“Twitter is a unique social network that offers several potential applications for a company’s marketing strategy.”

Twitter, the microblogging social network, has become the favourite of celebrities and the tech-savvy. Businesses worried about left behind are experimenting with this service, in order to promote themselves. However, if done badly, the effect could be embarrasing. So should it be left to the company’s marketing department to tweet?

Here are the views of the professionals:

Management Guru: Don Tapscott

“Twitter is a godsend for marketing departments. They should embrace it. At its most basic, tweets are a useful way to send information on your product or service, or to respnd to critics. Your brand can be seen to be cool by showing you have a large following. By attracting followers, your company can reach a wide audience.

But it’s not just the size of the audience that matters; those who use twitter are likely to hold sway over others. Keep track of what companies are saying about your brands. Use search.twitter.com or desktop applications such as TweetDeck.

Create a hash tag for any marketing iniative-from a conference to a big promotional campaign- and encourage customers to discuss it. Profit from lessons learnt. Employees who attract many followers become brands themselves; make the special effort to retain them.”

Don Tapscott is the author of ‘Grown Up Digital’ and 12 other books, and is the chair of nGenera Insight, an international business strategy think tank.

The Executive: Richard Pinder

Much has been made of Ashton Kutcher reaching 1m Twitter followers more quickly than CNN. I am not surprised. People already pay good money to read details of a celebrity’s life in Hello magazine. Ashton’s Tweets are giving them something even better. We already have a number of access points to CNN. Another is fine, but it is not giving us content we did not have before.

The same is true for marketing departments. Their job and that of their agencies is not to “manage the brand”. Brands are no longer under their full control. Their job is to manage, as skilfully as possible, the conversation going on around that brand to increase the likelihood of positive endorsements. This has to include social media. So yes, marketing departments should have a Twitter strategy.

The writer is chief operating officer at Publicis Worldwide

The Consultant: Bernhard Warner

The company’s marketing department should tweet only if it can live up to these 10 commandments:

● We can articulate the company vision in no more than 140 characters, minus PR puffery and cliché.

● We give credit to cool, innovative or thought- provoking ideas, even if coined by someone else.

● We will challenge a potentially destructive position even if our position generates criticism.

● We are willing to listen to and engage with others, even if “others” are employees, customers or activists.

● We will not get carried away, never tweeting about a fresh “cuppa” or, worse, some banal corporate achievement.

● We will dedicate time each week to reading what others have to say and may even re-tweet (“RT”) the most clever.

● We will never include in a press release, speech or annual report our “Twitter followers” figure, no matter how tempting.

● We actually have something meaningful to say.

● If we don’t have something to say, we’ll find the person in the organisation best suited for speaking/tweeting on behalf of the company.

● If we cannot live up to these commandments we will reflect on whether corporate marketing is the right role for us.

The writer is head of editorial at Radar DDB, social media agency

The Academic: Olivier Toubia

Unlike other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter is what is called a “directed” social network: person A following person B does not necessarily imply that person B is following person A. (In contrast, you cannot be friends with someone on Facebook unless they are also friends with you.) This feature makes Twitter a better tool for identifying opinion leaders within your target market.

Look for users who have many followers, but are not necessarily following many users back.

One you have identified these key Twitters, engage in a two-way dialogue with them. Twitter allows you to disseminate information to your target market, offering them content and shaping your brand image.

But it can also be an ear to the ground: follow your (potential) customers and “listen” to their Tweets. Text-mining techniques enable you to learn a great deal from Tweets: not only what customers are talking about, but how they are talking about it (ie the specific words and phrases they are using). This information may be used to develop products, services and advertising messages that better resonate with your customers.

The writer is David W. Zalaznick associate professor of business, Columbia Business School

The Academic: John Deighton

Twitter is a playground, not a policy arena. A company that isn’t playing with Twitter isn’t learning, and despite the nano-lifetimes of social media no one can afford not to be learning how to use them. Friendster begets Myspace begets Facebook begets Twitter: every one matters even though none matters for very long.

A policy? No, it’s too much fun for that. When marketing departments make it their policy to have fun, they pretty well guarantee that they won’t.

What is there to learn? Etiquette. Brands learn about demeanour and comportment, not to be a bore or a bully, how to play with others. Most marketers grew up in a very different world, in the era of mass media, and in that world they were rewarded for being heavy-handed and intrusive. Success was measured by copy point registration, because the marketer was perpetually preoccupied with whether the consumer was getting the “message”. Successful brands in social media are more talked about than talking. They provoke conversation, but they don’t try to dominate it. Brands that thrive in the new world use a lighter touch.

[Source: Financial Times]