What makes good Twitter?

Week two (week one) in the Twitterverse is a study in contradictions. There’s almost nothing of a PLMish nature to report; none of the vendors I elected to follow tweeted anything of substance while companies more experienced in interacting this way did post compelling content. But a week of following random other tweeters yielded terrific insights into what people think on an average day. We all live inside our own heads, so seeing what someone else finds interesting was … interesting.

The PLM companies I followed tweeted links to interesting case studies about their products, to upcoming conferences and the like. With the exception of SIemens, the companies averaged less than one tweet a day. I believe I clicked on only one of the links all week; that to find out more about a webinar.

The Twitter-savvy companies, on the other hand, tweeted relentlessly throughout the week. Southwest Airlines, for example, answered questions and responded to complaints (more below), congratulated employees that were up for awards, hyped their ad campaign (but in the quirky way most people associate with Southwest: “We’re not saying other airlines are bad…we’re just awesome”) and running contests. Google tweeted about outages in Google Mail (announcing the problem, describing progress they attempted a fix), that Life Magazine is now available in Google Books, and that new apps are up. Not as interactive as Southwest but still interesting. Dell was the most blatantly commercial (although, with close to 40 feeds to choose from, I may just be following the wrong one) but did have many tweets about innovative uses of their technologies.

Southwest (@SouthwestAir) has been cited often as an example of a company that uses Twitter to great advantage. Aside from perpetuating the singing flight attendants/”we love your luggage” vibe, they use Twitter to interact with customers individually. During this week, they dealt with a number of lost luggage claims, and helped people with bereavement flights and in-flight wireless access. In one example, a groom lost his luggage after the wedding, tweeting about it in his account using the @SouthWest tag to attract the airline’s attention. Southwest tweeted shortly thereafter, inviting him to a direct messaging session to exchange more details. Soon after that, the groom tweeted that Southwest had responded and the luggage should be delivered within hours and thanking Southwest for its prompt action. Lesson: one displeased customer turned around in a very public way.

I also followed individuals in order to see how they represented their respective corporate enterprises: Ann Curry of NBC News, KD Paine, who researches consumer response to advertising and a few others. And, finally, to see what an average person tweets about, I followed a couple of writers I enjoy. These are all adults, and literate, so the posts were good. Ms. Curry tweeted her take on key elements of President Obama’s speech before the UN, the writers tweeted about works in progress and Ms. Paine tweeted about personal and professional topics. Each represented the enterprise they work for but seemed completely unfiltered in the sense that they seemed to offer their genuine take on the topic without having passed the tweet through a marketing departments.

That, I think, is what makes good Twitter use so compelling. Tweets represent the enterprise’s personality (Ms.Curry’s calm, Southwest’s customer care, Google’s reach) as much as that of the individual. Since most people want to interact on a human level, creating that “face” for the enterprise is an important step in creating a closer relationship between buyer and seller.