Is our brand on Twitter?
If you haven’t been asked that question by your company’s CEO yet, here’s betting that you soon will. For those unfamiliar, Twitter is a popular “micro-blogging” service that has captured the excitement of everyone from Oprah and Richard Branson to your next door neighbor. On the surface, Twitter is a seemingly less sophisticated version of other social networks like Facebook or MySpace. Users post short messages (up to 140 characters in length) and track updates from their list of contacts all in a single-page interface. Yet while Facebook is a closed, permission-based platform that requires you to personally know the people you add to your contact list, Twitter is deliberately open. The degree of access enabled by this freeform environment, coupled with the transparency and immediacy of a short “tweet,” ushers in a fascinating new chapter in the story of how social media is changing the way people connect to one another. The result is a rapidly growing phenomenon where everyday people are adding, following and interacting with authors, activists, celebrities, business leaders, and increasingly,
companies and brands.