OK, so I say ill-informed as I’m not up to date on the latest UK legislation, my knowledge is a couple of years out of date, so please excuse me if this is utter guff, however something occurred to me on the commute to work this morning…
So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.
Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.
So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?
Yep. Things like coComment and multiple-account managing desktop Twitter clients are leading to more of this sort of nonsense.
But I’m not sure it matters so much. I’ve done a little research (not very much, admittedly, and non-representative at that) into duplication among Twitter networks; realistically, the way our networks are set up, we should expect to see multiple copies of messages all the time, and not just when some muppet is broadcasting on all frequencies.
So — does it really matter what they’re doing? There’s so much redundancy and noise in this channel that the only solution is to limit one’s subscriptions.
Ooh — but there’s an opportunity for a time-delay service, isn’t there? Something like Channel 4+1 – where I tweet, something, and then an hour later, my company account retweets it so that I can reach a fresh audience…
Twitter: One more way for the eyes of the world to scrutinize us. Not a good idea for corporates to jump in without brushing up on their knowledge (or, as your post suggests, and as I agree, their common sense).