Meet the Pizza Hut tweetologist…. really?

Not content with having made enough noise with their dedicated Twitter hire the first time round, Pizza Hut are at it again. They recently held a contest on Twitter, to come up with a new name for their Twintern Alexa Robinson. To me, this reads nothing like a cheap bit of PR (which has obviously worked, because I’m writing about it). Pizza Hut have done some great things with social media, but this isn’t one of them.

Debenhams did their own Twitter PR this earlier in the year, when they put on Twitter assistants during their one day megasale. The assistants were armed with mobiles in the store, on hand to answer customer’s queries who used the hashtag #debtwtasst . At the time I was scratching my head. Debenhams seemed to have created an answer to a problem that didn’t exist. They claimed to want to utilise instant communication to answer customer’s queries, but I don’t see anything more instant than going and asking someone if they have something in your size or in another colour. Then I realised. Debenhams didn’t actually want to use Twitter to answer customer’s queries, but do a nice bit of ‘look at us – aren’t we cutting edge using Twitter?’ type PR.

There’s no doubt that Twitter can make headlines. Remember the 104 year old tweeter? Another nice PR stunt using the microblogging service. I’d like to see less companies using Twitter as a vehicle by which to make headlines and more businesses that really understand it, doing great new things with the service. And yes Pizza Hut, we heard you the first time. You have dedicated tweeting staff.