… or, I’d say, not so much of a dilemma really.

This ques­tion arises time and again and many opin­ions have been put forth. A quick search on Google can find a dozen vari­ants on the theme or more. Given I was asked by Tim Mal­one to explain my posi­tion when in retweet­ing Andrew Bar­nett I said:

RT @andrew­bar­nett: sigh — com­pa­nies should NOT be on twit­ter — com­pa­nies should encour­age their employ­ees to be on twitter.

Tim asked me what I meant, and I responded with:

@tdmalone com­pa­nies are not peo­ple. Humans con­nect with peo­ple not com­pa­nies. This con­ver­sa­tion could get long #

Here’s what I mean.

As a cus­tomer, con­sumer, stake­holder (or what­ever) inter­ested in your prod­uct, ser­vice or infor­ma­tion, I may at some point have to, or choose to, inter­act with you. That is, with your organ­i­sa­tion. But when this hap­pens, who do I inter­act with?

At this point, you (the organ­i­sa­tion) have got a cou­ple of choices. You can present the typ­i­cal name­less, face­less con­tact cen­ter to me — and you know how much I and all the other cus­tomers com­ing to you love that (and yet you per­sist), or you can maybe put a lit­tle sun­shine in my day and let me inter­act with Mary from Sales, or Pete from Ship­ping, or Lou from Cus­tomer Support.

Even bet­ter, if you get this inter­ac­tion right, Mary, Pete or Lou can actu­ally be empow­ered to resolve my issue, rather than being bound up in dumb­plex­ity (I love that word! I dis­cov­ered it in Gra­ham Win­ter’s Think one team, which you should buy and read if you even remotely care about work­ing in inspir­ing, mean­ing­ful busi­nesses that are focused on their peo­ple and customers).

So how does this apply to Twit­ter?

Well, in my mind (and you needn’t agree) a Twit­ter account that is sim­ply the name of your com­pany (and that you use for any­thing more than announce­ments — see below) is like the con­tact cen­ter — a name­less, face­less, inhu­man blob. I don’t like deal­ing with things that are inhu­man. I’d much rather inter­act with a real per­son. And par­tic­u­larly with a real per­son that wants a con­ver­sa­tion with me and that can resolve my issues.

Imag­ine!? Happy cus­tomers deal­ing with real peo­ple! Revolutionary!

There are many com­pa­nies get­ting this right — Com­cast and Frank Elia­son, Tel­stra with Mike Hick­in­botham and the Big­PondTeam, Lau­ren Cochrane at RSPCA and any­one and every­one at Zap­pos with a Twit­ter account to name just a few.

Who are these peo­ple? Just that. Peo­ple. But they’re peo­ple who want to help and are empow­ered to do so. There are sev­eral more exam­ples that aren’t hard to find if you go looking.

What these peo­ple are doing, on behalf of the com­pa­nies they work for, is build­ing brand iden­tity, adding value to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and being a real, human face with which to inter­act. And frankly, we humans like inter­act­ing with other humans.

On the other hand, there are Twit­ter accounts that rep­re­sent brands that aren’t help­ing the brand iden­tity and rep­u­ta­tion much. They’re sim­ply 140 char­ac­ter at a time foghorns for the com­pa­nies. Or they are unre­spon­sive. Or they look like they want to engage but don’t do much of a job at that engage­ment (are you read­ing this @Kev­in­Rud­dPM?). They don’t add value. They cer­tainly don’t feel like they’re man­aged by a human. They aren’t doing any­one any favors.

So, it’s not that the com­pa­nies them­selves shouldn’t have rep­re­sen­ta­tives on Twit­ter. They should. But those rep­re­sen­ta­tives should be iden­ti­fi­able as real humans. I don’t want to just talk to Coca-​​Cola, or SAP, or The Labor Party. I want to talk to a real, flesh and blood per­son involved with those organisations.

As ever, there are excep­tions to every rule. These face­less accounts can be use­ful for announce­ments or broad­casts. So long as you make it clear that’s what the account is for. I have a sec­ondary Twit­ter account, @acid­labs, that I use for just these announce­ments. But I made it clear when launch­ing the account that that was what it was for.

So, if your organ­i­sa­tion has one of those face­less accounts, either change the way it works to be backed by a real, iden­ti­fi­able per­son, or make sure it’s for broad­cast and obvi­ously so. In every other case, make sure your organ­i­sa­tion is rep­re­sented by peo­ple.

You can get some real insight into what organ­i­sa­tions, and their peo­ple, are present on Twit­ter by look­ing at twibs. I’m there!

As ever, this is just my opin­ion. What do you think?