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08NTC: Why You Shouldn't Have a Twitter Strategy |
Posted by Peter Genuardi at Mar 20, 2008 01:22 AM CDT Categories: Content Management , Nonprofit Trends , Technology |
Here at the National Technology Conference, it seems everyone is getting their "twit" on...or their "tweet" on...or whatever you want to call it. They're looking at their phones to catch messages from the Twittersphere. Twitter is a "social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface."
Basically twitterers create an account and then select their friends, colleagues, or topics they’d on which they’d like to get short updates. Lots of people use it to exchange quick notes by phone-based text messages, instant messenger, and/or a web based interface.
Someone who works for an international relief organization asked me recently, "What should my organization's Twitter strategy be?" I looked at her and said, "Nothing. You shouldn't have one."
Called me old fashioned. Call me a troglodyte. Call me whatever you want.
It's not that I don't love web 2.0 applications as much as the next guy. It's just that I think there are a ton of new, cool, awesome tools emerging every day; BUT, very few of us have used the current technology to its fullest. In seeking to use the latest and greatest, many of us forget that we’ve barely made use of the last great thing,
I should probably be clear. Developing a Twitter strategy today probably makes sense for your organization if:
- Your organization already has an awesome online presence with lots of useful content and you need to drive more traffic to it
- Your organization holds lots of events where people who are attending will benefit from a live, collective conscience
- Your organization is visitation focused, like a museum
If at least one of the three conditions don't apply to your organization, I'd say wait on developing that Twitter strategy. Instead here are five things you can do today to improve your online presence that will return real results.
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Very interesting. Funny that I was driven to this post because of a question I posed to my tweeple about the Twitter use of a Convio customer! :-) If I understand your post correctly, you're not so much saying that Twitter should be a no-no for organizations as that it is lower priority than many more pressing items on their to-do lists. Fair enough. But assuming that an organization will succumb to the temptation to use Twitter anyway, I'm still interested in asking how they should do so. For me the puzzling questions are about granularity and point of view. I check Twitter a few times a day to see what my "friends" are up to, to be entertained by their wit, to answer random questions, and to post questions of my own. Since an organization rarely eats lunch, has a personal sense of humor, or is willing to show its collective ignorance, it's hard to see how that translates. Absent a personal point of view, some organizations are using Twitter like an RSS feed, to push links to content. That raises the question of granularity or frequency of posts. Should a news outlet, say, tweet about every story? One top story of the day? Occasional special series or public events? Whatever the decision, they'd better be sure to dial the fire hose down to a manageable flow. I welcome pointers to organizations that are doing this right.
URL: http://twitter.com/tabz
Twitter is my human powered google tool. The ROI is not self-promotion (though there is some of that) the ROI is getting instant and immediate solutions to problems I'm having from a vast majority of people. I can then focus my time and effort on other tasks and connecting with people is the real goal. There's some days where the "solution" is so valuable that I want to hug someone. So maybe Twitter won't promote your company, but creating a good twitter follower base can increase your effectiveness.
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Thanks, Betsy, you point out how some organizations are doing cool work with Twitter. How Some Nonprofits Use Twitter Would love to hear how people are measuring the return on investment for these types of programs. It seems to me the largest question, or may be just the first, we should be asking is "what is the opportunity cost of NOT DOING something else?
URL: http://www.harmaninteractive.com
I agree that you should focus on improving your site and doing the basics first and that Twitter is not for every org. For those interested, I posted on my blog recently a few examples of how nonprofits are using Twitter. http://www.betsysblog.blogspot.com/
URL: http://www.connectioncafe.com
Hey Peter - Great points. I agree that you really don't need a strategy for twitter. I do follow some organization profiles so that I can get updates as to where events are, etc. But, those organizations already have a mailing list and RSS feeds to which I subscribe. And, they are few and far between. I think one great advantage though is that if members of an organization are ON twitter, and they twitter about where they are (at Walk for Health w/ @petergenuardi) then other people who follow them may help to organically spread the word. *FYI I think the proper taxonomy is that you don't tweet(v),you twitter tweets(n) :)