Buzzgain

Its a well understood maxim that technology companies are the “early adopters” of most things new in technology. Used to be financial services and telecommunications were the flag bearers, but if you were developing any kind of software the first companies you’d go and knock on the door of were in New York or Silicon Valley. I started to analyze twitter in this same regard.  Who were the early adopters of Twitter from a corporate perspective (ignoring individual users for this discussion) and why were they adopting twitter.

SocialBrandIndex is one such directory of companies on twitter. So is Twellow. There are several uses of twitter from a corporate perspective. The biggest number (431) of companies that have a “presence” on twitter are media companies – this includes online media, newspapers, large blog networks and TV networks & movie studios. We track about 1900 companies (of which I think about 800 are fake or “hijacked” accounts on twitter.

The question I started out to answer was since twitter is such a social (as in people are needed to be social) site -

“Is it better for an individual to represent a company than for a company to have its profile as a iconed entity?”

What that means is that is would you rather have your questions answered by Mahalo OR by Jason? Its hard to disassociate a prominent individual from a company from the brand. At the same time, Lionel as your point person for all DELL is better than any DELL support is it not?

One of the main drivers for companies to adopt social media I think is to ensure that they show up as a company with real people instead of a faceless organization or “corporation”. Should they have not learned from the several bypass IVR cheat sheets on the web that customers want to talk to a real person?

What do you think? Would your rather follow someone that’s a real person or Comcast Cares even if you know there’s someone there to help?