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Yes Twitter can be good for your company. There are of course soon to be urban legends about companies like Dell that made over $1 million during the recent holiday season by using Twitter but what about the sales they lost because of Twitter? I would wager that it could easily be north of $1 million.

Just a quick search on Twitter reveals tweets like this one:

dell laptop locked up two or three times in the last half hour, only button that responded was the powerbutton. Maybe I should send it back

While there may be some good coming from Twitter through marketing opportunities, there is clearly some bad along with that. I think that this is the double edge sword of social media that one must be careful with.

Then there are companies like Mozilla and VMWare or, more specifically, products like Firefox, VMWare Fusion and Harvest that have teams of people constantly watching Twitter and actually responding to your tweets. One time when I was having some VMWare problems @vmwarefusion responded to me almost immediately:

@davejohnson It’s easy enough to find the real culprit. Go to Activity Monitor, and click “Show All Processes.”

not that it ultimately helped much but it’s the thought that counts. To properly take advantage of social media tools like Twitter and get the most out of them this is an important step; it’s about the community engagement rather than leaving them to their own devices. Even though Firefox still crashes on an almost daily basis it does make me feel better when someone reaches out to help. Companies like Dell should be doing the same if they want to see a net benefit from tools like Twitter.

This type of involvement on Twitter really makes sense and it makes the tool more useful even just socially. However, I can see a future in which Twitter could be taken over by people using it more for business relationships using their Twitter network to mine data rather be social. It would get pretty annoying if your Twitter friends starting asking you questions on a daily basis about this product or that, or if companies engage you in a Twitter conversation as a sales tool.

So companies should get out there and engage but don’t be phony about it and be careful not to inundate people with messages.

And, for the record, I am very happy with Dell

Tags: dell, harvest, socialmedia, twitter, vmware.