Why you should not be on Twitter

OK so twitter is everywhere. I myself bang on about twitter ad (some would say) nauseam and twitter can be found plastered all over the media (look at me in the Shropshire Star both here and here). But the fact that journalists can find stories at their convenience is not, of itself, a reason to join the zeitgeist.

Twitter can do some marvellous stuff for you. You can really get to know your customers, you can share content easily, you can track the market and find out what your competitors are up to. And all this in real time.

There is, however, no such thing as a free lunch. Your customers will expect to get to know you. They will want you to deal with their enquiry as easy as kiss you hand (reading a lot of Patrick O'Brian at the moment don't'cha know). They will expect there to be content for them to enjoy and they will expect it to be good, and plentiful, and (most of all) free. Your competitors will be able to see what you are up to of course while they track the market all from the comfort of their Blackberry Curve.

There is a gradient, a path if you will, which leads to twitter (or the far-away mountain).

Step one. Honestly, do you actually listen to your customers? Do any opinion polling? Ask for feedback? Invite them round for pizza and discuss your new product lines?

If the answer is no: well crack on with that before firing up the tweetdeck.

Step two. About this content stuff? Are you adding value to your products and developing your brand with such hi-tech noodles as a regular newsletter. Perhaps you send out an e-mail from the chief exec or customer services manager. Maybe you have a loyalty scheme or a membership discount? Maybe you write to people just to say "thanks" once in a while.

If the answer is no: you know what to do.

Step three. Engagement. Are you able to form a proper relationship with your customers through a mediated mechanism like a facebook page or (steam aged though it may be) a blog. This is an excellent way to develop your brand and bring customers around you. It's slower and more controllable than the twitterverse as well as, frankly, being where a lot more people spend their time. Either you can handle this or you can't.

If you can't: then stay in the sandbox a little longer.

If you can then come on in. The water's lovely.

With apologies to Simon Wakeman for stealing the title from his excellent post "Why local government shouldn’t be on Facebook"

A model to measure strategic communications quality

This has been floating around at the back of my mind for sometime and finally I've put it down on a piece of paper (or rather on a PDF but it looks quite a lot like paper).

I reckon, that in terms of strategic communications, it is possible to tell a good organisation from a bad one. It is also possible to improve a bad organisation so that it gets better at strategic comms. This model is my first attempt to provide a tool to allow that to be done in a systematic way.

This is how it works. There are five sections. Within each section there are up to five statements or groups of statements with an associated score. If the statement can be said, with evidence, to fairly describe the organisation in question then the associated score should be allocated to the organisation. In each section only one statement should be used to deliver the score.

The scores for each section can then be added. The total score gives a measure of strategic communications quality relative to a theoretical ideal. An organisation meeting the highest quality statement in each section would score 39.

So if you can fairly say:

Our customers understand what we are seeking to achieve and they can explain how we keep them informed/ Our customers also understand how to influence our decisions and they can explain how their views influence our decisions.

Then you can award yourself 10 points

But if the best you can manage is

We provide some information about what we are seeking to achieve but we do not know whether customers understand this. Our customers can't explain how they influence our decisions.

Then the best you can have is 3 points.

I've put a worked example in the PDF which is for a (entirely fictional) IT consultancy which scores 12/39. Then they can use the model to see what improvements would bring the biggest benefit in terms of scores (in the example the board can get better or they can improve customer relations).

Download it here and let me know what you make of it.