in the twitterverse for brands.  Here’s why:

1. Our humans already Twitter.  As for my particular brand (my marketing team supports also several other branded Twitter accounts), the obvious candidates for human representatives would be John Battelle or Tim O’Reilly, who are already prolific personal twitterers.  Having a brand allows us to retweet their relevant tweets, disseminate conference specific information and converse one on one with our customers, while allowing them to continue to do their own thing on Twitter.
2. I want to do my thing on Twitter!  I do not want to give up my account and dedicate it to my brand.  And I don’t think my brand would be served well by 90% of the random life stuff I tweet about (ok, maybe my brand “me” is well served, but that’s my point – people are brands and brands are brands but they can be different).
3. Unintended consequences.  I absolutely think that the immediate result of limiting Twitter accounts to one per person would be the creation of dozens of fake users created just as proxies for the brands.  For example, when you talk to “Brad” at Dell,  that’s often a fake name used by several reps, similarly, you could create “Lois” at Coke or whatever and have several employees dispensing Tweets as her.  What could be more antithetical to the spirit of Twitter?  At least with a brand you have real people talking about relevant things.
4. Engagement.  As anyone following over 1000 people knows, you are going to miss some tweets.  We maximize coverage of our brand accounts by giving everyone on the marketing team access and assigning one person as “owner” of each account.  This way we can all chime in and tweet or re-tweet or answer a question in case someone else misses it.  It’s the best way for us all to stay responsive and engaged with our customers – and it would be impossible if we had to do it alone.
5. It’s easier for customers to find us.  They may not know (or care) who takes care of what at our conferences, but if they need a projector set up in a room onsite, they know they can direct message us and get an instant response.  It makes a lot more sense for me to route that message to the appropriate team member than for them to try to find someone through Twittersearch or just throw a tweet out and hope we’ll hear it.  We probably will, but it might take longer – and that’s not good for customers.

The more I use it, the more passionate I am about Twitter.  The more you build your community, the more you learn and the more you can share.  With so many of our core customers on Twitter (being in the very business of Web 2.0-related education), it makes sense for us to have a branded public presence.  And while we were once accused of being a robot, I assure you the humans behind @web2summit are real people who want to talk to you.