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.