Marcus Schmidt is a member of Microsoft’s Twitter outreach team. He recently did a guest post on Marty Collins’ blog Marketing Today where he talks about how Microsoft uses CoTweet on their Twitter accounts @MSWindows and @windowslive.
Read the full post here: Team Tweeting with CoTweet
I remember nearly 20 years ago when I first heard the phrase, “Imagine your brand were at a cocktail party. What would it wear and who would it talk to?” It sounded so smart and sophisticated. It made me want to be a brand guy. (Today it stimulates my gag reflex, but that’s another story).
We’ve already got sticks. Introducing a new “carat.” And a new tool.
Brands do have personalities. We as humans love to project personalities on inanimate objects. It helps us relate, on terms we can understand. Projecting a personality onto something, however, doesn’t make it human. At least for now, social media is for humans communicating with other humans. No one I know who is actively participating in social media is hoping it becomes infiltrated by brand-bots posing as humans. Except for routine transactions like withdrawing money from an ATM, most people value that human touch – it’s why we prefer talking to “Frank at Comcast” over some anonymous CSR at “Comcast.”
The most recent thread in the ongoing debate on whether brands have a place in social media was picked up recently on Mashable. Lon S. Cohen and others say brands do belong on Twitter. While the spirit behind Mark Drapeau’s arguments concerning the need for authenticity and transparency behind brands is right on, the notion that brands should be banned from Twitter is provocative, but untenable. Here’s why:
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