Twitter as a means of corporate communication

For a long time the Twitter hype is forcing Companyswho want to be where their customers and potential Employees are, to that, the medium in their Marketing– and to integrate communication strategy. Only: Many do not really know how.

Pure self-adulation ...

So they somehow want to join in the chirping chorus, because that's the way it's done these days, and then blow irrelevant advertising messages into them Welt, because after all, you want your product or service merchandise.

Best example of such a misguided one Strategy: Lufthansa. While American airlines such as Delta Airlines already handle their customer service via Twitter, the German airline simply lets a service provider blow out cheap flight offers via Twitter.

Example airlines

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An experience report on the tweeting customer service of Delta Airlines is available here:

Inquiries via Twitter, however, remain unanswered - so none can be said to be of a real dialogue with the customers Rede be. The fact that Lufthansa still has almost 10.000 followers is only because many people are hoping to get a cheap flight here - and with the same stinginess-is-cool-Motivation, with which they also have a price comparison search engine in the Internet would use.

Real interest in the company - no result! If the bargains fail at some point, the followers go to competition. A one-way street with an expiration date.

… Vs. communication

"Companies that use Twitter only to spread advertising messages have no idea about the possibilities," say Jan Kirchner and Alexander Fedossov, who are among the pioneers of German social mediaRecruiting-Scene belong. For the two of them, Twitter is much more than just a marketing tool: "It's about offering your followers added value by posting interesting information," explains Kirchner. This is exactly why he finds Twitter ideal for obtaining information: "I can filter out what is relevant from the news, for example by only following certain people, creating lists or searching for specific terms."

Systematic staff search with Twitter

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Kirchner and Fedossov, HR consultants from Hamburg, have long thought further about the possible uses of Twitter: They were the first to systematically use Twitter to search for personnel and dedicated a separate chapter to the topic in their recently published book on Online-Recruiting: "When we started blogging about it, a lot of people thought we were crazy," says Kirchner, "because before, people only thought of e-recruiting as job boards and application forms on websites.

Twitter is ideal for recruiting!” The reason: companies that only advertise jobs on their own website or in closed job exchanges only reach a limited target group. Jobs Twitter, on the other hand, is found much better by search engines. In order to be able to find out relevant job results even better, Kirchner and Fedossov developed jobtweet.de, the world's first job search engine for Twitter, which uses semantic filter techniques to search through all tweets for job offers in real time. One Ideawho even gave them the award “Founders of the month” in the Financial Times earned.

Companies have to learn criticism

One important point here, however, is that companies have to learn, publicly and internally Criticism and be willing to engage in open dialogue. You would have to become more flexible.

And they have to accept that customers and employees are playing an increasingly important role.

Fear of losing control

This is probably not what companies and company bosses generally want. 'Cause they gotta use some of their power that way Control and give up security. But the social web forces them to do so.

Deutsche Bahn recently demonstrated that this openness can also lead to people leaving the planned path and having to rethink spontaneously: In a Twittsoap, they regularly had imaginary employees report about their everyday work at the Deutsche Bahn in order to encourage school leavers for a Vocational Training to be interested in the group.

Well meant is not always good!

What they apparently thought was a nice idea at Deutsche Bahn, however, was badly received by the community: Because, according to the criticism, Twitter is about them Communication with real ones People and thus an authenticity that cannot be achieved by the superimposed language of the two artificial figures. Or in other words: the followers felt they had been taken for a fool and expressed this in correspondingly harsh, sometimes unjustified criticism.

Apart from the fact that the Deutsche Bahn itself is one of the companies that per se criticize, no matter what it does:

It is about the kind of communication

That this criticism is not really about the art figures themselves, but about the kind of communication becomes clear when looking at the counter-example Alma Mater: The Stuttgart-based personal consultancy has created as a social media mascot the little comic ants Almameise, the cheerful and charmingly tied through the area, but providing meaningful information and always in dialogue with other users.

On the other hand, according to the criticism in the net, the experiences of the DB characters were freely invented, a dialogue with the followers is hardly taking place and the somewhat childish-naive language style is not appropriate to the target group on Twitter.

Sovereign publicly responded to the criticism

Robindro Ullah, who is responsible for university marketing at Deutsche Bahn, also acknowledged this publicly: “Getting the right tone in the speech is probably the most difficult thing here. We assume that the language of the desired target group is different from that of the people currently represented on Twitter. Nevertheless, we were guided by the target group of our choice, ”he wrote in his commentary on the critical blog post, which is unfortunately no longer available.

But he also did it clear, which intentions the personnel marketing of Deutsche Bahn had with the Twittsoap: It is to be understood as an experiment through which the group wants to explore possibilities of Twitter to improve its bad image: “Is that even a viable way? Is it accepted by users? Is the approach correct? These are Askthat keep us busy, which is why such blog posts are also very helpful. Thank you for that!” Ullah concludes with his sovereign comment on the not exactly sensitive criticism.

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