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I’m just working on a Twitter strategy for a client. Their rationale is to humanise the brand and get early warning on any product issues. This is an extension of stuff we’ve done for clients in other social networking environments but I wanted to speak to a couple of the more prolific corporate Twitterati to see how things were going.

Quite a few are still experimenting. The Labour Party for instance is still establishing who their audience should be and how to make it easier to gather information from around the organisation and get it out in the right format. One thing we’ll see soon is MPs and cabinet ministers being able to easily blog, Tweet and post on facebook via one platform.  

Honda’s is one that I’ve followed for a while. Alicia Jones is a senior exec in Honda’s corporate comms division in California. She runs the Honda Twitter feed, the famous (ok, famous among Twitter folk!) Alicia-AT-Honda! Obviously Tweeting is only part of her job so time management can be an issue and ROI is important….

“I’m evaluating the value every day in a variety of ways … when it comes down to it I’d say that the jury is still out on the ROI. Its easy to count “followers”, link click-thrus and use tools like TwitterGrader but I think most of the value for me is coming from other more nebulous things.

“American Honda doesn’t currently have a corporate blog so as a corporate communicator it allows for a direct connection to engage and respond in a way that I cannot otherwise. And on occasion it gives me a forum to share things that wouldn’t be worth, say, a news release but that may be cool or interesting… so I tweet.”

The key is humanising your brand and no better example than the feed that comes from the ChannelFour Newsroom. It provides an insight into the decisions made in the course of the day that give a picture as to why what ends up on screen ends up on screen, an insight into the thought process and the people involved. I’m thinking of stuff like this….

This fosters a ‘club’ feel amongst an audience that is tech-savvy, metropolitain and demands a bit more from a brand than just being broadcasted at. A lot of other media outlets haven’t quite grasped this and tend to just attach an RSS feed of latest stories to their Twitter accounts.

PS One of the best things about Twitter is when you follow a celeb and they respond by following you - I’ve saved my email with the header ”Britney Spears is now following you on Twitter”!!! Imagine my excitement when I saw this. I’ll do an update post if I get an interview….

Tags: , alicia jones at honda, alicia-at-honda, britney spears twitter feed, channel 4 newsroom twitter feed, honda twitter feed, how are brands doing on twitter, labour party twitter feed, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 7:02 pm and is filed under General PR, Social Media, Technology. 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.