Tweet your way to the top

Are you one of the four in five social media users who say, “Twitter is a complete waste of time” or “I dont get Twitter”?

Facebook passed 1 Billion users last year. Twitter has 200 Million active users, so about 20% or one in five versus Facebook.

I want to tell you that if you aren’t on Twitter there is something important you are missing.

I remember when I was growing up my parents would take action if something was wrong. They would write a letter to the Manager, and usually get a reply, or they would call and speak to the Manager and would actually get the Manager. This is not the reality for most of us now. If you are Richard Branson, there’s probably noone who is likely to refuse your call, but for the rest of us our calls go to call centres where you speak to someone with no authority, or a supervisor with little more.

Twitter is a tool that gives you a voice in the world, a voice like people had when companies were small and decision makers were accessible. When you send a tweet, it stays on the record with only twitter able to remove it if they can see that a request to remove is a reasonable one. So if you keep your comments accurate and respectful your tweet can confront issues that are just not right, and the other party’s choices are hunker down and hope it goes away, or face it and respond or act. They can’t censure you themselves.

Your tweets stay on the record and are easily searchable as a search term ad-infinitum, so if you have sought to draw attention to something and if it has been negligently ignored, you can leave a trail about the issue being publicly on record and drawn to the party’s attention on their account that can be referred back to by investigators or courts.

In this world where formal communication channels at best get you to a call centre , Twitter lets you escalate an issue on the public record to a level where an organisation ignores it at great risk if it is a substantive matter.

Every politician and company of any significance now has a twitter account. Some of them like the current Australian Prime Minister KRudd actually tweet themselves. But just about all of them have professional communication teams who unlike a call centre are very close to the ear of the recipient.

If you care about making a difference in our world, or even just want your voice back, you really need to get with the other 1 in 5 of us who have a twitter account. For me it is not a tool I use every day, but when I want it to help me get something done it can be a very very effective tool.

Follow me on ‘UraPAuckland’ and I will follow you.

Ura P Auckland
GAICD, FCPA, B.Bus
Managing Director
Authegrity Pty Ltd
www.authegrity.com

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