STUDY: Most Fortune 100 Companies Don't Get Twitter

This story has been making the rounds the past few days and has really gotten the SM folks all a-twitter! Seems that we now have conclusive evidence that corporate America just doesn't get Twitter and I'm sure there will be a great deal of conversation about how to get companies onto Twitter and how to use it successfully.  

Of course, it wasn't but a few years ago that experts were writing lengthy treatises about how companies didn't understand Second Life and if they didn't figure it out soon, they would miss that gold rush.  We all know how that one turned out!

And it's not that I don't support Twitter and what it can do for a company, but I think that once again our industry is getting all caught up in a tactic without thinking through the strategies needed to make these tactics successful.  

Here are some random thoughts about the study:

• SM is all about conversation and relationships.  Do the 14,000 followers of @Twelpforce really have a relationship with Best Buy or, are they like me and they're there in case there's a really good deal or we have a very specific question to ask.
• For all of the discussion about conversations, I once said that conversations on Twitter are much more like solar flares.  They happen, but they are usually pretty short in duration.
• Is it really possible to judge personality?  And what does it mean that they're Twitter feed didn't have enough personality?
• The Dell site they referenced didn't seem to have much of a personality from what I saw, it was mainly pitches for things for sale.  Which, BTW, is not a bad thing.
• While some companies like Best Buy and Dell can do really good things on Twitter, others are not so clear cut.  Still others potentially have too many brands in their stable to use a single, corporate account.  For example, what would the GE account actually be used for and wouldn't it be more effective to have the individual brands have Twitter accounts?  Did the report look at just the main corporation? Some Fortune 500's have division that have very specialized businesses and could use something like Twitter in a much different way.

I think that one of the big problems with how too many people approach SM is that they want to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.  If you don't have thousands of followers and you're not Twittering all day long, you're doing it wrong.  And frankly, that's just wrong.

That's why I've talked about creating authentic experiences for years.  Because what may be authentic for company A would be completely inauthentic for company B.  Because there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach for SM.  Because there's no one-size-fits-all way to have relationships.  But like branded content, Second Life, WOM and every other tactic that we've jumped on in the past couple of years there may not be a right or wrong way to do SM.  And because like the tactics in the past, these tools by themselves aren't necessarily the keys to being successful.

So, we'll see where those all leads in the future and whether or not Twitter joins Friendster as something few people will remember was once discussed as a game changer.

In August we reported that a large number of Fortune 100 companies have embraced Twitter, but how well are they actually using it? A study released today (PDF) by Weber Shandwick says the answer is not very well, and that the majority of Fortune 100 companies don’t really get Twitter. Though 73 of 100 companies had at least one registered Twitter account (up from 54 reported in an unrelated study released in August), the majority of them weren’t using Twitter effectively to engage their followers, weren’t tweeting often, and didn’t display any personality in their tweets, according to the study.

Most Fortune 100 Companies Don't Get Twitter

Dell Outlet (DellOutlet) on Twitter