Twitter, as you’ll no doubt be bored to tears of hearing, can be used in as many ways are there are people using Twitter. But that doesn’t help you figure out how you might use Twitter. Catherine Bray just asked this:
I think unless you’re using it as a pure info feed (and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself) the personal is the only way to go. The thing is you have to think of it as part of a larger communication strategy.
Here’s a very rough illustration of how a large-ish organisation like Channel 4 communicates with its customers / audience / fans, etc.
Lots of people inside the bubble communicating in a large number of ways to the wider world. It’s more complex than this, obviously, but in essence we’re talking one-to-many broadcast. Which for Channel 4 is fine. It’s what they do well. And, more pertinently, Channel 4 as an organisation cannot sustainably have a many-to-many conversation with millions of people.
So with that in mind lets add Twitter:
Again, absurdly over-simplified. Here I’m thinking what might the org want to get out of this, the answer being communicating their message to a wider and more diverse range of people. Here the org is still doing the broadcast thing but people within the org are communicating with people outside the org who are passing their message on to their own networks.
I saw this happen when Joanna Geary was working for the Birmingham Post and successfully integrated bits of the newsroom into the local Twitter community (back when you could safely call everyone using Twitter in Birmingham “a community”). How much their reach grew through this is debatable but there was definitely some growth. I’d be interested to see how The Guardian measure the value of Jemima Kiss‘ Twitter account to the organisation. I’d also be interested to see whether that value is attached to Jemima herself rather than The Guardian. But that’s a ponder for another day.
Like I said, this is just one idea of many. Feel free to take it, modify it or dismiss it out of hand.
Wow, a full-on blog post response, thanks Pete. Yep, I’m definitely feeling that conversations are the way to go.
Also: how powerful is RT endorsement by an organisation of good links, without actually doing something more official?
I’m thinking here of where channel4.com/film don’t necessarily have the time or space to do an article about, say, an interesting niche film festival but can let others know about it via Twitter. Maybe ‘endorse’ is too strong a word – but I like the idea of using Twitter as an informal events news feed where the events aren’t necessarily anything to do with Channel 4.
@Catherine: Yup, but the same would apply to a public Delicious.com account or shared items in Google Reader. Which is not to say Twitter is the wrong place to do that, just that that sort of this is not unique to Twitter. In short, that’s an interesting and good idea but you should do it where the audience / community is. Twitter may well be the place but some might other places.
(Possible solution – bookmark using Delicious and pump the RSS into Twitter? Two birds, one stone.)
A small scale example may be http://www.criteriongames.com A few key members of the company have twitter accounts that are publicised throughout their site/podcasts and these people are communicating up-to-the-minute info about the game.
Later on the info gets onto the site in more conventional manners. Also the twitter feed info is incorporated into the game itself as part of the community area.
It’s small scale compared to the reach of channel 4 but at the same time it is global to all the game owners.
I thought it was quite an interesting use of twitter by a corp. See @CriterionGames for one of the twitter-isations.