spreading jam

If you’ve got May’s Revolution, check out pages 52-54.  It’s an article we collaborated on with the magazine about brands that are on Twitter, but doing it wrong.

We had a look at over 100 brands on Twitter to figure out who was doing it wrong.  What came out was that there are very few instances of big brands self-inflicting irreversible damage.

Instead there are lots of examples of brands that are just being plain boring, disregarding the conventions of the platform and missing opportunities.  As it says in the article, some brands are acting like an “embarrassing uncle”.

The specific crime of many was that brands are still treating Twitter as a “shouting” mechanism, routing RSS feeds through it or incessantly talking about their product.

A small number of brands are lucky enough that people will want to hear what they’ve got to say about themselves 24/7 (Apple, Google etc.) but for most, this just isn’t the case.  These remaining brands should be thinking about what they do across the rest of their marketing.  Do they align themselves with music?  Do they sponsor sports?  What are their brand values?

Once they’ve answered those questions, they should ask “how can we take this to Twitter?” and “how can we add value?”.  Hopefully, you should end up with a Twitter account that people want to follow, and that is a true reflection of the brand.