So Twitter doesn't work for businesses?

I was talking to a pal of mine earlier today who is now a VERY senior guy at a VERY big company. I asked him what Social Media tools he was using and he was quite enthusiastic about their blog. I checked the blog while we were talking. Nine posts in the last month, eight about products and one about a prize the company had won – they looked like press releases, and I told my friend so. I gave him a bit of a hard time and explained some ways he could get much more from the blog, by giving more.

Then I asked him about Twitter:

“Ah, we tried that, it doesn’t work.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t work?”

“Oh, we set up an account, IT arranged for our blog and press releases to be sent automatically to the Twitter stream. I got marketing department to allocate a grad trainee to send out regular stuff every day about new products, shows we were attending, price increases and so on. Complete waste of time.”

“In what way?”

“We got a marginal increase in web traffic, but no decent sales leads and no sales at all that I could measure.”

“Talk me through the instructions that were given to the grad who was running the account.”

“Simple really. Keep it business like, don’t waste too much time on there. Four Twitter posts a day telling people about our products.”

“OK, well maybe we can start there…………………..”

“Sorry Mike, can we pick this up later, I’ve got to get to a 2010 budget meeting.”

“Sure, let me email some thoughts to you.”

“Great. Talk soon……”

At this point I started to pen an email, and then I paused. I’d already given my friend some stick about the blog, so how would he react to me banging on about Twitter. Maybe he’d think I’d gone soft since leaving the cut and thrust world of big business, maybe he’d think I’d been “converted.”

And then I had an idea! I’ve recorded our conversation almost word for word above. So without leading you in any way, maybe you can help? Please let my friend have your thoughts in comments below. Let’s see if we can get a virtual Twitter training session going.

Over to you………….