@megganlea: Can you tweet to success?

As one who has been skeptical of Twitter from the beginning, and still hasn't joined the ranks , I was curious to know the effectiveness and business value of the new hip social media site. I realize it allows you to connect to your customers in a different way, but is it just a fad that has no longevity?  It even seems to almost overshadow reliable news sources and can tend to be a gossipy celebrity site that lacks validity.  Two of the top tweets this week according to billboard.com were:

	@ladygaga : lady gaga + steven klein= une Pièce de résistance. Alejandro.
	@justinbieber : ladies calm down. @kimkardashian is a friend. a very sexy friend but a friend. no need 4 threats. Let's all be friends and hang out often ;)

Interesting facts, I know. I decided to research top ways companies use Twitter to find out the effectiveness of this new popular site.  I found an interesting article on Readwriteweb.com that delivered the following findings:

1. Directly:  Businesses are using Twitter more and more as a marketing and PR channel.  Here companies "tweet" announcements, promotions, accomplishments and attach links  back to their Web page or another promotional site. Since this is the premise of our class it will be interesting to learn more about this method in the following weeks.  This way tends to be the easiest and most common. An example by Carnival Cruise lines is below:

2. Indirectly:  Some companies allow their employees to tweet.  This seems rather dangerous to me but I can also understand it could bring with it some perks.  Positive tweets by an employee about new products, services, promotions and industry developments can promote positive feelings about the company.  However, you can't control everything if you give your employees liberty to tweet freely regarding work and their company and could do negative damage.  An example by an employee of Chevrolet is below:

3.  Internally:  Some companies use Twitter to communicate internally by sharing thoughts and ideas and discuss current projects.  If information is guaranteed confidential, this could be a great tool to communicate internally with fellow employees and boost employee moral, but I see it as being rather dangerous.  If confidential information is leaked, it could be detrimental to a company.

4.  Inbound signaling: Rather than being a Twitter participant, some companies just "listen."  If you want to keep track about what people are saying about your brand, company or industry, you can use  search twitter as we learned this week in our lectures to keep track.  I personally think this use of Twitter to be the most effective.  You can't take everything you hear or see on Twitter to be reliable or truthful, but this medium could help you to learn what customers like and don't like about your product, service or company and could be an effective research tool.

The way I see it, Twitter can serve multiple purposes that hold both advantages and disadvantages. It can be a very self-serving, self-promoting site that allows someone like you and me to share irrelevant information.  It can be used by companies to promote and strengthen both customer loyalty and employee morale and it can also be a companies eyes into the world and their customers opinions.  However, each of these uses can open the door for negative criticism and PR disasters.  So I think my conclusion as of now would be: Twitter is great for some companies, and not so great for others. It is up to your company and industry to figure out which side of the argument you reside. If that is on the Twitter side, you then must decide which model is the most effective way to manage your time on the site.