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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Can you be a Twitter Schizophrenic?

Posted by Amir Lehrer


I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who has five twitter accounts, one is personal and then four of them are each a stream for different topics.   I don’t know what all of them are but the ones that I do know are great ideas.  One of them is a pipeline of jobs for a specific niche.  It’s great and it is something that the niche needs.  He is doing a great service for the people looking for those positions as well as the organizations that he is publicizing. 

My take on this was that the beauty of twitter is that it is authentic and completely transparent.  It is a live human who is doing all the tweeting and there is no editing.  The tweeter writes about his life, his ideas, his passions and people follow him because they are interested in what he has to say, they crave social interaction and they like to be part of other people’s lives.  Social media opens up conversations between consumers and actual people in companies rather than just the corporate image that traditional media projected. 

@comcastcares is a great example of a real person tweeting about real things in his life and also representing a company by offering instant customer service.  More people are changing their view of Comcast each day just because this guy exists.  He is a human face for the corporation. 

I told my friend that he should use one account for all of his pipelines and people will follow him because of his authenticity.  I told him to at least announce that it is him behind each of the accounts to be transparent and people will be able to follow the feeds that they want.  Instead, he is using the different accounts to collect feeds and spit them out in one location.  It’s a good idea but in the web 2.0 world, is this what we really want or need?

I consider myself somewhat entrepreneurial and I have tons of ideas all the time.  I have thought about creating different twitter accounts for different ideas but at the end of the day, I decided that whatever I do on twitter, I want to be completely authentic.  If I start a business and want to tweet about that, I’ll do it on my account.  If the business grows, I’ll let other people in the company have their own accounts where they can tweet about different aspects of the company and let their personalities shine through.

I’d love to hear what you think about this.  Am I right?  Am I completely off my rocker?  Let me know in the comments and then follow me up @flid2.

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  • Thoughtful piece on the issue of using multiple profiles.

    Thanks for sharing your insights. I especially like this statement:

    "I told my friend that he should use one account for all of his pipelines and people will follow him because of his authenticity. I told him to at least announce that it is him behind each of the accounts to be transparent and people will be able to follow the feeds that they want. Instead, he is using the different accounts to collect feeds and spit them out in one location. It’s a good idea but in the web 2.0 world, is this what we really want or need?"

    Spot on!

    Good job.
  • Josh,

    You are exactly right about twitter being like a website exclusively for facebook status updates. I'm pretty sure that's either where the idea came from or if not, they came from the same thinking.
    Twitter is a great tool but is only as valuable as you make it for yourself.
    Here are some common uses and examples:
    1) customer service - @comcastcares follows any conversation that talks about comcast and responds to them right away, thereby improving customer service. It is much quicker than waiting on hold when you call.
    2) Personal network - By announcing what you are doing and where you are going to your network, you are encouraging your friends to participate in your life. There was one guy who was stuck in an airport for 12 hours and was going to sleep in the terminal when he tweeted and one of his followers offered her apartment just minutes away. These things happen everyday.
    Another person went on vacation and forgot his laptop charger. One tweet and a few minutes later, he borrowed a charger from someone in that city.
    3) busines - you can put a human face on a company which makes it a lot friendlier and a place that you would want to do business.

    A few hours will not do it for you. If you use twitter regularly, you will start to get used to it and find ways that you can benefit from it yourself.

    The trick is to build up a network of followers. You can do that by being interesting, adding value, pointing out great articles, websites, services, or anything you are passionate about.
  • Josh
    I tried twitter for a few hours... I couldn't for the life of me see why I would need such a service. It made me think of a website dedicated to facebooks status tool. Is it really that useful?!!
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