At the beginning of July Microsoft’s corporate communications group bit the bullet and launched their
@Microsoft twitter profile. I offer my congratulations to the team behind it: Lou Gellos (
@lougel), Dominic Carr (
@dominicfullstop), Jeff Running (
@echidna77) and Sandra LeDuc (
@sandraleduc). These are four of the brightest and most talented folks in the entire Microsoft global marketing and communications organizations, and I think they’ve done a good using twitter to publicize Microsoft news and announcements over the past month and a half. In that time they’ve gained 18,000+ followers while tweeting 158 times. For most companies this would be a clear-cut success, but Microsoft isn’t most companies.
Since July 1
st, Microsoft has been
mentioned on twitter over 154,000 times. Amongst those mentions were praises, scathing screeds, snarky insults and calls for help. The majority of those tweet writers have no idea how Microsoft is structured, the role of corporate communications or that the company is composed of 90 thousand employees who each have their own distinct opinions about the company. In the battle of the tweets, it looks hard to win when you are outnumbered 1,000 to 1. In fact, there are some who would advise that it’s a no win situation. It’s best to just ignore the external conversation and focus on your message. I disagree.
With the @ symbol comes responsibility, for Microsoft that means that it’s not enough to look at twitter (or social media in general) as a publicity channel. It’s essential to think about how to make sense of the aggregate conversation, use that intelligence to drive editorial direction and provide solutions to problems where possible. Although this may sound daunting, it’s really not so hard. In fact, Microsoft already has many of the pieces in place now. The solution is one of coordination rather than resources. @Microsoft is just one of many corporate
twitter accounts.
@MSWindows,
@IE,
@OfficeLive,
@Ch9,
@MSAdvertising and dozens of other accounts have been established and are playing their roles in the conversation. Most are just pushing their messages, but a few participate in their piece of the conversation spectrum. @Microsoft could easily become the point of coordination for all of these conversations.
My solution would be to assign a member of the team to be the social media coordinator /
ombudsman and to add a monitoring and engagement platform that can be used to identify relevant conversations and to task appropriate teams to respond. The coordinator would look for great stories to tweet and maintain a reasonable tweet velocity. More importantly, they would build relationships with and provide information to the various business group twitter teams. Proactively, they could discover clusters of product conversations and advise groups on establishing their own twitter presences.
Microsoft (and other companies) needs to be part of the conversation not just a publisher of information. @Microsoft is a great step in joining that conversation, but so much more could be done with just incremental changes. By listening to the social media fire hose and selectively responding to key conversations in a coordinated way, Microsoft could begin to change the way customers, employees and others perceive the organization.
