Privacy in a Social World – Have We Gone Too Far?

The last few months have seen some interesting developments as technology companies start to flex their PR muscle – making announcements around how their technology is now social and gives companies the ability to effectively live with their customers, prospects and general consumers (Salesforce.com’s hype-as-a-service Chatter announcement is one example of this)

I’ve been a proponent of social media monitoring for some time now – as far as I’m concerned the real value in social media monitoring is how we use tools like Scout Labs as a strategic and operational tool rather than just monitoring buzzes or mentions.

See my presentation to social media tools week for more information on what I think about this topic.

So I think I get where this is going. I’ve been around this technology and sales in general to see the bigger picture. I’ve watched with immense interest as the debates about social CRM have raged amongst people who are clearly smarter than me – see here for a great example

But…

Have we really thought through the business implications of these developments (and for the moment let’s put aside any questions about whether these developments are real or vapourware or as I like to refer to it now – hype-as-a-service)

What worries me is whether these types of developments are a step too far? Are we in fact enabling the next generation of abuse – but at a level that doesn’t stop at the inbox?

Some of the questions bouncing around my head include:

1. If we drink the vendor kool-aid are we going to start invading the privacy of consumers? Interfering in their online lives in ways that may in fact destroy social media as an effective tool.
2. Have the vendors (i.e. Salesforce.com, RightNow, Lithium etc) given any thought to how their technology might be abused?
3. Is there such a thing as privacy in the social sphere? If not why not?
4. Has any company given any thought to what internal controls needs to be in place to prevent abuse? Just because the information is out there – does that mean we have a license to use and abuse it?
5. As many companies rush to put social media policies in place, are they already deficient?
6. Are interactive tools like Chatter simply a more automated way for marketers to blast consumers?

Given the proliferation of spammers and scammers on Twitter – what’s to stop them using Salesforce.com’s Chatter tool to really invade the lives of their targets? As Mike Schaffner pointed this out in a recent Forbes article – even Salesforce.com’s CEO admits he knows more about strangers on Facebook then he knows about his employees.

So where is the point where we step back and not interfere? Or do we just sit back and let consumers build a backlash that eventually leads to CAN-SPAM like laws?

My Ongoing Debate about Twitter’s Relevance

Earlier this year I wrote about my doubts regarding Twitter. I had concerns at the time about the relevance of Twitter and whether it would be effective enough to warrant investment and attention. I’ve kept at Twitter, I’m an active user with the service integrated into my other social activities. Whilst mainstream media continues to be slap happy about Twitter, I’m still not convinced.

I get the whole information distribution thing. I blogged recently about how effectively Australian band Powderfinger had been in using Twitter to build enthusiasm for their free concerts. I see lots of other good examples – ABC Radio for example. We’ve even had tremendous success – for another business I own Twitter has become a very powerful sales and communication channel.

But

The system has issues and the risk for enterprise in my opinion is too great – particularly in the B2B context.

Here are my concerns:

1. The system is flakey – part 1

The whole ‘fail-whale’ thing is cute for like – 2 minutes. Google gets its butt kicked when Gmail is down for 10 minutes yet constant service from Twitter is a rare thing. Running a major service channel through Twitter with this service standard? Sorry, I wouldn’t be hanging my career on that option

2. Hackers Rule the Roost

I used to get angry when people sent me DM’s about ‘I’ve added you to my mafia family’ or ‘are you as smart as me’. Then I realised these users were subject to hack attacks and spam attacks.

Here’s an example of a user who I consider to be prominent issuing an apology:

This would be a tough conversation with the CMO or CIO – ’Lets get on Twitter. Good chance we’ll spam our followers, our account will be hacked – but it’s all good. Everyone’s doing it…’

3. The system is flakey – part 2

What is it with changes being lost, blocks being unblocked, the system being severely constipated before it suddenly spews out a torrent of ‘past due date’ content?

This is poor. And again, in an enterprise context – why would you put trust in a system with these flaws?

4. Inappropriate Content

I’m pretty diligent about blocking anyone who mentions money, sex, or religion. But most days I find companies and individuals with followers who are so suspect it beggars belief that they haven’t been blocked or reported.

I’ve seen some really really inappropriate avatars used by Twitter accounts – why aren’t these users blocked?

Worse, I’ve seen some major US companies following users who have avatars that are quite shocking. I have to ask. If you’re following users who have graphic images of women – what is your Twitter strategy? Is this really a reflection of your company’s values? One of these companies is a major brand in the social media space.

So how are we protecting our brand in this free-for-all world? Can someone fill me in on what Twitter is doing to police this space? And don’t give me that ‘oh there’s a new report spam link’ – rubbish!

5. Widespread Abuse

This really irks me. Company names and brands are being hijacked. The proliferation of this abuse is amazing.

Given I work in the CRM space I’ve been watching a couple of accounts. One account bbakari uses the Twitter API to flood the service with – spam.

Here’s an example

Now, granted I can block this user and not worry about the mindless river of drivel – but the fact is if you search for Salesforce.com or SugarCRM.com this torrent of spam clogs up the search results.

And just so you know, this is bbakari’s second account on Twitter. His first account @freecrm was killed off.

My Conclusion

Personally, I like Twitter. I follow people whose opinions I value and I like that they use the service appropriately. I like the fact I can tie my other social profiles into Twitter.

I can see the value. I can see the big picture with Twitter being a useful tool for information distribution.

But if I put a CEO hat on I have concerns – serious concerns. Would I recommend a B2B company jump into Twitter – probably not! I think their social media strategy would make more sense and they’d get better value focusing elsewhere.

Customer Feedback – Friend or Foe?

I caught in interesting story on Australian radio this morning. Noted Twitterer @612brisbane Spencer Howson was talking about his foray into the world of Internet auction sites. What was interesting this morning was his experience in providing feedback to a seller. In a nutshell Spencer provided negative feedback about one aspect of his experience. On the surface, this seemed reasonable and reflected his feelings about his experience.

What Spencer found unusual was the seller contacted him and asked him to change the feedback because he or she felt the feedback was harsh or unwarranted.

The fact is Spencer cared enough to provide feedback.

As we note too many of our customers when we get talking about social media monitoring, and the potential for negative feedback to be made public

With thanks to Scout Labs

I really like this image and tag line from Scout Labs – it’s one of the best I’ve seen – and it’s a point I make to all of our customers.

Putting aside whether Spencer was fair or harsh, I think the seller has missed a great opportunity to engage in dialogue with a customer and address his concerns – and also build trust and goodwill.

Rather than challenging Spencer and trying to embarrass him into a back down, my recommendation would have been to acknowledge the feedback, thank the buyer for caring, and then communicate what steps you’re taking to learn from this and improve the operation of your business. And don’t forget to ask the customer what they think you should do to improve your service – chances are their perspective is reflective of other customers.

What percentage of your customers give you direct feedback? What percentage of your customers talk about you in the social-sphere? How would you know?

This is where tools like Scout Labs come to the fore. Social media monitoring allows you to dial into what your customers, non-customers, and the community are saying about your product, your company, and your services.

Social media monitoring is NOT a marketing exercise – it’s about aligning your whole organisation to your community – from the executive down into R&D, sales, service, marketing, finance, and logistics. And it’s about finding opportunities to engage in dialogue.

As an aside, does your company engage in email marketing where the “From” address is ‘do-not-reply@’? Do you see the issue here?

I caught in interesting story on Australian radio this morning (http://www.abc.net.au/brisbane/). Noted twitterer @612brisbane Spencer Howson was talking about his foray into the world of Internet auction sites. What was interesting this morning was his experience in providing feedback to a seller. In a nutshell Spencer provided negative feedback about one aspect of his experience. On the surface, this seemed reasonable and reflected his feelings about his experience.

What Spencer found unusual was the seller contacted him and asked him to change the feedback because he or she felt the feedback was harsh or unwarranted.

The fact is Spencer cared enough to provide feedback.

As we note too many of our customers when we get talking about social media monitoring, and the potential for negative feedback to be made public

With thanks to the Scout Labs team

I really like this image and tag line from Scout Labs – it’s one of the best I’ve seen – and it’s a point I make to all of our customers.

Putting aside whether Spencer was fair or harsh, I think the seller has missed a great opportunity to engage in dialog with a customer and address his concerns – and also build trust and goodwill.

Rather than challenging Spencer and trying to embarrass him into a back down, my recommendation would have been to acknowledge the feedback, thank the buyer for caring, and then communicate what steps you’re taking to learn from this and improve the operation of your business. And don’t forget to ask the customer what they think you should do to improve your service – chances are their perspective is reflective of other customers.

What percentage of your customers give you direct feedback? What percentage of your customers talk about you in the social-sphere? How would you know?

This is where tools like Scout Labs come to the fore. Social media monitoring allows you to dial into what your customers, non-customers, and the community are saying about your product, your company, and your services.

Social media monitoring is not a marketing exercise – it’s about aligning your whole organisation to your community – from the executive down into R&D, sales, service, marketing, finance, and logistics. And it’s about finding opportunities to engage in dialog.

As an aside, does your company engage in email marketing where the “From” address is ‘do-not-reply@’? Do you see the issue here?

Are Social Media Obligations and Responsibilities Mutual?

Many of us would have read the story recently about Za’s Brick Oven Pizza restaurant and their run in with a South Carolina Twitter celebrity. It’s an interesting lesson about the power of the crowd and how sometimes this power can be misused (either intentionally or unintentionally).

As someone who is active in social media, generating income from working in the space, consulting to companies, and providing solutions I’ve long advocated the basic principles put forward by the luminaries like David Meerman Scott (as an aside – did you know that David is coming to Australia next month – don’t miss this…) Brian Solis, and Axel Schultze – be open, be transparent, contribute and expect nothing in return, accept feedback, listen, engage, and most of all be honest.

But as I read this story and thought about the ideals that we strive to live to I was struck by this notion that sometimes consumers don’t seem to live to the same set of expectations. So there’s no mutuality in this social media thing… Is this fair?

You don’t get to play by the old rules any more, and it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. You don’t get the old privilege of anonymity – Sonia Simone

So we as vendors can’t live by the old rules! But what about consumers who choose to use word of mouth tools (like Twitter) to make a complaint that they know full well is going to spread; is there an obligation or expectation on them to take an active role in the resolution?

Is it fair on the vendor if a customer rants on Twitter and then decides they don’t want to talk, that they want to move on!

Or have we entered an age where consumers won’t accept mistakes period?

Or worse, have we entered an age where minor transgressions become internet headlines? My dish arrived 2 minutes later than I expected so it’s death to the reputation of this restaurant… I have to admit I don’t like this model where a consumer can rant and run. It goes against my core values of fairness and accountability.

How should we deal with those that decide to rant and run – do we as active members of the community have a right to turn the tables and call out consumers who do a seagull?

Twitter Announces Verified Accounts

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Twitter is planning the introduction of verified accounts.

Twitter will soon offer verified accounts for certain user groups

Twitter deserves praise for this move, as the growing number of impersonators/fakes/squatters is close to becoming a serious blight on the service. Many of the Australian companies I talk to are turned off by this and also the effort involved in reclaiming a brand or branded twitter account.

As the WSJ article noted, this move will potentially create a nice revenue stream for Twitter. I personally feel there is real merit in charging certain groups of users for a verified account. My advice to our enterprise clients will be to utilise the service once it’s launched.

For companies wanting a professional and consistent presence in the social space this move fits nicely with the rumoured move by Facebook to introduce vanity URL’s.

Sports Teams and Social Media – are they doing it right?

The immersion of sport and social media continues with Sports Illustrated recently publishing an article recently regarding sports stars using Twitter. Whilst it’s interesting to watch a tool like Twitter being used by sports stars like Cadel Evans, Eli Manning, Lance, and the Shaq etc; I’ve had this nagging thought that the bigger opportunity is being missed by the players, clubs, and sporting leagues. Are they doing the right thing?

Wanting to kick this around further, I took the opportunity to sit down and chat social media with former AFL premiership winning player – David Thorpe. David is an astute businessman, a legend salesman and a guy who can see the big picture quickly. I was explaining the basics of social media and to help David I put it into a sports context – how could his former team in the AFL – the Bulldogs use social media to grow membership and game day attendance.

Two things emerged from my conversation with David that would help crystallise my view of the missing link.
Firstly David made the comment:

AFL clubs have the best membership base of any code in the country. They’re very good at getting and keeping members. It’s a very tribal sport.

This is an interesting point. They have a strong base of customers; they don’t need another tool to market to their members/customers.

David made a further comment that has proved crucial

In my day (the late 60’s and early 70’s) we would be out on school visits conducting clinics with the kids. The club would give us tickets to give away to the kids at the clinic. These weren’t just single tickets – they were family tickets as our goal was to get the family to the game and get everyone into the sport.

Our goal was to NOT give away the tickets to just the kids in our teams jerseys. We were under instructions to target kids in opposition jerseys along with girls – giving them tickets to the game.

This was when the light bulb came on for me (and is in fact the key second point). Their unstated aim at the time was to attract “non-customers” – this bit is important, as examining how you can attract non-customers is a core premise of Blue Ocean Strategy. This link explains non-customers.

So now I was thinking about how a team could use social media as an innovation tool so as to break down the barriers for non-customers?

So I took this defining thought and got the team together – this wasn’t just one idea but two:

1. Create an integrated social media strategy that connects to the broader community; and
2. Utilise this platform to engage with non-customers

We know a lot of clubs are publishing newsletters, have their key players writing blog-type articles. Many of the teams in our national competitions have multi-media rich sites – but they still follow the monologue model of communication. We wanted to go beyond this and develop a strategy that would give a club or league a clear sustainable advantage in how they connect with the community.

In most cases where a sports star is using a tool like Twitter (or Facebook), the model looks like this:

The intersection of sports stars and community via Twitter

If we look at the major leagues and teams around Australia, the model looks like this:

The Sports Club intersection with their communities

A good example being the Brisbane Bronco’s website – rich in multi-media and information but engagement is limited to signing up for an email newsletter. This is a monologue. Dialogue is left to the community via the numerous sports forums and communities.

The real potential for clubs and players is where they bring everything together and use social media to develop a dialogue with the community. In simple terms the model might look like this:

Social media will allow the club and players to connect to the community and have a dialogue

The intersection points (all 4 of them) is where social media delivers for everyone. Using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, the club can deliver a consistent message and provide the opportunity for the community to contribute and engage at a much deeper level than we’ve seen so far.  The goal is to move beyond the monologue and the use of canned blogs.

Objective #1 – A practical example

The first thing we need to do is have a high level strategy that makes sense and could be executed by a team or league. As a test case we looked at Brisbane based sports team – Logan Thunder. Logan Thunder participates in the Women’s National Basketball League in Australia. They’re new to the competition having been admitted in 2008. They already have a reasonably strong following and are located in the middle of large pool of prospective customers. What was interesting for us is that women’s basketball generates a lot of forum traffic as followers dissect games, players, and coaching performances so it seems we have a community that has some level of familiarity with social media tools.

The tools that I can see as being relevant for Logan Thunder include:

1. Creating a blog or blogs and using these as the first point of information distribution
2. Using a Twitter account to further distribute information about games, clinics, player updates, sponsor mentions, and community announcements
3. Using Facebook for the team, players, and coaching staff; creating fan pages, distributing team, player, and competition information. Facebook could also be used to allow fans to vote for their favourite player post-game

Because these tools can all be integrated, it becomes relatively simple to deliver consistent information for the community to absorb and engage with. This is the dialogue bit.

How would Logan Thunder put this into action? The ideas that we noted aren’t exhaustive by any means but we could see real value in such activities as

• Any time a player is in the community or at a school running a clinic they encourage the participants to follow them on Facebook and Twitter
• Newsletters, game information, community activities originate from Facebook and are then cross populated into Twitter, the team blog, and into the forums
• Involve the sponsors within these tools – for example a sponsor focused Facebook app that allows fans to vote for their favourite player – a fan who votes gets a prize along with the most popular player
• Get the coach involved in blogging with pre and post game reports, coaching tips, and mentor sessions for up and coming coaches
• Allow fans to Tweet from the games and feed these tweets into Facebook, and the team blog – this is already happening in Super 14 rugby
• Promote the teams social media footprint into the forums – encouraging the active contributors to engage with the team – Remember: make them love you or dislike you – just don’t leave them indifferent

These are our early thoughts and ideas and they’re by no means exhaustive. We can see some really interesting benefits coming out of this approach and given the cost is so low, we’d like to see teams and leagues get on the social media train because it’s not going away.

As I noted way back at the beginning of this post, we identified two key objectives in terms of how sports teams and players can take social media participation to the next level.

Objective 1 – Develop and execute a social media strategy – we’ve covered that here

Objective 2 – Utilising Blue Ocean Strategy and Social Media to attract non-customers – So we’ve connected to our members/fans, now what? How do we attract the non-customers? What does research on Facebook show? What groups of non-customers use social media tools and how could we reach out to them?

Workload permitting I’ll publish part 2 around the middle of June. Ideally we’d like to workshop some of the Blue Ocean Strategy ideas with a team – we’ll have to see if anyone’s interested.

Social Media Monitoring and Australian Politics

The Queensland State election is over and the hacks, pundits, and SP experts are picking over the results.

I noticed an interesting piece on Crikey from Bernard Keane about the LNP (login required). Bernard made a connection between the LNP trying to execute an Obama-like campaign without the Obama-like results. His key point seemed to be that the LNP leader lacked the intelligence or deep charisma of Barack Obama. I’m not sure that this is the real issue here.

Whilst Obama is a charismatic leader, what Obama did most effectively was to use his party and those who subscribed to my.barackobama.com as the tool to get people engaged and involved. This is the critical difference and a difference that I think the LNP (or any party in Australia for that matter) has yet to grasp. Let me explain.

Firstly, let’s have a look at the respective homepages – This is Obama’s main site

My Barack Obama

Note the language? Note the reference to you the public and the request to believe in yourself. See a picture of Obama?

Lets have a look at LNP

How LNP engages

Note the difference. The first thing that stood out for me was the inference “We don’t need your help, we just need your money”.

The real critical difference is deeper than the websites though. Obama motivated people to engage – he mobilised the groundswell and then let the local troops continue to foster that engagement. Obama was all about getting people interested and engaged – both Queensland Labor and Queensland LNP failed on this front.

After reading Keane’s article, we sat down last night and mapped out a strategy that a political party could use to really connect to their community. I think over the space of an hour we put together an Obama-like strategy. At a high level, to be more like Obama LNP needs to:

• Set up each candidate with their own blog – this can be their own local website – and get them actively blogging and using twitter to drive engagement at the community level.
• The leader should be using Twitter and Facebook to drive engagement NOT just with the leader but with every candidate they’ve put forward – i.e. “I’m the leader but have you seen the post my local candidate put up regarding the slow response of the Government to the oil spill, go here to read more”
• Visits to rural areas can be seeded with active efforts to get the local community involved – Twitter or blog and ask them what questions they want answered?
• The local candidates should be using the local press and their own resources to reinforce the option to engage directly.
• The leader should be posting comments across his candidate base – 5-6 times a day – jump on a candidates blog and add a comment – recognise a contribution that a member of the public has made or remind the local candidate that the leader is expecting him to have local questions lined up for his pending visit.
• Hand outs shouldn’t be about the party line; it should be about come and engage. I received 3 letters from my local LNP candidate, none of which suggested I could engage other than by phone or email. He doesn’t have a website, a Twitter account, or a blog

A key element to this high level strategy is the ability (read: desire) of the party to listen to the community. This involves moving beyond what the press has to say and dialling into the groundswell. I had the opportunity to turn on Radian6 over the last week of the campaign and I tracked what was happening with both leaders and both the major parties (Anna Bligh from Qld Labor was the incumbent premier).

Once I filtered out the usual press noise I was able to get a very clear picture of what was happening. Aside from the fact there wasn’t much noise (reflecting the fact neither party really got engaged) I was amazed at how much more noise the Labor party was generating. They sustained this, whereas LNP fell away badly as Election Day approached.

Radian6 demonstrated clearly how important it is to listen so as to generate meaningful community engagement. As I just said, neither party did this well.How can you engage if you don’t listen?

The question now is whether any of the parties, local, state or federal are prepared to really listen.

Social Media and the Australian Wildfire Disaster

The past 48 hours here in Australia has caused me to rethink some of my doubts about Twitter whilst also reaffirming my belief as to the importance of social media for our future.

The Australian state of Victoria has, over the past 48 hours suffered incredible loss as devastating bushfires (wildfires) have swept across the region. 24 hours ago, many of us hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. What we know now is that the emergency is far worse and can only get worse before we see any respite. With many towns wiped out and emergency services yet to get back in, the current toll (as at 2350 AEDT) is likely to move well north of the current 84 souls.

The reason I write this post is not for sensationalism, but because today I’ve seen firsthand what the future holds for news and information distribution. This afternoon in Brisbane, whilst our major media networks ran standard programming, I followed the flow of news of the devastation primarily via Twitter (thanks to @cfa_updates and @774melbourne). Sadly, as the death toll escalated beyond my comprehension the gap between what was possible (i.e. Twitter) and what we’d come to expect (i.e. TV news networks) was insurmountable. It struck me as odd that as I updated my wife she couldn’t believe what I was saying as the TV either wasn’t up to date or the networks felt it wasn’t important enough to run anything more than hourly updates – it’s not like they don’t know how to use ticker updates.

It angers me that as I was getting official reports from credible/reliable sources this same information was taking hours to get distributed into the mainstream community. It wasn’t until close to 8pm AEDT that the Australian mainstream press finally started providing timely updates – nice work team.

What did I learn from this?

Well, social media and tools like Twitter are at work down under despite my earlier post that Australian companies are missing the boat.

But we’ve got some major work to do. We’re just so not connected.

What stood out for me?

1. @cfa_updates – an unofficial source of Country Fire Authority data. Whoever @cfa_updates is, it kept me glued to my computer all afternoon. Great work whoever you are. I hope the CFA ultimately recognise your work as you allowed them to focus on the important stuff whilst disseminating info out to the community.
2. @774melbourne has kept us all up to date. But has @774melbourne highlighted a weakness in Twitter? @774melbourne is the Melbourne radio station for our Government owned broadcaster ABC. ABC has a Twitter presence – @abcnews. So whilst @774melbourne was tweeting every few minutes, @abcnews was making (barely) an hourly update that in some cases wasn’t even devoted to the emergency. This begs the question. We turn to the ABC for news, yet off @abcnews we’d be hard pressed to understand the gravity of the disaster. You’d need to go look for @774melbourne to really get your finger on the pulse – this is not ideal.
3. A number of local Google engineers created a very useful map of what was going down. Great work Google team considering it was a weekend. And nice commentary asking people to stay away from core emergency service numbers. It’s worth noting that Google simply took CFA feeds and turned this data into a useful service (as did @cfa_updates).

In 6 minutes, Sunday 8 February 2009 will be finished. Yet I’m still getting updates from @774 and @cfa_updates – still. Go to bed guys, we’re going to need you over the next few days. God help those relying on the mainstream press…

And finally, wherever you are, think of the volunteer fire fighters, emergency services, the police, the red cross, the teams flying the helicopters, the medical teams dealing with the injured, the vets dealing with wounded animals, the poor sap reporter on the ground knowing his update is next to meaningless, those who are left to rebuild shattered lives, and those who are no longer with us.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you all.

Australian Companies Are Missing the Twitter Boat

We’ve been participating in and following the Twitter phenomenon for a while now. Not as much as some, but we’ve kept an eye on this “thing”. We’ve been circumspect about Twitter as we tend to evaluate tools like Twitter in the context of whether they are useful for companies that are B2B sales focused. We’ve commented previously that (in our opinion) Twitter will be the never was in the B2B space as it just doesn’t add value. A comment from Dave Stein about doing some research got us thinking about how Twitter was being used here in Australia. For this exercise we put away our B2B focus and spent time over in the B2C camp.

Our survey looked into 100 Australian companies/brands covering 10 categories, focusing on how they are using Twitter. The research was kind-of scientific but not of the drug-test type rigour.

The results shocked us. Even as we’re wrapping up the final report for publication I can’t get over how bad the results are. We’ve found little evidence that Australian companies have grasped the importance of Twitter or had made a serious attempt to harness its potential.

Having seen how US companies are using Twitter, I have to admit I was really disappointed with what we discovered. Incredibly, many of our major consumer brands have no presence on Twitter or are already being cyber-squatted by opportunists.

The key findings of the research include:

• 87% of brands surveyed have no presence on Twitter
• 50% of the media brands are being cyber-squatted
• 50% of the major sporting codes have a presence but only at the national level
• 0% of major financial institutions surveyed have an official presence.
• Virgin Blue (@virginblue) is the only travel participant with an official presence. Both Qantas brands are being cyber-squatted. Though I get the feeling the Virgin Blue presence is more a global corporate initiative
• Both the AFL (@afl_com_au) and the NRL (@nrl) have an official presence but the results at the club level are virtually non-existent and showing signs of growing squatter presence. Rugby Union and Football Australia have no presence on Twitter.

Where this disconnects for us is that research we’ve seen from trusted sources indicates that a significant number of US companies are using Twitter in a variety of ways to listen, connect, and communicate with their customers and wider communities. I recall being at Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Summit in Boston back in October and being amazed at how sophisticated the discussion was around Twitter.

It’s like Australian companies are in a twilight zone on this. We can’t even get into a discussion with them on some of the really interesting stuff like Radian6’s social media monitoring as they don’t get this space at all.

I asked our Social Media Consultant France Blake what she thought (she works for us and did the hard yards on the research)

I don’t get the results. I don’t understand why they’re not getting into this. Maybe they don’t care about communicating with their customers? The cyber-squatting stuff worries me. I can see this being messy down the track”

I will finish on a small positive note. One company and two sporting bodies have really solid Twitter profiles

• Crikey News (@crikey_news). How is it that an independent news service is setting the standard?
• Cricket (@cricnews). This looks like a non official presence but it’s good either way as it covers global cricket news
• Tennis (@tennisaust) – nice branded presence

Good work Crikey, cricnews and Tennis Aust; everyone else – get with the program

In some respects we may need to go back and expand our audience. I’m not sure. I’ll wait to see what sort of feedback we get.

FYI – Feel free to use comments to check as to whether your brand was included in the report or if you would like a copy of the report which will be available early next week.