Optaros Labs

Corporate Microblogging: Who Speaks for @optaros?

@Optaros on Twitter

Twitter and Identica are  great places for individuals to express themselves, engage in conversation, build their personal brand, or just have fun. But what’s a corporate brand to do? What does it mean for someone to tweet as @optaros (or post notices on identi.ca as @optaros)?

I’ve been pondering this question recently not just from a theoretical point of view but from a very practical one as well, as I try to manage the Optaros presences on identica and twitter.

@optaros on Identi.ca

Given that many take to microblogging in part because of the opportunity for personal connections with individuals, is there a place for the kind of fictitious personhood that a brand represents? Mark Drapeau has argued (“Do Brands Belong on Twitter?“) that Twitter should consider banning brand identities:

Thinking about what might be best for people, in my opinion Twitter should not only not charge brands for membership, but also ban them altogether. Not unlike Facebook and other sites, every account would represent a person using a real name, location, and picture.

No Masks (Photo by Mike Smail)

Facebook, of course, explicitly prohibits in its terms of service – although enforcement sometimes lags – brands from having individual profiles. Brands are encouraged to create pages instead, which are specifically intended for that purpose. (It is interesting in this context to think about the original Friendster banning of “fakester” profiles, and the rise of MySpace which followed it as MySpace reached out to bands and other “fakesters” and offered them profiles at the url myspace.com/brandname).

Lon S. Cohen responded a few days later, with Why Brands ABSOLUTELY DO Belong on Twitter, in which he points out the the problem isn’t people tweeting as brands, but doing so poorly. He offered these tips to brand-twitterers:

Brands have to be more than just faceless organizations online. They need to offer value added content about their brand/industry/sector.

I hope that we contribute to the Twitter conversation by bringing news and info not only about our cause but related topics as well.

Each brand can represent more than its product or service. It represents a whole industry and related content attached to that industry.

You don’t have to talk about your competitors but you should talk about what your customers come to you for.

Approaches

Perhaps the problem isn’t really whether brands belong on microblogging networks, but how they should be.

Some brands simply reserve their own name, hoping to avoid Twitter squatting or worse.

Others actually have staffers post to a corporate branded Twitter account – either one individual (see this interview with Brad Nelson, the person behind @starbucks) or a group of folks working together.

(For more brands microblogging, take a look at the Social Brand Index, which lists brands using Twitter and Identi.ca, including companies like Whole Foods and The NY Times. As I write this the only Identi.ca entry is for Bargainista who only updated once 5 months ago.  Also, check out 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them.)

Challenges

Simply registering a name and then not posting tends to give the impression of being dormant. It looks rather like not participating at all, or worse, it looks like you’re just testing the waters. (See PerkettPR’s take on the assumptions people made when they set up @PerkettPR).

Posting as an individual, but using the corporate domain or brand name feels (to me at least) like impersonation or ventriloquism. On optaros.com, we’ve tried as much as possible to eliminate artificial, impersonal, anonymous corporate voice. It was important that every blog post have a real author, identified by name and reachable easily through a contact form. Why should microblogging be any different?

Ventriloquism Ad, 1956 (uploaded by Radio Rover)

Neither Twitter nor Identi.ca is really set up, however, for the corporate brand account. To have multiple users posting to a single “persona” you basically have to resort to sharing the username and password, and there’s really no effective tracking of who posted what when. (There isn’t even really a convention that different authors posting to a group account should be identified – authorship of individual tweets is usually not declared).

Unless you set up some kind of coverage schedule, it’s easy (especially in a consulting firm like Optaros, where client work will always take priority over building a branded presence) for everyone to assume that someone else is doing it, resulting in a dormant account.  (Identi.ca at least supports OpenID, so you could map multiple OpenIDs to one Identi.ca account without sharing passwords – but then any one user can remove any other).

So what’s a corporate microblogger to do?

I’ve opted for a middle ground, which means taking a number of approaches over the coming weeks.

First, I’ve attached the @optaros account on identi.ca to an RSS feed of blog posts from Optaros.com, the Enterprise Open Source Directory blogs, and here. That account in turn cross-posts to twitter. I realize that posting automated RSS feeds into a microblog account helps you spread messages, but isn’t very conversational. (Frankly, it feels a bit like attaching an ipod to a megaphone in a crowded room, then leaving the room and letting it blare away. But they won’t be very frequent, and I ultimately feel it is better than nothing).

Second, I will be setting up a “landing page” for the Optaros twitter and identica personas to point to which will list all the known Optaros folks on microblogging services under their own names – I’ve already been gathering this info in an internal wiki.  This way people who discover the Optaros profiles on those services won’t just hit the anonymous corporate wall, but will be able to find real individuals working for Optaros with whom they can engage.

Finally, I plan to make it easier for Optaros consultants who are using microblogging to post to the Optaros account(s) through our intranet. Should be relatively simple to use Drupal’s permissions system to manage a “group” of eligible posters, and provide a simple form that lets people post to the microblog if they belong to the right group. That way we avoid having to share passwords, but still open up participation to a broader group. I imagine also “signing” each post with the username of the poster (which could be a link back to their public profile page if they have one).

Open Mics (Photo by Jean-Jacques Halans)

Simply making it easier for Optaros folks to share links won’t, of course, eliminate the “diffusion of responsibility” problem identified above. My hope is that showing a simple feed of @optaros posts (and @replies) on the intranet itself will encourage people to post more and respond – and that the concept of ‘signing’ a post will help get replies to the right folks.

What’s your take? What are your favorite “brands on twitter” doing well, and poorly?

Tags: brand, Identi.ca, marketing, Microblog, microblogging, optaros, Twitter

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 6:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.