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The Group Twitter Account Conundrum

By Nick Hodge | May 29, 2009

On my Soap­box, I have been some­what neg­at­ive (and some­what vit­ri­olic) on blind group twit­ter accounts. My argu­ment has been that no-one talks to brands; humans tend to and would prefer to con­nect with rather human. There is a per­spect­ive I missed: where organ­isa­tions want people to rep­res­ent them, and the indi­vidu­als see them­selves are dis­tinctly sep­ar­ate from the organisation.

My par­tic­u­lar job is unique; not all organ­isa­tions invest in weird people who name them­selves a Pro­fes­sional Geek and describe them­selves as Icon­o­clastic and Mer­cur­ial. As a daily part of my job,  I becone a light­en­ing rod in a small com­munity for a large and his­tor­ic­ally face­less brand. At one end of the daily con­tinuum there is kudos/whipping for everything that brand does; and the other I attempt to be whatever “me” is at this moment.

This is some­what OK for me, but some­times risky for the brand when I fly off the handle. As as wise man at Microsoft coun­selled me earlier this week, we are all human. Social media will mir­ror this human­ity. Whilst fraught with mis­in­ter­preation, it is bet­ter than bland corporate-speak, any day.

Liv­ing the organ­isa­tion you work for is a leg­acy of my on-farm upbring­ing. You live in the work envir­on­ment. There is no escap­ing large or small jobs. That, or I have a form Insti­tu­tional Stock­holm Syn­drome. Ulti­mately, I am doing what I am paid to do.

So how do indi­vidu­als rep­res­ent the organ­isa­tion, ser­vice or product they work for when there are mul­tiple indi­vidu­als in the team where the indi­vidu­als see them­selves dis­tinct from the organ­isa­tion? There are valid reas­ons why a solu­tion needs to be sought.

Lower latency con­ver­sa­tional medi­ums such as twit­ter, there is no time to review a tweet by a group before tweet­ing on behalf of the said group. By the time the group has agreed, the con­ver­sa­tion has moved on. l’esprit de l’escalier en twitter.

Enter The Mul­tiple User Twit­ter Conun­drum. I’ve seen a recent innov­a­tion on twit­ter which I sup­port. It is a good com­prom­ise between my ideal­ism, and the hard-nose mar­ket­ing ori­ented “brand is everything” divide.

Let’s review the Microsoft Bing team’s Twit­ter Pro­file page. It shows the five people who twit­ter on that account/address, with a name and caret (^xx) under­neath the pic­tures of the humans. xx rep­res­ent the ini­tials of each indi­vidual. Tweets such as “SteveB at D (video incl. Bing at All­Th­ingsD) http://twurl.nl/zorfia ^betsy” indic­ates Betsy, or ^BA tweeted this nug­get. I now can identify a human behind that tweet, that con­ver­sa­tion from the group twit­ter account.  This caret-xx only takes three pre­cious char­ac­ters out of 140.

As a fur­ther step to my ideal­istic people con­ver­sa­tional mode of social media, it would be cooll if each indi­vidual should put their per­sonal twit­ter id on this pro­file page. Or email address: ideally some mech­an­ism to double check the iden­tity of the per­son to stop twit­ter spam-bot miscreants.

Maybe in the future all we will just have twit­ter ids. They will become more valu­able than ego URLs.

But then again, I am pos­sible step­ping back up to that very small plat­form of a soapbox.

Topics: socialmedia, twitter | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “The Group Twitter Account Conundrum”

  1. Caramoan Says:
    December 25th, 2009 at 4:13 pm

    Twit­ter is some ways is much bet­ter than blog­ging. I love to Twit­ter my every­day activ­it­ies on my friends and rel­at­ives.
    ***

  2. Bong Gomez Says:
    February 19th, 2010 at 6:55 pm

    i always update my Twit­ter and i love to twit­ter my daily activ­it­ies to my friends and loved ones. i also main­tain a per­sonal blog for entries which requires more detail.

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