Social Control

03 March 10

You're sitting at your desk sipping your Venti latte and secretly playing a game of Minesweeper when your phone rings. It's someone from the executive suite who is wondering what the brand is doing about Twitter. The exec says "my grandkids keep talking about it. It seems to be big. Are we doing anything with Twitter?"

What will your answer be? If you haven't had that phone call yet, you might. So it's time to craft an answer.

You don't HAVE to be on Twitter. If you do decide to be on Twitter, be strategic about it. Successful social media marketing (on Twitter and elsewhere) is about participation and careful brand monitoring and active engagement. If you're not ready or willing or have the budget for that, then Twitter is not the right project for you right now. Unfortunately, too many brands feel they have to be on Twitter because everyone else is. So they waste time and money and effort on tweeting and wonder why they don't see a huge increase in business because of it.

Here's our recommendation: Start by keeping an eye on your brand on Twitter. You can run searches using http://search.twitter.com for your brand and see what people are saying. Broaden your search out to include what your target audience is thinking about and talking about. Do you have something valuable to add to the conversation? Only when you think you can add something of value should you start looking growing your Twitter presence. But once you do, you've got another hurdle to watch for: Don't mistake Twitter activity for Twitter success. Twitter activity is a lot of tweets and retweets and mentions. Great. Twitter success is true engagement of your target audience and conversations that are started or extended by your brand.

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