Don't entrust your Twitter to twits

(First published in Creative Review)

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/may/ad-agencies-on-twitter-the-rights-and-wrongs

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. (51 characters)

 Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. (65 characters)

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. (48 characters)

Yes, Oscar Wilde would have been a demon on Twitter.

 Tapping away on his smartphone as he languished in Reading Gaol.

 Followers; 1 million Following; 0

 No coincidence that his number one devotee, Stephen Fry, also enjoys a huge Twitter fanbase.

 They are both witty. They are both bright. They know how to write.

 But they know/knew how to write long format. You know, books and stuff.

 Writing pithy, concise, entertaining, provocative, inspiring bon mots which people quote as they did in Oscar’s day and RT as they do in Stephen’s time is not achieved without a bit of application.

 Brevity takes time.

 So why do so many companies assign their Twitter feed to the intern, the most junior member of the marketing team or in the worst cases, the linguistically challenged?

 Hence the proliferation of crass utterances – ‘we’re having Cake Friday!’ or ‘take a look at our new reception, Coolio!’ – where tweets become desperate cries through the bars of the office walls to portray the company as ‘fun’ or ‘dynamic’.

 Alternatively tweets become dry and dusty PR punts to promote the latest achievements. Look what we’ve done. Look what we’ve won. Well, woop di doop.

 What your company is like or what it has achieved is something to be rightfully proud of and worth shouting from the highest laptops.

 But how you tell people says even more about you.

 Tone of voice may be an archaic phrase but it’s still an art.

 And nowhere is it more important than Social Media.

 Words are a tricky clay to work with and if you want your company to be seen or read in a favourable light you need someone who knows what they are doing.

 So why entrust it to anyone other than someone who understands the dynamics, the cadences, the nuances which are involved in constructing the perfectly engineered sentence.

 Not every tweet has to be a pearl.

 But if you are tweeting on behalf of a company and that company claims to have a point of view or point of difference, then at the very least the words should be well chosen.

As should be the person who tweets them.

 Admittedly not many companies employ an Oscar Wilde. Given his dilettante nature, you probably wouldn’t employ him anyway. And HR would have a fit.

 But there are plenty of writers out there who are fluent in syntax.

 A century before it even existed, Oscar understood Social Media.

 There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’  (80 characters)