Should businesses tweet, or twit ?

What does a business do with social media ? While a trillion words have been written on this subject, not much light has been shone, I submit. Businesses are still struggling with what to do. Take the example of Twitter.

I will straightaway confess that I am not a fan of Twitter. I don’t tweet (the more appropriate phrase should be “twit”, but because of the unfortunate connotations of that word, we’ll let it pass). But I dodged my Net Nanny ( no surprises, its blocked here) to look at what business leaders and businesses are doing here.

Here are some actual tweets (admittedly I was selective about what I picked)

Richard Branson (Virgin)

* Looking forward to the cricket today; Come on England
* I do love Monaco this time of the year. The Prince is such a gracious host to the world of sport

Jack Welch (needs no intro)

* Kennedy celebration of life was impressive
* Beckett has had a brutal scary week – 8 home runs

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook – I thought he should know a thing or two about social media)

* So many interesting people are following me. I think I’ll follow some of you guys as well.
* Playing with TweetDeck. Its pretty neat.

Evan Williams (CEO Twitter ; the man himself)

* There’s a crapload of people in my backyard.
* Normally I love Mondays

I gave up. Do I have to read this inanity ? Maybe I should go to company tweets ; that might be a better representation of what businesses are doing with Twitter.

PepsiCo

* If you’re interested in hearing a rebroadcast of our 3Q earnings call, click here.
* Hope everyone is enjoying their Friday

GlaxoSmithkline

* GSK US Blog post. The Bloggers are coming. The Bloggers are coming.
* Yay. Great news. Spotted random people in Phila sneezing into their elbows or sleeves today. Message must be getting out there

Google (well over a million followers)

*“Sex, Conference Calls, outdated FCC rules” & our take on Google Voice
* Gmail team’s good advice on how to create secure passwords at …….

Reasonable conclusion – Businesses don’t have a clue as to what to do with Twitter.

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