Twitter gurus from Downing Street and Woolworths discuss best practice

The government uses Twitter to keep the public informed on policy announcements

As business take-up of Twitter continues to grow, examples of badly mishandled micro-blogging campaigns have started to emerge. One recent example has been furniture retailer Habitat, which was forced to issue a public apology on Wednesday after using hashtags mentioning the unrest in Iran to drive Twitter users to its site. The incident has since been blamed on an intern.

However, a number of organisations including the government and the company behind the revamped Woolworths web site have also been promoting Twitter as a business tool this week, and have announced best practice guidelines to using the site to improve customer service and transparency. V3.co.uk talked to both organisations about what they were gaining from their micro-blogging strategies and how best to Tweet.

Ian Green, the digital communications managing editor for 10 Downing Street, said the government was employing Twitter to keep the public informed on the prime minister’s activities and on policy announcements.

Twitter is a good way to give the public “a more personal insight into how Number 10 works”, Green said. “Our overall strategy is to engage with people where they are, not only by expecting them to come to us at the Number 10 web site,” he added.

Because the Prime Minister’s Office is not a commercial organisation, there is no specific “bottom-line” to measure the success of its micro-blogging strategy, but Green said he did use a number of indicators to gauge the effectiveness of Tweeting.

“The number of followers we have is a crude but reasonable general measure,” said Green. “Beyond that we look at click-through from Tweets to sign-posted information and levels of engagement in interactive events such as web chats.”

Green advised organisations deploying a Twitter strategy to inject accounts with personality, but at the same time to assert a certain amount of control over Tweets and to set clear parameters on business objectives for Twitter.

“Keep your voice, identity and judgment consistent,” he advised.

Regarding how much Green had to think about the content of each Tweet, he said, “Tweets are considered carefully, of course, as there are clear risks when communicating on behalf of 10 Downing Street, especially in such an informal medium. Having said that, I don't think the personality of the administration is compromised at all.

“I work closely with other communications colleagues in order to remain informed on key issues but I am trusted to apply the appropriate judgment when interacting with our followers. To date this has served us well."

Meanwhile, Shop Direct has been using Twitter in the run-up to the launch of its new Woolworths site to promote its offerings and combat the negative publicity following the high street chain going bust at the end of last year.

The company, which bought Woolworths in February, hired an outside agency called Glue to drive forward the digital agenda in time for a summer launch.

Glue social media director Jonny Spindler said he first conducted an audit to see how the brand was coming across to customers.

“At the top of the searches we saw many negative blog posts focused on Woolworths being struck by the recession, but then as we looked further down the search results we found lots of sentimental comments from Facebook groups and Twitter. Thousands of people were reminiscing on the good old days of Woolworths and wanted it to come back again,” said Spindler.

“We told Shop Direct to forget launching its Woolworths social networking strategy in six months' time: as the conversations were happening right there and then, they couldn’t afford to wait."

Spindler said Glue mentored Shop Direct employees on how to communicate on different social networking sites. His team also outlined social media guidelines for employees on content 'dos and don’ts'.

“For example, Facebook was consumed with Woolworth memory discussions and fan pages but Twitter was more of a medium for customers to find out information about Woolworths online,” he said.

“We took the strategy to the chief executive level and his buy-in to the strategy was crucial. His demands for how the strategy was going meant the management of the Twitter account soon became someone’s job role.

“The employee put in charge of the account ran it with input from different areas of the business, particularly the PR team in order to target journalists. "

When it came to the content of the Tweets, Spindler said the focus had been on asking people what they thought of the new products. “It gets people excited about Woolworths coming back,” he said.

Glue also advised Shopping Direct to track what people were saying on the web that related to Woolworths products, such as pick and mix, and then Tweet something relevant in response.

“You need to make sure you don’t fall into the traditional trap of social networking, just pushing out what you want to say, because that’s not very social. You need to listen to your customers on the web and make Twitter a two-way conversation,” Spindler said.

“Woolworths is not using the platform as a promotion tool to sell products like Dell has been doing. Instead, Twitter is used to break exclusive insider news and to engage with customers."

Dell reported last week that it it had earned $3m (£1.84m) in revenue through Twitter since 2007.

In other Twitter news, hedge fund managers have started monitoring Tweets for price-sensitive information, according to the US technology firm Streambase, which was tasked with developing the software to allow them to do so.

The technology enables traders to work from breaking news rather than waiting for it to be fed down through financial wires such as Reuters and Bloomberg.

It is clear that the business take-up of Twitter is now crucial to the site’s success, and is driving the firm to try to monitorise the traffic.

Nielsen Online recently reported that 62 per cent of Twitter users visit the site at work. Another research firm, Hitwise, revealed this week that UK Twitter traffic had increased 22-fold in the past year.

Just one year ago, in May 2008, Twitter ranked as the 969th most visited web site and the 84th most visited social network, but on Wednesday Hitwise said Twitter’s ranking had improved to the 38th most visited web site and the fifth most visited social network.