First companies sign up to CoTweet

McDonalds, Microsoft and Coca-Cola are among the first  companies to sign up to CoTweet’s Enterprise Innovators programme. Put simply, the programme is a method for brands to manage their Twitter presence, providing functionality for multiple users to manage the account and also integrating analytics. The company themselves bill it as ‘taking Twitter to the next level’. Businesses that sign up to the scheme are also guaranteed a dedicated account manager. The only problem is that the Innovator’s programme costs $1,500 p/m , certainly not an accessible option for many businesses.

In fairness, Co-Tweet does currently offer a free beta service on the side, with more limited functionality that allows companies to reach and engage with their customers through Twitter. The service also sells itself as being a useful solution for organisations where multiple people may be managing one account. This includes functionality such as assigning tweets to other colleagues, alerts when different users are ‘on duty’ and emails when messages are sent to your Twitter account.

Now, I signed up for a free account to trial CoTweet, to manage the Simply Zesty Twitter account. As someone who uses Twitter fairly regularly, I found that CoTweet simply added another barrier between myself and the actual Twitter interface, that I didn’t feel was overly necessary. I understand the need for bigger brands to monitor and measure their presence online and I’m not pretending that there is as much work in monitoring Twitter for ‘simply zesty’ as there might be for McDonalds. But there are already full service buzz monitoring applications on the market, that are much more cost-effective with entry level costs of around $40 p/m. And that’s just the paid options.

This points to a wider problem around the concept of a service just for Twitter. Twitter doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it is just one part of your whole online presence. I can’t understand why a business would willingly pay this much money for a service that is just giving you one part of your social media activity, when you could use a solution like Radian 6, that presents you with updates and alerts from a range of sites, all within one dashboard. And this problem isn’t confined to buzz monitoring either. There are now dedicated Twitter Agencies such as Cherp that help you to manage your Twitter brand strategy.

This, to me, shows a completely flawed understanding of how social media works. Are you expected to have one agency running your Twitter presence, with a separate agency for Facebook etc? If you are to advise clients on what their strategy should be for Twitter, you need to know how this fits with the wider social media strategy. Your audience isn’t confining themselves to one site, so why run your social media activity in that way?

I have no doubt that larger organisations do have a need to effectively measure their Twitter accounts and run them efficiently but I think CoTweet is mis-selling a service that is already on the market. Twitter itself already offers a lot of the functionality that CoTweet does. They also promote the fact that they have the ability to monitor keywords and trends within their interface. Well, so does Tweetdeck and that’s free. Twitter is about real-time conversation and I just can’t see a process such as emailing a Twitter alert for a colleague to follow up really working. Why not just have all employees install Tweetdeck and respond in that way?

I say all this as someone who isn’t using the paid-for service on CoTweet so there may well be massive advantages that I’m not picking up, but I just take slight issue with the way they’re selling themselves. I think they’re being slightly misleading, for example,  by saying that they offer analytics, when you can get this for free with bit.ly (who CoTweet have actually partnered with). Their main selling point does seem to be on the management side of things, as opposed to analytics, but I’m just finding it hard to see how this actually makes it easier for companies.  I think that CoTweet, in particular the paid service, is turning Twitter into a kind of monster that has to be tackled and tamed by companies. Something they reinforce by saying it helps you to ‘crack the code’ of Twitter. There is no code to crack, it is updates of 140 characters.