Twitter brand smackdown: The winners and losers

Rodney Rumford
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Social Media Posted on June 01, 2009

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Automotive

Ford vs. Nissan

Ford has a clearly defined Twitter presence that handles brand and reputation management for the company. In short, the company listens and responds quite well. It shares news, product information, and points to resources, news items, blog posts, etc. Ford has also segmented its presence into multiple accounts (seven, to be exact), including handles such as fordtrucks, fordmustang, and forddrivegreen. The company's social media manager has a Twitter account that is used for both listening and interacting. Ford has presented itself very transparently on Twitter for quite some time, and overall, the company has done a good job in its execution.

When it comes to Nissan, we could only locate one Nissan account -- NissanCube -- and its updates are nominal. The company is failing to interact at all with its audience. Rather, it uses Twitter as a broadcast channel. Notably, there is no way to find the company's Twitter presence from its website.

The automotive industry is hurting across the board. Interacting and extending their brands via Twitter is a fiscally smart move that all automotive players should be embracing.

The winner: Ford

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healthy energy June 2, 2009 at 11:15 AM

Social media is almost intoxication. Twitter & consumers are looking for the wave of the future opportunity, with this new economy, and the new economy is going forward for upstart companies to find the people and resources they need. To learn more continue to http://energydrinkclub.blogspot.com

Mark Mulholland June 1, 2009 at 2:06 PM

Here is an effective social media (twitter, facebook, blog) strategy used by Nissan for the launch of their new Cube car in Canada. Rather that using a Nissan corporate twitter account to engage the market in conversation, they gave the job to 500 creative individuals identified as influencers http://tr.im/n3Zu .

Jeffrey Levin June 1, 2009 at 12:15 PM

I love your articles and share them with my Tweets.

Rodney Rumford June 1, 2009 at 11:43 AM

Craig. Thanks for the kind words. There customer support at twitter does need to improve but they do a pretty good job of using getsatisfaction. If you have a hijacked brand/trademark contact them and they will help you regain control of it's use.

Scott,
While there is some strong anecdotal evidence that twitter does in fact move the meter in the areas of brand perception and customer satisfaction; hard numbers will follow. I would strongly disagree that companies are "losing their shorts" by engaging on twitter. The costs for using it for support/service can actually be quite efficient if it is incorporated into the business process properly.

I would think that hard numbers will be forthcoming in case studies in the future.

Scott Hetherington June 1, 2009 at 11:33 AM

Interesting article and a good read...however, it completely ignores the bottomline. Sure, Ford, Zappos, Starbucks, etc. are using Twitter in what you and I both believe to be the correct way, a way to open a positive dialog with their customers, but...and this is a big but...

How is it effecting their bottomline? Are they creating more loyal customers? If so, is it enough to make up for the expense of being so active on social networks? These companies may be "doing it right", but they may also be losing their shorts. Without this information, it's impossible to say who's the winner and who's the loser.

Craig Peters June 1, 2009 at 9:08 AM

Good stuff, Rodney, but there's a very crucial issue missing from the mix: Sometimes the brand smackdown comes from Twitter itself.

As I posted to my blog yesterday (shameless plug: http://www.lohad.com/?p=3489), a brand's presence on Twitter can be hacked, and a month of emails to Twitter to correct the issue may go completely ignored. The result: the brand's social media strategy is obliterated.

As we learned at TWTRCON 09 yesterday, Twitter has precisely 45 employees -- which explains why their customer service is *ahem* subpar at the moment.

Twitter has a valuation of $250 million and has raised $57 million to date. They need to spend a few bucks on some real customer service before brands can be confident that their Twitter presence will be a stable one.