Corporate social identity - should I be Frank, Susie or corporate …

One question we have been discussing at length in the office recently is the  simple issue of naming a twitter account, initially we branded all company names as simply as CompanyName, but we began to notice that engagement was better when we attached names to the accounts Name at Company…  An example – the primary Social Loop Twitter account should it be “Social Loop” or “Chris at Social Loop” or alternatively should it be a girls name the impact of pink SEO is well documented (sending link bait emails as a girl seemed to have better results).

Having a name to an account also seems to give you more freedom, Mark @ company Y is more likely to be chatty than a straight looking corporate account.
So more freedom and better engagement – seems an obvious choice? 

There are a few negatives –  by humanising it people expect you to recall the conversations you had as though you are a real person – a 24/7 primary twitter account manned by one person (who never takes holidays) isn’t realistic and today people rarely stay in the same job forever.

As well as that people still want to hear the corporate voice sometimes rather than the voice of a lone employee.

Solutions

CRM
Well there are a few solutions – an expensive social CRM solution like Radian6 allows you to track and tag up conversations, CoTweet is a cheaper solution but no where near as powerful.

Multiple AccountsAlternatively, and the version we have recently been leaning towards is multiple accounts – encourage your employees (particularly trusted ones) to brand their accounts with the company, typically this involves substantially more trust and a new way of thinking than larger companies are used to – but companies that have been doing this have been seeing it paying off, this really is what social media is all about,  the only flaw in this (other than drunk tweeting but that is another matter) is when employees leave – who owns the account, the following they have developed, clearly something that needs talking through before this happens.  The various accounts can happily retweet each other when ever it is worth doing. 

Who is doing the tweeting One solution that has been popping up more and more is to say who is doing the tweeting, i.e. you put names on the account – one example of this is Leeds Digital – the description names the 3 people who are managing it, (Leanne, Simon and John)

Concluding – what is best for your business Twitter profile(s) ? In my opinion every company is different – what sort of personalities suit your online presence. At the moment and with a little thought, we have gone with “Tweets mainly from Chris and Maria” – I know in the future that all of our personal accounts will have a little @ Social Loop …