I am beginning to feel Twitter fatigue. I was incredibly active on it when I started, which was just a few months ago, but now don’t do much more than a cursory check once a day or so to see if anything interesting is floating around. Twitter used to be much more about links to interesting articles or even blog posts being bandied about, in addition to the usual status messages. That’s what drew me to it. Now, I feel it is more about conversations between individuals and status messages than the information I found so useful. And Twitter’s continuing technical issues aren’t helping either. I’ve been patient for a while because I understand that any website can have technical issues and things need to be sorted out, but it seems to be taking a much longer time than necessary.
Anyway, I wanted to explore the uses of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, by companies and brands as a method of influencing consumers, which apart from link publicity (which sometimes counts as spam) is easily the best way of employing social media usefully. Jo pointed me to a useful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang that aggregates some examples of companies using Twitter in this way.
What’s important with what these companies are doing is that they are listening to their consumers/users and responding to them. The single most important thing for any consumer is to know that their opinion counts. If you ask me, every business in the world should have a mechanism like Twitter where people can contact the company with queries and be assured of a response from a human-being, and not an automated response like we usually receive by email. Ernst & Young, for example, has one individual responding to all queries that prospective graduate recruits have about working there on their Facebook group.
This video, an interview of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research speaking about the influence of social media marketing, is very informative and relevant to this topic.
