Innocent gets Twitter wrong
Posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 7:18pm in Business, PR General |
Ask any British based PR or marketer about which brands they most admire and chances are Innocent Drinks will be somewhere near the top of their list. And rightly so. Innocent is a great brand which has been praised on this blog on more than one occasion. Everything from the company’s brand narrative to the little cheesy notes included on their smoothie cartons is sheer genius and guaranteed to give you a warm and gushy feeling.
The company also should be praised for its efforts in social media. A blog, YouTube channel, various worthwhile initiatives on Flickr and a popular Facebook Group and Fan Page. The blog has been put to good use by the company on a few occasions, most notably in May last year when it decided to partner with MacDonald’s by supplying Innocent smoothies to each of the fast food chain’s UK outlets, which in-turn created a lot of negative commentary from the Innocent fan base. Nevertheless, the company had the guts to address the issue openly on the blog guaranteeing two thumbs up from any social media enthusiast. Bravo.
Recently, Innocent has set up a Twitter account for the company’s upcoming 2008 Annual General Meeting (AGM) and can be found at http://twitter.com/innocentAGM2008. By general standards, however, it’s a relatively poor attempt at using Twitter. 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 bit televisions, that is.
Alex Pearmain disagrees and believes that it has no need for dialogue because it’s a Twitter account set up purposely for the company’s 2008 AGM. Alex has a point but one can’t help feeling that this is a poor attempt from a company that usually sets such high standards.
7 Comments
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 […]