Brand or Spammed

Saying that a brand can Twitter is a pretty broad statement but what does that mean? Just as I learned in the advertising classes I sat in during college (my degree is in Advertising Art & Design) there are many ways to position your advertising in the public. Your message can be as diverse as there are personalities in the world. There are lots of different strategies to approaching social media in general and Twitter specifically.

There are some that say even thinking in terms of strategies and planning how to approach Twitter is antithesis of the whole social media mindset. You come to the social media tools for conversation, honestly and openly. Having a plan or a strategy implies from the start that you aren’t being entirely honest with the other folks you engage with. From a certain point of view this is true. For my own personal Twitter account I have no strategy or plan. When I tweet from @obilon, I’m there as myself, just a guy who wants to talk to other people. I’d never ever think of myself as a brand or having a tactic to my tweets. And I certainly don’t do it for marketing purposes. That said, like everyone else in the world that you will meet, I have an agenda at times and a particular point of view or opinion on everything from politics to wine, I don’t consciously try to make others see me in a certain way, except as I see myself.

That’s my personal account. With my personal account I am a lot of things, and one of them is a consumer. I do follow businesses on Twitter and enjoy see the tweets float through my Twitter stream. If something interests me I click on it. I may even be motivated by a brand to go check out one of their products and services. The only stipulation I have is that it’s not deceitful. I don’t want to be spammed or tricked into clicking a link I never intended to click. Do I like naked pictures of women? Well, to be perfectly honest, yes, I do. But do I want to be tricked into clicking on one? No way.

That’s why I follow @playboy. What you see is what you get from them, so to speak. If I follow some spammer account like @Sindee666 who tweets as if she’s a real person but all her links are porn that’s not honest. That’s spam pure and simple. Not all brands are spam. Let me repeat that. Not all brands are spam. At times there’s a fine line, but it’s up to the individual company to know where that line is and not cross it. There are times when your followers will, in fact, let you know when you’ve crossed the line from brand promotion to spam. Like my father-in-law is known to often say, one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling.