Just stumbled on this interesting fact... during the recent debt ceiling crisis Obama blasted out a bunch of tweets asking supporters to email and call their congress representative. The result? 40,000 people stopped following the president. You can read the story here
I liked the conclusions the story comes to...
"...the campaign generated a lot of negative chatter. Many considered the president's tweets to be spam, and some even went so far as to call them a sign of "desperation." At least some of the criticism highlighted by the Post appeared to be leveled by the president's own supporters."
"At the same time, his Twitter faux pas hints at the possibility that using social media only when you need others to do something for you in the immediate term is a flawed social media strategy."
This is simply a case of Obama not understanding that his Twitter followers are not all Obama supporters eagerly waiting for marching orders from their president. Some of the followers are folks that don't like Obama, some are people who just want to stay informed, and yes, some are ardent supporters.
But if you want to use Twitter to rally your base, then you should create a second Twitter account called "@Obamabase" or something. And there you can Tweet endlessly about what you want your base to do.
So it's not so much a flawed strategy, rather, it's a flawed understanding of your publics (which all communications faux pas almost always come down to).
I get however that people don't want to have multiple Twitter accounts, segmenting out their audiences and managing multiple accounts. It's also much more impressive to have as many followers as possible under one account.
If @Barackobama has nine million followers and @Obamabase had 200,000 followers, that tarnishes the importance of the nine million followers and says 'who knows who they are, but what we do know is only 200,000 people are following the prez from a perspective of active engagement' - it in essence weakens his brand (to the extent that Twitter is part of his brand, and with this president it is).
Many corporations get this and have multiple Twitter accounts. They will have the main one which acts as a catch all for high level, general information that multiple publics would find interesting, and then they might have one that is just for their reseller community for instance.
If you do go with multiple accounts you want to make sure that you have enough publics to justify it and that those publics have very different interests in following your business (as would be the case with resellers and consumers - each have clearly different interests with regards to information). On the occasion when information does apply to both publics, you simply tweet under both accounts.
I liked the conclusions the story comes to...
"...the campaign generated a lot of negative chatter. Many considered the president's tweets to be spam, and some even went so far as to call them a sign of "desperation." At least some of the criticism highlighted by the Post appeared to be leveled by the president's own supporters."
"At the same time, his Twitter faux pas hints at the possibility that using social media only when you need others to do something for you in the immediate term is a flawed social media strategy."
This is simply a case of Obama not understanding that his Twitter followers are not all Obama supporters eagerly waiting for marching orders from their president. Some of the followers are folks that don't like Obama, some are people who just want to stay informed, and yes, some are ardent supporters.
But if you want to use Twitter to rally your base, then you should create a second Twitter account called "@Obamabase" or something. And there you can Tweet endlessly about what you want your base to do.
So it's not so much a flawed strategy, rather, it's a flawed understanding of your publics (which all communications faux pas almost always come down to).
I get however that people don't want to have multiple Twitter accounts, segmenting out their audiences and managing multiple accounts. It's also much more impressive to have as many followers as possible under one account.
If @Barackobama has nine million followers and @Obamabase had 200,000 followers, that tarnishes the importance of the nine million followers and says 'who knows who they are, but what we do know is only 200,000 people are following the prez from a perspective of active engagement' - it in essence weakens his brand (to the extent that Twitter is part of his brand, and with this president it is).
Many corporations get this and have multiple Twitter accounts. They will have the main one which acts as a catch all for high level, general information that multiple publics would find interesting, and then they might have one that is just for their reseller community for instance.
If you do go with multiple accounts you want to make sure that you have enough publics to justify it and that those publics have very different interests in following your business (as would be the case with resellers and consumers - each have clearly different interests with regards to information). On the occasion when information does apply to both publics, you simply tweet under both accounts.
Comments
Post a Comment