Identifying personal voices in a corporate Twitter stream, using ConnectTweet
I’ve been trying out ConnectTweet, a tool that helps make it easier to tell whose voice is being used in a corporate Twitter stream.
ConnectTweet is currently not even in beta testing, so it could change considerably before it’s released. In fact, one purpose of this post is to provide feedback.
Why ConnectTweet?
A problem I’ve found using Twitter on behalf of an organisation is precisely that it is me tweeting: an organisation can’t tweet. There are tools that let multiple users tweet through one account, but for me that doesn’t solve an important problem: it’s not possible (in my view) to have an ‘organisational voice’ in a conversation.
An organisation as an entity does not have an individual, informal, human voice. It is the collective voices of the staff (on behalf of the organisation) that engage in conversation, not the organisation itself.
ConnectTweet allows a corporate account to re-post specific tweets from specific users, making it much clearer whose voice is being transmitted.
How does it work?
- The holder of the corporate account:
- stipulates which users are allowed to publish its strean;
- specifies a hashtag to identify which tweets to publish.
- When one of those users tweets from their own account they simply add the chosen hashtag.
- Any tweets published in that way will go out from both the user’s Twitter account and that of the organisation.
- The holder of the corporate account has the option to append an attribution to the originator of each tweet.
Drawbacks
- The original tweet is published with a hashtag, which may be confusing to other users if it’s only purpose is to link it to the corporate account.
- Appending with ‘via @…’ or ‘original post by…’ still don’t wholly absolve the corporate account of any bad writing or spurious opinion, because it remains unclear whether it went through an editing procedure first. Better may be the option to append with ‘Tweeted by…’ because at least that makes it clear who wrote it.
- Leaving off an attribution will make it even less clear whose voice it is, because the different tweeters will always have different styles. Therefore it should default to having an attribution, rather than that feature being an ‘advanced’ feature as is currently the case.
This list is unfinished. I will be adding any new feedback here.
vCard
Email
Audioboo
Delicious
Flickr
Google
Last.FM
LinkedIn
Tumblr
Twitter
cotweet.com is more of an interface for people to use to manage an account that ConnectTweet. It’s got CRM features (assigning who’s “on duty” to reply etc, email notifications) as well as various (and customisable, text, twittername…) ways of assigning attribution. It works well — but at the moment people can only use it via the web. I think it’s the best solution at the moment tho’.
I’ve been using GroupTweet for a couple of accounts — it works by retweeting direct messages to it. It has two problems, both because twitter isn’t a mature enough medium for people to immediately grasp what’s happening.
1 – you can only follow people allowed to tweet through the account (not a problem really for account usage, try to follow debate via a commercial account or try to follow everyone back is pretty much a bad use of resources — search and @ messages are much better). Problem is that people aren’t used to this type of use and even professionals (http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/07/07/newspapers-on-twitter-who-is-winning/) too easily equate “following” with engagement.
2 – as with all the services people aren’t quite sure about the “via” thing yet — the grouping of different voices shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does.
Jon Bounds