Wednesday 12 May 2010

Brands on Twitter...get ready for a good critiquing!

It's cool to be on Twitter don't you know, your nan might not be tweeting yet but you can bet that a lot of high street stores/supermarkets/big brands are all trying to get in on the action and join the "uber cool" new found land. Well, uber cool might not be true but marketing/pr gurus will have decided that they MUST be on Twitter and have dived in without any objectives set or any real purpose, other than to show face in this new landscape.

We have two lucky contenders today whose Twitter presence and practice will be examined but I am generally quite nice so I usually just have nice things to say. Unless you do something wrong, then i will be quite unpleasant.

First up we have the Carphone Warehouse. http://twitter.com/carphoneware
CPW once had a bad reputation, cowboys and hard sellers often resulting with angry customers. Twitter is a great place to vent your anger and so it only seems natural that CPW should have a presence here to actually feedback on the criticism. I was very anti CPW but i have to say that their Twitter account is pretty good. They reply to any mention of their name with what appears to be a lot of happy customers. They also share relavent news articles and improvements to their service. You don't feel like they are just on Twitter for the sake of being on Twitter but that it actually adds value for their customers.

Second up today is Magners Cider. http://twitter.com/magnersuk
Magners use their social media channels as a way of associating itself with comedy as well as plugging its product. They run lots of competitions and post up links to events they have sponsored. They reply to lots of tweets and often tweet some entertaining content. They blend the art of plugging their product and making the content interesting enough to keep following them and winning their competitions feels very achievable.

Short and sweet.