Making Every Idea Count in 140 Characters or Less

CRAIG PLADSON

Interactive Account Director

Colle + McVoy

Topic: Marketing/ Communications

Like many Minnesota businesses, you may be thinking about social media, especially about Twitter and how to use it. If so, you’re probably in one of the three following situations: 1) Your company is considering creating a Twitter account. 2) Your company has joined Twitter but hasn’t posted anything yet. 3) Your company may have decided to join Twitter and is continuing to explore ways to make the most out of this powerful emerging communication platform. At Colle+McVoy, we’ve been in each situation. And while there’s no “one size fits all” communication strategy that works for every business, we’ve found one that works for us and one which we often use as a guide to advise our clients. It’s a plan that makes every idea count in 140 characters or less.

We started to build our strategy with a list of questions: What should we say? What shouldn’t we say? How do we decide which employees post to our Twitter account? How often should we post? Should we follow everyone who follows us? What tools can we use to make this a manageable process for our agency? To provide more clarity on these issues, we drafted a Twitter communication strategy and assembled an internal team to provide feedback and help make it happen. The team was made up of people from various disciplines within the agency and we leveraged their dynamic perspectives and personalities.

Next, we identified six “hosts” from the internal team to manage our Twitter feed. Each week, a designated host is responsible for making sure that we stay relevant by posting at least one message per day. However, any of our hosts are free to make a post or reply to one of our followers at any time. We fully disclose who our hosts are by including their photos and names on our profile page. We also identify which host has made a post by including their initials at the end of each tweet. Each host uses an application called TweetDeck to make posts and easily monitor conversations on Twitter about the Colle+McVoy brand.

By following our Twitter feed at twitter.com/collemcvoy, you’ll see subject matter you might expect, such as agency news and events, the latest trends in marketing and advertising, as well as industry news that excites us. But you’ll also see postings you might not expect, such as what the current “vibe” is within the walls of the agency, our “song of the day,” and even random photos we’ve taken to give our followers an idea of what a day in the life at Colle+McVoy is like. By providing relevant news, feedback and insight into our culture via Twitter, we’ve even established new client partnerships and hired employees from the connections we’ve made.

Our strategy is working. Since the beginning of 2009, we’ve attracted nearly 2,000 followers. We believe this is because we work hard to make every idea we post count. By “count,” I mean provide value to those who follow us. We also appreciate every opportunity to get feedback and ideas from our followers. Craig Pladson is an Interactive Account Director at Colle+McVoy. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/craigpladson.