CorpComms Magazine

From Stephen Fry to Barack Obama, Marriott Hotels and British Airways. Everybody's catching onto a whole new craze. It could either be utterly pointless or a work of genius but it sounds like this - tweet, tweet, tweet.

The microblogging phenomenon Twitter is steamrolling its way into the public consciousness. Its roll call of active users has grown by 900 per cent in a year.

Twitter claims that more than six million people are in on the act - including a surging number of big-brand companies.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social network which allows users to post brief messages of less than 140 characters to answer a simple question: 'What are you doing?'

Called 'tweets', these range from mundane descriptions of a sandwich lunch to erudite haikus on the essence of the global economic slump. When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River last month, a picture of the accident scene was quickly posted on Twitter by a passenger on one of the ferries that sailed to the rescue, and surgeons at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit recently gave a rare glimpse into an operating room by tweeting about the removal of a tumour from a patient's kidney.

NO SET RULES

'Twitter is a very streamlined, very simple services which makes it malleable and entirely adaptable. There are no rules - you can use Twitter in an infinite number of ways,' says Julio Ojeda-Zapata, whose book Twitter means business, explores how companies are beginning to tweet.

'There's a very low barrier to entry so there's really no reason not to do it,' he says. 'Twitter is all about conversation. You can actually have useful interactions with your customers to get ideas or improve your services.'

Launched in March 2006, Twitter began to gather momentum a year later when it won a top award at the influential South by Southwest digital festival in Austin, Texas. Twitter put big screens with scrolling Twitter updates in the festival's hallways and conference-goers kept tabs on each other by tweeting. Messages go directly to users' phones, laptops or Blackberrys.

With typical dot.com self-conscious quirkiness, Twitter is run by 29 staff from a San Francisco office which, according to New York Magazine, has clouds adorning the walls, green ceramic deer grazing in the corner and a vintage video game console for light entertainment. It is yet to generate any significant revenue but corporate users could yet be its source of profit.

The vast majority of Twitter's users are simply friends, acquaintances or business contacts who want to keep each other updated on their movements.

But with thousands of messages per second zapping around a semi-public space, companies see it as an opportunity to keep tabs on perceptions of their brand.

Even the Church of England has got in on the act, using Twitter to encourage people to share tips for helping each other during Lent with its Love Life Live Lent campaign.

REAL TIME INTERRACTION

At the American budget airline JetBlue, a small team monitors mentions of JetBlue across the Twitter universe. Passengers asking questions, offering praise or complaining get responses - which, in accordance with Twitter's rules, are composed in the briefest of tweets.

In a typical few days during February, JetBlue's 'tweetdeck' responded to issues over lost luggage, a sick passenger on a flight, windy weather causing delays at New York's JFK airport - and the airline's Twitter maestro, Morgan Johnston, twittered his counterpart at rival Southwest Airlines with a lunch invitation.

'Initially, the attraction was very much the ability for us to listen to what was going on, almost in real time,' says Johnston. 'We'd track brand mentions from the public who were in the process of travelling.'

JetBlue quickly realised that two-way interaction was crucial - otherwise customers are merely venting aggression into cyberspace. Johnston offers rapid responses to simple queries or puts Twitterers onto the airline's customer service team for more complex issues.

'I do what I can to point people in the right direction,' he says. 'I tend to view our presence on Twitter as an information booth.'

Others are adopting a similar tack. Recently, the Twitter page of the upmarket supermarket chain Whole Foods included a response to a request for a swordfish recipe, a clarification of the spelling of 'methyl mercury' and a promise to investigate the disappearance of tofu scrambler at a branch in Texas.

Marriott's Twitterstream combined updates on new hotel openings with an engaging dialogue about the virtues of different red wines. British Airways, seemingly yet to engage with any great enthusiasm, was simply pumping out bland tweets of special offers and weather delays.

BRAND-JACKING RISK

Technology experts caution that Twitter needs to be used carefully. Charlatans, for example, can pose difficulties. Jeremiah Owyang, senior social computing analyst at Forrester Research in San Francisco, says: 'There is a risk of brand-jacking - of people trying to pretend they're representing something when they're not.'

The curious blurring of public and private space also raises sensitivity.

Owyang says: 'There are pitfalls - the biggest one is employees saying things in public that they shouldn't be.'

Twitters lurks in a grey area halfway between a chatroom and a blog - Owyang describes it as 'open publishing rather than an open chatroom'.

At present, establishing a Twitter presence is a tiny cost in manpower and technology. But that could change. Twitter, which carries no advertising, has been mulling ways of charging companies that use its service to market their brands. The company is being evasive on the specifics, saying: 'We are still very early in the ideas stage and we don't really have anything to share yet despite a recent surge in speculation.'

Ironically, the absence of advertising tends to make Twitter more corporate-friendly. On bigger social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, users get easily aggrieved by unwanted commercial messages popping up with disconcerting personal knowledge about their shopping habits. On Twitter, users can control the 'feeds' they receive and only tune into those brands that interest them. There is little sign of a backlash to keep commercial users out. For example, computer maker Dell has offered exclusive discounts to its more than 18,000 followers on Twitter, after holiday promotions broadcast on the service produced more than $1m in sales.

NEED TO MAINTAIN

A common mistake, however, is to establish a Twitter presence but never maintain it - which creates a sloppy impression and will irritate Twitterers keen to correspond. The proudly tech-friendly President Obama, for example, went a month after his inauguration without tweeting - although he can justifiably claim to have been busy.

'If you have a Twitter account and no one ever uses it, that can cause trouble down the road,' says David Almacy, vice-president for digital strategies at the public relations firm Waggener Edstrom. 'It's like having a telephone number and never answering it.'

Almacy says Twitter users are generally pleasantly surprised to get feedback from companies - and that even the slightest of help in resolving problems can go a long way.

'People appreciate personal contact on Twitter rather than waiting on a customer service line for hours,' he says. 'If something negative happens, a customer might tell ten people. But if you go on Twitter and the problem is resolved as a result, they'll tell at least 20 people.'

One American telecoms company, Comcast, has a twitter feed overtly devoted to customer services, Comcast cares, which has more than 10,000 followers.

Another Twitter aficionado is the luxury accommodation network Tablet Hotels. The newspaper USA Today recently reported that when one customer twittered about a row with a hotel front desk, Tablet Hotels spotted it within 30 seconds - and phoned the hotel to intervene.

Among the dilemmas for corporate twitterers, however, is the question of how to react to inaccuracy. A customer's tweet can contain an allegation about a company which isn't true - but is it always worth leaping in with a heavy handed intervention?

Almacy advises caution: 'If it is the complete opposite of the truth, most of these things will self-correct before you need to intervene. Give it a little while, see if it's got legs. Usually, the community will step in and say Wait a minute, this sounds a little fishy.'

In a sure sign of a craze taking root, a distinctive language surrounding Twitter is growing by the day. An interactive on-line Twitter dictionary, a twictionary, explains that interaction with a sexual undertone is 'twirting' and a meeting of twitterers is a 'tweetup'. To copy someone else's tweet is to 'RT' - or re-tweet.

Still generally the domain of more tech-savvy communicators, Twitter remains a fraction of the size of Facebook, which unsuccessfully tried to buy its smaller rival for $500m four months ago, or MySpace, both of which have well over 100 million users.

But with a remarkably vertical growth rate, it could yet be the all-encompassing network of tomorrow. At this stage, there are few rights and wrongs in twittering - except for an adage that is as valid on Twitter as on corporate blogs, websites or any type of marketing material: if there's one thing the typical consumer can't abide, it's a phoney.

'Twitter is a lot about personalities and you've got to develop a Twitter personality which is a reflection of your non-Twitter personality,' says Ojeda-Zapata. 'You need to reflect on your corporate personality - are you serious? If so, be serious. Are you playful? Well then be playful.' 

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