Ran across a post about a Business Insider article that was revealing, critical and insightful about the agency process to create a single tweet for a new client. It may surprise or enlighten you about the careful and often bureaucratic method an organization follows to produce the perfectly crafted tweet. More on the article here.
Hopefully your organized isn’t mired down in such bureaucracy and process that you overlook the most useful part of social media: SPEED!
Piggyback PR 
45 days to plan and publish a tweet in some cases… and over 13 people involved in a single tweet… that is insane! Congress spends far less time debating national policy issues!
I really think this concept is interesting, for a few reasons. First, social media is an outlet for corporations and brands to build a relationship with the public. It is a way to get things out fast. Secondly, timing is key with social media marketing. 45 days is definitely too long to formulate a tweet–because by the time they formulate the tweet, it will be irrelevant. Lastly, social media is all about staying relevant. If you are only posting on average every 45-50 days on social media, you will become completely irrelevant to followers. In order to efficiently leverage social media you really need to be consistent, stay relevant, and stay ahead of the trends, media curves, and stories with your timing.
I agree with Ramya, the delay in social media response could be hazardous to the reputation of a company. I also agree with her point that in order to be successful on social media, a company has to stay relevant and by outsourcing social media responses an organization could tarnish it’s followers opinions.
This idea of timing that Ramya brings up can be pretty interesting. As she mentioned the regularity of posting but on a very large account it is also very important to post at the correct times of the day to gain the attention of the audience intended. Both spacing things out correctly and matching up with the appropriate timezones timezones.
I agree that posting every 45-50 days is too long of a wait to keep companies relevant. Timing is key especially with all the white noise in social media at this moment. Stories and trending topics pop up and change multiple times throughout the day. Things are forgotten and others are remembered more than others. Therefore, getting stories or articles to trend during prime time is the ideal situation.
This is amazing. This article definitely illustrates how brand image is imperative to a firm. Just think, if a corporation hired a single person to make posts and tweets to improve a brands image and accidentally makes a minor mistake… The consequences from a single accidental tweet or post could potentially leave someone jobless, and/or wreck a brands image just through social media is crazy.
I totally agree. I mean I understand the significant impact social media can have but then you see it in this light and you are completely blown away that one mistake could be so detrimental. it is definitely a new world now that social media has taken over. It is definitely a good and bad thing but this just makes us aware we need to think about social media and the impact it could have before posting
Wow!!! That’s pretty crazy that so much “paid” time goes into a single tweet!!! 45 days to publish a tweet and over 13 people involved seems a bit extreme!!
No kidding. I wonder what other resources the company could allocate the funds they pay its social media department. I get it, it is very important to house a social media department in the best interest in the company, but 45 days to publish a single tweet? come on…
This is so daft, I don’t know where to start. So I won’t.
First of all, this 45 day process might be a symptom of average employee age range at Huge. There is a mass of teenage brain power in the world that should really be vetted for the possibility of sweat shop type consulting on these things. Seriously, a 14 year old could have come up with an incredibly un-profound tweet that could have gained more traction for a cheese company. Don’t believe me, their tweet was:
“Sharing a Camembert with friends? (How generous!) Get the best flavor by serving at room temperature. #artofcheesepic.twitter.com/R6iWPeKv1Z”
This got no re-tweets by the way, but then there is no such thing as no publicity?
45 days to process, it is insane. Writing a few sentence would never took that long, no one is asking for a 1 page essay to post. And, do you know how long is 45 days? the thing is that 155,000 people die per day, so it is close 6.8 million people die, then you can making a official post. (it is about 11 times portland population sizes)
I understand the importance of being careful what is tweeted or posted on behalf of an organization, as social media is one of the best and easiest ways for a company to reach its public, but 45 days is extreme! I’m doing some social media coordination for my company and I come up with several posts to use within an hour, sometimes they need a little editing by my supervisor but I couldn’t imagine spending more than a few hours coming up with a single post/tweet!
Wow! This is way beyond insane. I think it’s only happen in USA this kind of extravaganza thing. When you think time is money they sure have plenty money to waste.
Yeah I think that this is just microcosm of how much anything has to go through to get accomplished in a large corporation. I know at my company, most good ideas take at least a year to be implemented, even if it is a small website change. I think that this just goes to show that some companies over-think even the smallest tasks.
I think this is interesting to see how much time, resources, and money go into a single tweet! I wonder if it’s exaggerated or real.
At my work where I handle a lot of the social media, we have a lot of agency to post things without having a boss or other coworker look over them. However, even with that agency I know that I take a long time to look over exactly what I’m posting. I’m acting as my company and have to comply with the image they want to put forth, which definitely takes consideration. While I do think 45 days is crazy for a 140 character max tweet, I think it would surprise people how much consideration is being put into simple little factors. I mean, we’ve all seen social media disasters from companies where you are left thinking, “How did no one catch that?”
On one hand I think this is incredibly pathetic, but on the other hand I guess I could see how this is necessary. I’m involved with social media a little bit, I have accounts with all the major platforms but I really only use a couple of them. So I probably don’t have the best insight or maybe even a valid opinion on how social media really effects businesses today. But I will say that I have experienced some of the drawbacks to poorly strategized posts. I’m in a band and social media plays a huge roll in our success and it helps us create a buzz so that people can continually know where we’re playing next, when the next album is coming out, or just random little tidbits about this or that. For a while we were pretty amped up on trying to get our Facebook likes up and so we would make posts pretty frequently saying pretty much anything on our mind, but over time we found that we were actually losing likes as often as we gained them. It was the typical case of taking one step forward and two steps back. So we ended up getting a strategy together with the way we posted and how often and it ultimately helped us progress with likes. With that being said, I can definitely understand how a company would take extreme measures in how they present themselves in a social media setting, however, 45 days sounds does sound like a pretty over the top timeline on ONE tweet.
That is a lot of people and a lot of time for a small post, but there is clearly a lot that goes into it. They must draft a lot of posts and bounce back a lot of different ideas on exactly what a business wants to post and how they want to put it out there. They probably consider every outcome of how the market could react to that post as well. They also probably have disagreements on what should be put into social media as well, especially if there is 13 people involved.
Fascinating, an advertising firm using advertising creative practices on a tweet. In the case of the Camembert, the process was played to direct a specific message to a specific audience. Of course, even from an advertising side this is poor planning because they aren’t creating to their medium. Their medium doesn’t call for the same type of advertising that a print magazine uses. Twitter is run by spontaneity and quick, fleeting messages. With only two favorites at the time the article was written, it’s clear their ad team didn’t get the memo on how Twitter works. Most tweets only live on a followers site for a few minutes, so spending that much time is pointless.
Their 45 days would be better spent learning how to write an effective tweet in less than an hour, and they better hope they are crisis-management free during that time period.
13 people, 45 days, one corporate tweet.
Even after fully reading the article, I am still shocked that a company needs to take 45 days to produce a single tweet for their brand. I also completely agree that speed plays a huge factor in determining success within the social media world. I wonder if the companies using this strategic planning are taking into account the potentially large amount of missed opportunities by taking over a month and a half to create a single tweet on Twitter.
For instance, back in 2013 during the Super bowl power outage (which lasted a full half-hour), Oreo’s social media team used its creativity and speed to come up with an on-the-spot, fast-thinking and epic Twitter tweet: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/how-oreo-got-that-twitter-ad-up-so-fast#.vuLk75dRv
“Power out? No problem,” the tweet read, along with a hastily put-together image of an ad showing an Oreo and the terrific tag line, “You can still dunk in the dark.”
This was tweeted within minutes of the blackout and went viral. It has been re-tweeted over 15,000 times and has gotten more than 20,000 likes on Facebook. However, if it wasn’t for the brand’s almost instantaneous reaction, Oreo would have missed a major brand opportunity within their social networks and with their large fan base.
Citations: http://www.cnet.com/news/how-oreos-brilliant-blackout-tweet-won-the-super-bowl/
One of my favorite instances of a brand’s social media not being tied down by organizational bureaucracy was Oreo’s now famous Super Bowl tweet.
During the 2013 Super Bowl— in the middle of the live broadcast— the stadium’s lights went out. Players were pulled off the field, announcers stalled for time and fans around the world pulled out their smart phones.
Within minutes, Oreo tweeted this graphic: http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2013/2/3/22/enhanced-buzz-29415-1359947838-0.jpg
As the first topical response from a major brand, the tweet quickly gained more than 14,000 retweets.
The agency behind the tweet (360i) knew the importance of social media for big events like the Super Bowl and setup command post in their offices. They flew in the Oreo brand managers, foreseeing the value of quick responses to public events.
When the lights went down, the agency quickly came up with the concept, threw together the design, got the tweet approved by the brand managers and shared it with the world.
The agency president said this: “You need a brave brand to approve content that quickly. When all of the stakeholders come together so quickly, you’ve got magic.”
I think Business Insider underestimated the important principle, “PR people need to think how the readers perceive the message, but not how PR people convey the message.
Business Insider sought for making the title sound like interesting for readers to get more PV, but in this case, it must not have changed the meaning of the whole article so that the title did not mislead the readers. Business Insider might not have meant to mislead people, but the result tells us that the title actually mislead the readers. As a result, the readers doubted Business Insight.
Taking into consideration that that kind of intentional behavior can gain many viewers but it can also give a pad impression on them, Business Insider should not have done that.
That is truly insane to think of how much they prepare one single tweet, especially if we consider the fact that one of the principle of twitter is its spontaneity and the fact of posting “in live” !
I understand that it is essential for a company to be careful about what they post because if a bad tweet appears it will get viral but 45 days and 13 people seem really way too much to me!
It’s very true that speed is an important part of social media, and that in the end, it is a way to send out more raw, quick messages to followers. But social media is about creating value for people who see it, and for a company with a smart social media strategy, it makes a lot of sense that such a complex process goes into it. They also want to be careful not to make a big mistake and say the wrong thing, so I can absolutely see why they do all of this. If they put out the wrong message, it’s going to be very bad for the company. Because social media has so much potential downside along with arguably less upside, I’m not surprised by this at all. That said, it’s also doesn’t seem like it’s really accurate that it took 45 days to write the tweet. It does show that a lot of work has to go into it, but I think this article was a little sensationalized.
I agree with the majority of the comments, wherein 45 days to create a single tweet using a 13 man team sounds absurd and wasteful. Speed and relevance make or break a businesses social media reach. A company that is topical, ahead of their competition, and eloquent excels in the social media game.
I don’t think it is crazy for so much thought to be put into a tweet if it relates to a: (1) Planned Marketing promotion, (2) certain graphic or product release, or (3) CSR brand messages. The importance of brand value has become increasingly important over the years, and social media is being use to help facilitate the brand image. Here is a quick article on how social media companies can help to build brand image: http://businessnoteusa.com/?p=3635