This just in... Who cares?

[by Todd] Can someone tell me, in 30 minutes or less, why I should care at all about Twitter? Seriously, I'd love to figure this out. According to Leigh companies need to have their ear to Twitter in order to get the first glimpse of brand nightmares headed their way.

But, try as I might, I fail to see Twitter as anything more than a curiosity among a precious few nerds.

Hang on. Let me back up my rant and try this again.

Leigh is right, every company on the face of the planet should have a plan for responding to consumer outcry. And no plan should be complete without incorporating listening to and responding in the UGC world. But deciding just when and how to respond is the truly tricky part.

Way back in News 105 (a.k.a learning how to write a news story) we were told that key elements of newsworthiness were timeliness, proximity and impact. So that two-car crash that tied up rush hour traffic for you is a big story at home, but not likely to matter much to people a couple hundred miles away.

Of course all this was long before anyone created a blog, or "twittered" (damn, that just sounds wrong). Suddenly geography isn't the easy calculation it once was. And timeliness has been sliced down to nano seconds compared to what it once was. But impact, that remains the gold standard. Which brings me back to my rant.

Companies need to keep a keen focus on asking "Who cares?" whenever an issue pops up on the radar. If person X, blogging on a site with five links raises an issue, then I care a lot less than if it is on a site frequently cited on 100s of other sites.

Double ditto with Twitter. Yes, I want to know what's being said. But I can't imagine ever pulling a play book off the shelf and initiating a disaster response program based on a Twitter. All too often it's just a handful of like-minded technophiles whispering among themselves.

The critical skill required is an ability to understand what makes news. Shame on any public relations agency or brand agency that isn't studying daily how stories move between the user generated world and mainstream media. But never let three executives talking among themselves about something they found on Twitter trigger a full-scale response.

So I would add the following to Leigh's game plan. Call on professionals. Either keep a public relations firm on retainer, or have one in your Rolodex. Then, when you hear a whisper on Twitter, or see your brand on Technorati, call on a pro and ask them to help evaluate the risk.

After all, there's nothing worse than a company taking a spark of unrest and pouring fuel on it to create a full-blown conflagration.

Comments

[Leigh Householder]

Todd,

I've got ya covered on why you should care about Twitter in a minute or less.

First up, all your favorite geeks are there. The people whose blogs and articles you already read. Call it a preview, a cheat sheet, an appendix - whatver, it's a fox hole for talk leaders.

That's today.

It also has a momentum eerily reminiscent of FaceBook's. Without the reigns. You should care about it because as demands on our time and attention become ever greater, this is potentially the next major communications medium.

When email exhaustion is epidemic, how will we connect?

Today, it's talk leaders bitching about Comcast. A year from now? It's a slew of people talking about everything from work to life to dishwashers.

How'd I do?

[Leigh Householder]

Oh, and, one other tiny thing. I kind of made the assumption that the company in question knew it screwed up. I think they usually do. It's just whether or not the match they left burning in the forest will ignite the nearby 30-acres off maple or fizzle out.

[Jenny]

Todd - during the fires in San Diego county last year, the local PBS station twittered its way through the entire thing, instantly letting followers know which neighborhoods were being evacuated, where the fireline had moved to, and when it was clear to return, block by block as it was announced. Not only for the locals living the nightmare, for those of us with family and friends out there, it gave us a chance to know what was going on and how our loved ones were being affected. It was priceless, instant contact.
That's the value of twitter. And if companies and brands can capture that kind of consumer, hungry for instant content, they've scored big.

[Rita Arens]

Well, considering I just got tipped off to your post by Twitter, I'd say you're wrong. :)

I agree that you don't want to blow tweets out of proportion, particularly if the person doing it isn't an opinion leader, but I've seen more than one PR campaign go down the tubes because the PR people didn't know enough to read the twittering about their efforts.

I've also seen companies rise because they pay attention to tweets by techno leaders, such as Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble.

[Todd Copilevitz]

Good points all. And Leigh I think you came in well under the 30 min mark.

Here's my point on Twitter. Yes, it has great value for keeping your ear to the ground. But in every example the collective community involved is fairly small. My caution was against taking a Twitter, or even a couple of them, and hitting the big red panic button.

I have been reminded by Sunni (who never posts any more) that she uses Twitter to keep an ear out for several of our clients as well. And I'm glad she does.

But when we talk to our clients about monitoring the UGC world we should treat Twitter as a lucky strike extra and not the next frontier. Our clients have been abused by premature discussions about the next great thing. (Second Life anyone?)So let's see some critical mass develop before we elevate its importance.

Ultimately my plea is to keep it all in perspective. Twitter=good to know. Influential blogs=Oh crap! What do we do now?