Coloring Outside The Lines
Social Media consultants (including me) like to tell you all the rules that apply to using services like Twitter. But the fact is that without innovation from the grassroots users, many of the features that are standard on Twitter now would never have existed. Take RT (retweeting) for instance. This was a practice started by the users to re post another twitterer’s tweet that his followers found interesting. The user base was coloring a little outside of the lines and finding their own unique ways to use the service.
In this sense anyone putting restrictions on how Twitter should and should not be used is essentially limiting innovation on the service. I had a pretty public debate with both Dr. Mark Drapeau and Shel Israel about brands on Twitter. In fact, my first post on Mashable was in response to another post by Dr. Drapeau calling for a ban on twittering brands. Shel Israel seems to share Dr. Drapeau’s opinion and asked me to write my best argument for brands on Twitter which he graciously referenced in his book Twitterville. To distill the argument down to its basic form, according to Israel and Drapeau, Twitter should only be used for human to human communication and conversation.
They do not preclude companies from using Twitter in their marketing campaigns but they’d just rather that company be as transparent as possible and reveal exactly who is manning the Twitter account. Israel cites many different means to achieve this level of transparency, which you can read about in his excellent and well-researched book. I respect both Shel Israel’s and Dr. Mark Drapeau’s thoughts and opinions. I even suspect that in the end, they may be right about this and I might be wrong.
I don’t think that brand twittering is on par with an innovation like RT or @replies but my point is that when you listen to anyone with a set of rules about how to use social media, take it with a grain of salt. It’s coloring outside the lines a little that sometimes make the most interesting compositions.