Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

I joined Twitter a little under 2 years ago. At the time I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was simply a smaller version of Facebook. But after 602 tweets and viewing thousands more, I’ve since changed my mind.

“Facebook is full of all the people you went to school with. Twitter is full of all the people you wish you went to school with.”

I remember reading this and thinking it was not only brilliant, but also very true. Twitter is like a huge RSS feed, bringing you information on everything you’re interested in and housing it all in one place for your easy viewing. You can follow pretty much anything, including (to name just a few): news feeds, celebrities, museums, designers, transport services and of course, brands.

The beauty of Twitter is its honesty. You can’t get away with as much as you once could. I read an article about how P Diddy threw a party behind closed doors and called it: ‘The party of the Decade’. It turns out it wasn’t. P Diddy worked extremely hard to create a persona as: ‘the King of the party’. Unfortunately for him, people inside were quick to point out the truth. Tweets about the huge queues for the bar, z list celebrities being drunk and severe lack of space were flying about the tw-internet. It got me thinking about the days before Twitter. Had this party happened then, would it still have gone down as a failure, or would the majority of the population still believe that P Diddy’s parties are the place to be?

Of course that was just one celebrity party. But imagine how this works for a brand. If for example, you sell your running trainers as: ‘The choice of the professional’, it only takes one major athlete to tweet that they’re useless to trample all over your brand. Their 10k, 20k or 100k follows are all laughing at you while re-tweeting their thumbs off.

On Facebook you can still get away with a few little white lies. Brands usually create ‘Facebook pages’ that users can ‘like’. These pages are written in a carefully constructed tone-of-voice and say whatever the brand wants them to. On Twitter you have no such freedom. Most of what is written about your brand is from your customers. Twitter has changed the way people interact with brands. If you’re in the market for a particular car model, you can search for it on Twitter and see what real people are saying about it. Consumers are more clued up than ever and often don’t trust what brands say anymore. But they do trust what other people are saying about them. So, if you’re launching a new car promising that it: “handles the road better than any other’, or launching a new crisp stating that it: ‘tastes just as good without the added salt’ — you’d better be telling the truth.

Here’s some Tweeters I like:

And obviously: