CoTweet Steps in Right Direction

Posted on | February 16, 2009 | Comments

Been checking out CoTweet, a new player in the dedicated social media client space. Clear that it’s early for them, but both the idea and the execution are smart.

Co Tweet is for brands who want to get multiple people engaged in the management of a single Twitter identity. Rather than Frank running ComcastCares, Bill using ComcastBill, and Whatsnername using ComcastWhatsername, multiple people using CoTweet can participate in the same Twitter account, coordinating their activities easily within their own instance of the hosted client. This makes it easier to overcome what Ian Schafer astutely called the Fly Ball Effect inside companies, where lack of clarity on who “owns” social media increases the likelihood of a dropped ball.

They’ve even incorporated a nice feature to avoid the potential de-humanizing effects of monolithic Twitter participation, which founder Jesse Engle explains in the service’s thoughtful introduction:

Reveal the humans behind your brand. Introducing ^CoTags.
CoTweet brings more people from your company to the social media party — now they just need nametags. Specifically, there’s a need to identify the people behind your brand Twitter account and a way to signal when each of them is tweeting.

Introducing ^CoTags, a new convention for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account. It’s really simple—just the carat character followed by the person’s initials, or other identifying set of characters…

The concept is like #hashtags. But while #hashtags provide a way to track tweets topically across many users, ^CoTags create a way to associate individual tweets within a shared brand account. And in the process, ^CoTags bring “humanness” to otherwise monolithic branded Twitter accounts.

What I like about CoTweet is that it reflects a sense both of what businesses need from Twitter users, and what users need from businesses who choose to participate on Twitter. Brands looking to leverage this or any social medium need to do so in a fashion that respects that medium’s implicit social norms. The tools that win – those that create sustainable value for the companies that use them – will be the ones that maintain that balance.

CoTweet is a step forward in this direction, at the very least showing it can be done.

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