I am so with you. I think we’re in early days, similar in ways to the early days of TV. Who then would have foreseen reality tv, or 24 hour news, multiple-angle sports coverage, or American Idol? TV programming then was by-and-large an adaptation of shows formatted for and successful on the radio. We populate any new medium first with the content of the medium it is replacing.

I’ve been talking to brands using twitter, and the benefits are often quite personal to the person handling their twitter account. From the public’s perspective, brands look and feel more personable and approachable if their twitter account is used not just for broadcasting announcements, offers, and news, but if they contain a lot of @replies and conversation.

However, those are non-scalable and pretty time-consuming approaches. Can, or should brands, budget for twitter-based public customer service? Perhaps yes.

But what you’re talking about is very interesting. I’ve explored it with PR firms and the challenge is often one of complexity. Many brands use twitter to monitor their own presence online and in the twitterverse. They put out and then use tools to track uptake and distribution. Old school, as you say. But also what they know.

For a full creative effort to succeed on twitter it would take a new kind of agency — a creative agency capable of fashioning interactive, participatory, conversational campaigns. Story lines that might unfold over time. Points of interest taken from within the organization, or sourced over twitter, that are more relevant to users and thus more conversational. Transparency — as you suggest — whereby brands create several facets of interest to the public. Their nonprofit support, their product development, their concerns as corporate citizens.

Brands need to realize that when they use a tool like twitter they’re joining the user’s world. This is not a medium in which to simply push out a brand image (“here’s who we are, now like us!”) but need to engage with users on their terms (“this is for you, because we like you!”). Less effort spent on the image and message of the brand, more on the facets of a brand that customers relate to.

Things that customers relate to will be naturally more re-tale-able — more worth talking about and sharing. If brands want to find ways to scale their use of twitter and other social media, it’ll be that way, I think: by leveraging the many interesting points of connection they can establish with customers.

It’s not an eyeball medium — it’s a talk medium!

Thanks for making this point, and please share more insights with us as they come in!

cheers,
adrian

For example, Starbucks could run a Twitter campaign called “Tweet your friend to a drink.” Tipjoy would provide a custom widget for the Starbucks website where users can pick the drink they want to give, and then a message would tweet out like this: “p $4 @abbyxmix for a tall latte, brought to you by @starbucks to help RED. Tweet your friend to a drink: http://starbucks.com/twitter ” Starbucks could make a small charity donation to RED for each drink that’s gifted and paid.

We could do something similar for just about any company out there, with or without the donation angle. Companies, please contact me at abby@tipjoy.com if you want to launch a creative campaign involving payments, gifting, coupons, charity, etc on Twitter.