It seems every day now there are new tools enabling brands to automate some or all of their social media participation. Some let you publish RSS feeds directly into Twitter, or find and follow those with “similar interests.” Others follow those who follow you, and un-follow those who don’t. Still others promise thousands of followers with the proverbial click of a button. There was even a big dust-up recently over “ghost twittering” that started on Dave Fleet’s blog, and ended up in the New York Times.
There have been other excellent posts on the subject of Twitter automation in particular in the last couple of weeks, including one from Iain McDonald at Amnesia Blog that does a CSI-worthy forensic analysis of how to spot Twitterers with a “fake follower count.” It begins:
‘They’ have thousands of followers, they adorn themselves with Bio’s which are occasionally obscure but often that of a self proclaimed Guru …and of course you’ve never heard of them before. Should you follow them? Seems reasonable to think that IF they have tons of people following them they MUST be legitimate, right? *cough*. I have been observing various Twitter users for the past three months who offer little value, but do know one thing above all other skills they possess …how to manipulate their follower count to get ahead in Twitter.
<cue scary music.>
I leave the ethical debate over all this to others, my question is more mundane…
What is the optimal level of automation for brands who participate in social media?
The answer for me lies in the core idea of this blog, that brands should aspire to create scalable intimacy through their social marketing programs, meaning more intimate relationships than are possible through broadcast media, at a sufficient scale of result to impact the enterprise. If you buy that, you can use it as a yardstick to test whether automation is a good idea:
- Where automation reduces the intimacy of communication to a point below what is possible in conventional media, it should be avoided.
- Where automation increases the scale of result to a point above what is necessary to impact the enterprise, it should be adopted.
For example…
This is obviously just a framework for some necessary thoughtful analysis by the brand, but I think it’s a useful one. Some examples:
- The question of whether to automate your efforts to acquire new social network contacts depends on the scale of result you need to derive value from your social marketing program. If you’re Finale, it’s probably not a good idea. If you’re Wal-Mart, it may be necessary to justify continued participation in the medium.
- The question of whether to automate your content creation – with things like ghost writers and RSS feed integration – comes down to whether the resulting content could be delivered with equal impact in conventional media. Sorry, Guy, but those of us interested in the Alltop RSS feed will subscribe to it. We follow you because we feel a connection to you! Now that we know that the “you” we get through Twitter isn’t really you sometimes, the intimacy of that link through the Twitterverse is no greater than it could be through Newsweek.
The approach isn’t perfect, and getting to the right answer depends on the sincerity and insight of the user. But that’s always the case, and I’ve found this useful in making some of those decisions for myself.
I think this is an important question for brands, and at least one take on an answer. What do you think?
Related articles by Zemanta
- Why I Don’t Use a Ghost Writer (socialmediatoday.com)
- Is Guy Kawasaki Singlehandedly Ruining Twitter? (Part I) (domainmacher.com)
- “Ghost Twittering” and the Creation of Value (blogherald.com)
- Six Lessons From The Ghost Twittering Saga (davefleet.com)
- Conversations as Data: We need new UI (newcommbiz.com)
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