Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

Twitter “Contributors” could bridge personality gap for business

I've been cooling on Twitter recently. Maybe it's because the monstrous amount of work I've been trying to beat back with a stick has kept me pretty focused on being billable.

Nonetheless, I still see the marketing value of Twitter. It helps clients engage with customers and it provides a channel in which to promote content.

But many businesses can't get their minds wrapped around how to fit Twitter into a corporate straight-jacket for three reasons:

1. Who's got enough time in their day to take on the task of tweeting enough to maintain credibility and to develop a following?
2. Does the corporation want individual employees developing a following of their own on Twitter -- only to take those eyeballs with them should they leave?
3. How can a Twitter experiment succeed without letting the person tweeting develop some personality? [see my previous post: B2B’s big hurdle: Developing a personality in social media]  It's tough to get someone to follow some lame Twitter feed where all they do is post links to dry-as-toast news releases.

Twitter might have come up with an answer. Twitter Contributors will flag which individual contributes a tweet to a corporate Twitter feed. It looks like it will be offered in a premium business package but I think it will be worth the investment.

This seems like an elegant way to answer some of the concerns businesses have about handing off the Twitter reins to staff. They could have a number of employees -- say a bunch of sales reps from a specific region -- contributing to one Twitter feed.

Say the feed is www.twitter.com/AcmeSouthwest. Each tweet from Bill the sales rep from the southwest region will have his name attached. Same with another rep from the region, Mary.

Followers would get the benefit of hearing a variety of voices and perspectives. Employees who are motivated to tweet could carry more of the Twitter load -- and see more of the upside. And employees would be able to develop some personality in a more controlled environment.

Stay tuned. Twitter Contributors hasn't been rolled out yet but it's coming soon.

I have seen the future… and it looks a lot like the web?

Time Warner has unveiled it's prototype e-reader. It looks kind of like Amazon's Kindle, except more web-like. Users can poke around pages to activate video, sort pictures, create their own table of contents, and other neat stuff.

I suppose it's cool but man, it looks demanding on the reader. I might be old school but when it comes to magazines, I'm happy to place my valuable reading time in the hands of a good editor. I prefer letting them sort through all the week's news and choose the best tidbits for me to know. I have plenty of opportunity elsewhere in my life to pick and choose exactly which fruit I want to eat. When I buy a magazine, I like coming to a table with food prepared and the table set, ready for me to tuck in.

I wonder if I had one of these fancy tablets from Time Warner if I'd spend most of my time poking and proding the darn thing instead of reading. When I want a web experience, I'll fire up the web.

This is very un-techie of me to say but sometimes the best tools are ones that have limited capabilities. Take my three-year-old iPod Nano. By and large, Apple resisted the temptation to pimp it up with too many bells and whistles. I know you can get an iPod Touch with plenty of extras built in but for my purposes, which is mainly listening to podcasts during my walk home, the iPod Nano is perfect.

Magazines are simple. Sometimes simplicity is good.