The ENTiPping Point

This seems to be one of the ways that many larger brands are choosing to a) keep their brand identity intact on Twitter and b) provide an element of human interaction.  Customers are able to associate a face with the tweets coming out of a corporate account, yet the face is attached to a brand within the Twitter handle.  Brands really have to consider the policies they will put in place about the content coming out of the Twitter streams of their brand since some of the employees may also use these handles to tweet about personal issues, friends, etc.

Pros:

1. Strong personal representation: Most likely this type of voice is going to have a face of an employee as its Twitter avatar.  People like associating with people and this humanizes the brand.
2. Opportunity for personal engagement:  Since the account is a person, there is more comfort with seeing commentary that may reflect the corporate tweeter's personal opinion about topics not related to serving the customer directly, e.g. favorite music tunes, community events local to the tweeter, etc.  Opinions can be expressed with the understanding that they're representative of the human, rather than the brand.  Note: the trick is finding the balance of how much "opinion" a corporate tweeter should be expressing.
3. Assigning and segmenting special skillsets: In a company like Charter, who handles cable TV, internet and phone service, it may make better customer service sense to delegate certain business specialties to different corporate tweeters, each with his own Twitter handle.  This is how team manager Eric Ketzer at Charter handles customer interactions;  each of Charter's corporate tweeters has a speciality of some type (billing, internet, cable TV, etc.) and the within the team they redirect customers to each other based on the specialty needed.

1. Expression of opinions reflecting on the brand: If a corporate tweeter possesses (and expresses) an opinion of a topic that is unrelated to the brand's mission, the brand runs the risk of alienating a portion of the customer population.  How can a brand segment off the human element of a tweet when the tweet contains both the brand AND the employee's names?
2. Creating customer affinity with a single person vs. brand: What happens when '@Bob_at_AcmeCorp' leaves Acme Corp. and goes somewhere else?  What does this do to the customer base (and relationships) that he has established?  Do they feel alienated?  What if 'Bob' goes to work at a competing company -- does he get to take his follower list with him who can subsequently get the same great customer service from him while he's employed at the new brand?

Employee Voice

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Brand-Only Voice is Employee Voice, where corporate tweeters are allowed to have a Twitter handle of their choice, convey their personalities and manage their employer's followers as their own in and amongst their childhood friend followers, family, etc.  In some cases, entrepreneurs ARE their brand, and therefore there is not as much disconnect between the brand identity and the person who created the brand.

Pros:

1. Breaks down brand stuffiness:  If your company is a brand that doesn't exactly exude a "cool kids" vibe, then maybe having a cool kid as your corporate tweeter will bring a new segment of customers to your brand.  Note: this could work against you as well and alienate a dedicated, affine customer base.
2. Dissonance from the brand: While this may be more of a perceived legal safety net than an actual one, a brand does have the opportunity to allow the corporate tweeter to say what they will on their own Twitter stream without explicitly associating themselves with the tweeter.  In some cases, this voice is started by employees in a company where no organized social media presence and strategy exists;  they attempt to serve the customers on their own out of their own desire to help the brand.

1. Dilution of brand relevance: Customers might not see this voice as the most reassuring in the social media environment.  Can this brand not put together some type of organized strategy for allowing me to contact it?  Twitter users are getting more and more accustomed to brands being on Twitter using some form of their brand name.  Therefore, if I want to contact Acme Corp. on Twitter, I probably am not going to think of looking up '@George1234' because he happens to be their community manager.
2. As goes the tweeter, so do the followers: If I become a follower of '@George1234' as a community manager of a brand I deal with, and then George leaves the brand, I may still keep him in my list of people I follow because during my time I spent dealing with him as part of that brand, I also found out that he liked the Steve Miller Band and has the same kick-ass Keurig coffeemaker that I do.  So as a customer of his previous brand, I have to be acclimated to someone new at that brand all over again.  As mentioned earlier, I may also follow this corporate tweeter to another brand if the customer service they provided was good.

The Employee-Piloted Brand Voice

The best way to describe this voice is "here's the brand that we're tweeting from, but it's really me/us playing 'Oz' behind the curtain of the brand and we want to be transparent about it".  It's a hybrid of the Brand-Only Voice and the Employee Voice and in many cases involves the use of CoTweet or another tool that allows multiple employees to manage and respond on a single Twitter stream.

Examples: @SouthwestAir, @MarriottIntl, @HomeDepot, @Ford

1. Best of all worlds:  Here you get both the benefits of the association of the brand, but with the added benefit of having real human names associated with the account.  In most cases, companies state the names of the employees staffing the accounts within the Twitter bio or on the Twitter account's background.  In the case of Christi Day with @SouthwestAir, she even goes so far as to provide her personal Twitter handle in case you want to follow her love of TCU football and her Maine coon cat's activities.
2. Transparency of responses: In many cases, you're able to see who is responding from the corporate tweet team, as seen in this example from Home Depot.  This feature is offered in CoTweet-like tools and reinforces the the premise that the customer is interacting with an actual person versus a brand.
3. Easy to search for your company brand: If your company brand is your Twitter handle, Twitter users will have a much greater chance of finding your brand by searching on the Twitter site.
4. Insulation from employee turnover: As mentioned before, by sticking with the brand as the Twitter handle, you're able to sequester the corporate tweeters from the outside world and provide enough of a curtain between the brand and the customer to allow movement in and out of the corporate tweet team without the public feeling too much difference in the brand's voice.

1. A 'Twall Center': Some customers may feel as though this is the Twitter version of a call center.  When you make a request of the brand, you get put into a queue and the next member of the team that's available picks up your request and handles it.  Some customers will inevitably find this similar to a call center, where you're put into a queue for the 'next available representative'.
2. Lack of continuity in servicing the customer: On teams of made up of similar "food group" team members, the tendency may be to stagger the team members' online availability throughout the day to cover times from 8-to-5 or even around the clock.  If customers have to deal with multiple team members over the course of a couple of days to solve a problem, there is a possibility that details of the case don't get adequately transferred from one team member to the next.  Note: this situation can be mitigated by thorough back-office case management, but it is worth noting since I have personally been a victim of this frustration in the past.

Each of these has its benefits and shortcomings and brands should consider which of these alignments best suits their customers' desires and needs for interacting with their brand.  What works for one industry may not work for another, so it is critical to understand the customer base and their perception of the brand before embarking down a path.

In my next post, I'll examine some of the strategy of tweeting from a corporate brand and throw out a couple of issues that brands may want to consider before jumping in and engaging customers right away.