Friday, July 27, 2012

Twitter post

A somewhat radical viewpoint, however with some key opinions of the benefits of Twitter and social media.

The New Twitter Ostriches
By: Oscar Del Santo on July 27th, 2012 at 1:30 pm


Twitter has become the preferred channel to test the mood of the person in the street, and specifically those in the all-important digital community including millennials and other key elements of the population.

And every institution, brand or person who systematically fails to listen, respond, engage or interact with not just her clients but the online community as a whole risks unleashing its wrath and suffering a quick and painful erosion of their prestige and credibility, let alone losing a valuable opportunity to improve their image, find support, apologize (why does it continue to be ‘mission impossible’ for some of our household brands?) or mount a vigorous defense when the situation calls for it.

It is therefore nothing less than shocking to witness the proliferation in Twitter of a new (mutant) species amongst our best-known commercial and personal brands that disregards criticism and feedback as a rule even when – as it is currently happening in Spain with the backlash against the Olympic Committee and its chairman after the fiasco of the official kit to be worn by Spanish athletes at the London Olympics – they are being denigrated and vilified in the social and traditional media alike.

If the microbloggy blue bird was created to chirp and tweet happily away, some of our institutional and business representatives together with a number of notorious yet ill-advised personal brands have degenerated into ostriches that bury their heads in the sand at the sign of trouble imitating the largest of our flightless birds.

The list of ostriches is surprising in its breadth and scope, and includes all those who mechanically publish messages as automaton loudspeakers and in the best of cases sporadically retweet some mention.

Before our most cynical readers jump to conclusions, I hasten to add that this communication policy has nothing to do with size or numbers of followers – though needless to say the latter makes it almost impossible for big Twitter accounts to engage with every single comment.

The fact that there is in many cases not even a standardized answer, or that no effort is made to implement technological solutions –

ITweetLive comes to mind – that would allow them to do so is a telling sign.

The fact is: bidirectional communication continues to remain an uncharted territory for many despite all the hype about ‘engagement’.
Perhaps the most pernicious unintended side-effect our new ostriches face is the so-called ‘boomerang effect’ that their short-sighted attitude provokes, especially in crisis scenarios where they find themselves in the eye of the hurricane at the epicenter of the Twittersphere wrath.

As America’s most prominent crisis management expert Eric Dezenhall has pointed out: “When one has done wrong, repentance is required. When one has been wronged, a vigorous defence must be mounted.”

The Twittersphere is often spontaneously mobilized when it perceives a glaring mistake by a brand.

Author:
Oscar Del Santo is a lecturer, consultant, key speaker, blogger and populariser of online reputation and inbound marketing in Spain.

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