

Your company's urge to tweet - dotcoma
http://www.dotcoma.it/2010/03/28/your-companys-urge-to-tweet.html

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MicahWedemeyer
The rant really only applies to big corps.

If you're a small company (like a 2 or 3 person startup, ie. the HN crowd),
then _you_ are the face of the company doing the tweeting/blogging/whatever.
Sure, don't fool yourself that your couple hundred followers really care all
that much, but it's cheap and easy marketing, and sometimes you get a bite.

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dotcoma
of course!

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emarcotte
I may be wrong, but this seems like just a rage dump.

I don't work for a large corporation so I can't say how they treat this stuff,
but the way we're approaching this is "starting conversations."

In addition, if you don't have any presense, how will you be found? If we stop
posting blogs, making websites, using twitter and all the other tools we have
to get our message out (and linked to) how would the author want us to be
found? We could go back to the old days of directly calling prospects who
weren't even looking for us. I just love getting unexpected phone calls from
salesmen myself.

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mtts
I understand that you (part of a small company, I presume) have a need to be
found, but the author is in fact right when he says that blogging and tweeting
by companies is really just advertising, nothing more and nothing less. Most
people do not "start conversations" with companies, they start conversations
with other people.

What company blogs and tweets and Facebook fan pages are, of course, good for,
is providing an avenue for companies to push their marketing onto consumers
that care so much about the product they've actually subscribed to the blog,
twitter account and Facebook page without bothering anyone else. In that sense
they're a huge improvement over traditional advertising. That does not mean,
however, that they're not still just that: advertising.

