Currently amongst companies and enterprises, Twitter seems to have four philosophical camps. Firstly, there are those enterprises that don’t believe in its power, so they don’t use it at all. Secondly there are celebrity users, who because no one else compares in stature or ego to them, follow no one; they just treat the system like an advertising soap box for their various public offerings. Similarly, there are certain companies who ape the celebrity modus operandi and just update on their new products or services. Finally, there are those that do get it right, and understand that the real point is engagement!

And Ford Motor Company, under CEO Alan Mullaly, is one of them. It uses several different accounts to connect with its clients and fans of its many market segments. Ford try to ‘humanise’ the brand in their terms and they don’t use the sites to advertise as such. Links to some of Ford’s twitter sites are below.

FordTrucks

FordDriveOne

FordDriveGreen

FordCustService

FordMustang

FordRacing

So for those companies not already involved, is Twitter (micro blogging) the new marketing tool that they should engage with?  The probable answer lies with the industrial sector you work in, and the nature of customer your sector prescribes.

Already some large UK store groups such as Harrods, Sainsbury’s and Habitat, Sainsbury’s and Harrods are twittering away, whereas others like John Lewis and Tesco are not. The really crucial issue, though, is the total number of followers – today Sainsbury’s has 636 followers, Harrods barely 150. Is it worth the effort one wonders, but then Brad at Starbucks in Seattle has over 485,000 followers frothing with excitement, so is doing rather well.

By considering the concept of engagement, a key founding principle of Twitter, it leads into asking whether your company would rather have minimal interaction with its clents? Would you rather outsource customer service to Bangladesh or Vietnam where the criticising bunch of toadies can rant at someone who doesn’t understand a word of English?

Furthermore, another serious question to ask of yourself is whether you’re going to put in the effort to do it properly. Stephen Fry, probably the most famous and prolific tweeter of the UK with around 1 million followers is obsessional and produces 20 plus tweets a day. Do you want to go down that road? Of course not, but you do need to make a reasonable effort.

If you sell to consumers, then it’s worth considering, though if you sell insurance, probably not. If you’re selling cars, tweets could be used to sell some of your more hard-to-shift models, and your followers can negotiate online in return.  Purepages is shortly producing a simple questionnaire, the twitterfactor, to formulate a probable answer. Watch this space!

© Mike Phillips. IBM B1 WEEK53 wc28122009

Sources: Twitter.com, Hitwise, Silicon.com, Computer Weekly