Alex

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 8:19am

As you say, I do think they’re using it in a deliberately narrow way at the moment, which is initself no bad thing. However, also agree with you that it would be nice to see a general innocent feed.

The AGM feed does stay true to one core component of the innocent brand, however’ attention to the little thing sin life. The coffee cups, wind, bottles, you name it, they make mundane engaging, as with their typical bottle/carton copy.

Simon Collister

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 8:33am

I was thinking the same myself yesterday. It seems like the Innocent guys are taking the iea of Twitter being a micro-blogging platform too literally. Alex is right when he says they are simply publishing news about the AGM - which itself isn;t a bad idea - but the content they publish is the wrong stuff. I want insight and info from the AGM/business, not tid-bits about cleaning up biscuit crumbs as cutsey as that mey be.

It’s the opposite to Downing Street - their Twitter feed is *more* interesting because of the anecdotal tid-bits. You get the official news via the BBC etc. Innocent should use Twitter to tell their (AGM) news directly.

And as you rightly point out, the lack of dialogue is a bug bear as well.

Michael

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 11:59am

I think innocent are one of the few UK companies making an attempt to embrace social media. I think you’re right to praise them for their efforts. The idea of a major british brand having a twitter account for the purposes of the AGM in itself is ground breaking - as to using Twitter incorrectly I didn’t realise that there was a wrong way to use it. I use it for everything from keeping in touch with people to delivering content via an email list and having weird Internet Marketing conversations all the time and use Twitter for what I feel Twitter is useful for at the time - I’m probably using it incorrectly :p

Alex W

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 11:59am

Twitter is not necessarily about two way communication.

If you look at the big names using the service, the ratio of followers to following is usually very small, covering the difference between their social use of twitter (following friends) and their business use of twitter (telling the world about how great they are).

I don’t necessarily think there is such a thing as a bad use of Twitter for a company, and the space it is designed to fill is the void between proper blog posts (where I imagine they will cover the AGM in greater detail).

While PRBloggers may not appreciate the current ‘tweets’, I’m sure a huge amount of their fan base will, these being the same people that enjoy what is written on the underside of each carton etc etc.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, as far as I know the AGM hasn’t started yet, so I would be mightly surprised if they were able to cover it already in great detail. They are good, but probably not that good.

Tweet Tweet « Gary Andrews

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 5:36pm

[...] how Innocent, a company that is usually pretty with it when it comes to social media, seems to have got Twitter a bit wrong. It’s a bit embarrassing when a government aide can work Twitter better than most companies. [...]

Chris Norton

Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 9:46am

I think I am going to have to agree with Michael. You are right to praise Innocent for being forward thinking and actually embracing social media but the official way to use Twitter is still up for debate. Some people see company/brand Twitter accounts as being two-way others aren’t offended if a brand only publishes interesting information about the brand and it’s people. I think it can work either way and neither particularly offends me as long as they are transparent about its usage from the outset.

Wat is de juiste manier om Twitter te gebruiken?

Saturday, May 17, 2008 at 11:39am

[...] Drinks, de gezonde smoothiemaker uit Engeland. Een paar dagen geleden las ik een interessant stukje van Stephen Davies over de manier waarop zij gebruik maken van sociale [...]

amelia

Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 10:15pm

I’m not really sure what the issue is I have to say. There are no rules for how to use Twitter, none for indivdiuals and certainly none for companies. Surely what Innocent was doing was keeping up a running commentary while they conducted a totally open and transparent AGM.

Explain again what your problem with this was.

Stephen

Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 10:53pm

Perhaps ‘problem’ is too strong a word, but I outline what I thought was a poor attempt from a company which is often regarded (and rightly so) as a poster child in the social media space.

Second from last para in the blog article:

So far it’s been updated 26 times, has 28 ‘followers’ and is ‘following’ no one. No dialogue, no insights, no interest in other users (by choosing not to follow anyone) and, perhaps most importantly, bringing nothing interesting to the Twitter party. Well, unless you care about people tuning in big televisions, that is.

This was the case at the time of writing the post. Innocent discovered this post, twittered it and subsequently started following people and @replying back (although a few questions to the company like this one didn’t receive a response though). Not claiming this had anything to do with me or this post but the AGM Twitter page improved (in my opinion) a lot afterwards.

I agree with you. There are no rules for how companies or individuals use Twitter. Likewise there aren’t any rules for how both of these parties use blogging. But blogging’s more mainstream than Twitter and although there are no ‘blog rules’ set in stone, there’s a certain etiquette and acceptance of dos and don’ts to the medium.

ted at innocent

Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 9:40pm

Hello.

We should have replied directly to this conversation a bit earlier but I suppose now is as good as time as any to join in. I think the original thought of this post and resulting debate raises some really interesting points about the place a lot of brands are in with their use of social media at the minute.

The first point should be that innocent have ultimately benefited from this post and the associated comments. Which is always a good thing, so thank you all. As Stephan points out in his last comment, we did indeed change our behaviours in using twitter directly as a result of this post. As with most things we welcome comment, be it praise or criticism, indeed you often actually get more positive benefits from the critism. Hence addressing this blog post straight away with our twitter followers ( http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008/statuses/794949909 ) and then taking on the suggestion regarding following everyone else’s feeds. From that point of view alone our feed, and what both innocent as a brand and our followers as consumers got out of it, ended up better than it was before.

It also brought up the below interesting thoughts as part of the wider context of our own use, and the general use of social media at present…

-no wrong or right way to use social media
I kind of agree with Michael’s & Alex’s thoughts that there is no wrong or right way to use twitter or social media, but probably a set of behaviours or social courtesies that will enable you to get more out of what you are doing. A good example of this for me would be howies blog. They have never had commenting enabled in their long history of blogging but it is no less an interesting or inspiring blog to me. Nor could you say that howies is not embracing openness or the use of digital communities, just have a look at the do lectures stuff they’ve got coming up.

-wearing stuff in, not out
Again as Stephen rightly says, he made these points as he called it when he first came across our AGM twitter feed. In reality this was only a couple of weeks in from when we first set up the twitter feed and quite far off when our AGM stuff really started to get going. The important bit of this though is that social media, and digital in general, tends to get better the more and longer you use it. Hence the thought, that like a nice leather, sofa you’re wearing stuff in, not out.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/wearing-stuff-i.html

-direct line to head office
Another thought on this is the way we first came across Stephen’s post (via a google alert set up on ‘innocent drinks’). I think every brand should have google alerts set up on themselves to pick up and act on stuff like this quickly for their own benefit.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/04/a-direct-line-t.html
http://www.google.com/alerts

-it’s good to talk
Social media is basically making it easier and more transparent for brands to speak and have conversations with consumers. And as Dan says on the comment to this post (another example of how we’ve benefited from what people say about us and we pick upon), ‘talking is good’.
http://letsbehumanbeings.typepad.com/letsbehumanbeings/2008/06/quick-quick.html

-falling forwards fast
My last thought would be around the context and resulting lessons we’ve now learnt post AGM twitter feed. At innocent we subscribe to the ‘fall forward fast’ principle of doing things in digital (http://www.tomski.com/archive/new_archive/000063.html ). The AGM twitter feed was ultimately a test case in using twitter. In doing stuff like this it’s kind of inevitable that things will go wrong along the way, but in the same light it’s inevitable that you’ll learn invaluable stuff in the process. And learning stuff will absolutely never leave you in a weaker position than when you started.

Hopefully others will be able to take some learning’s out of this as well as us. So we’ll all have learnt something.