Personal Branding: An Employer’s Guide to Crafting Twitter Policy

There’s no question that Twitter is quickly becoming an essential tool for business promotion. Top bloggers are building their audience on Twitter. Reporters and editors are mining their tweeps (twitter peeps) for tips and breaking news.

Take a look at the picture in the top right of this post. Those are the top referring URLs to Web Community Forum today. After direct traffic, it’s number four on the list. Fred Wilson recently showed a similar breakdown for his blog A VC.

As a business, the question is obvious: How do you build your business brand on Twitter?

Can group Twitter accounts work?

So far the verdict is: maybe.

Twitter is designed as an individual medium - it doesn’t make much sense for any one person to have more than one @name.

Unfortunately, raw Twitter feeds that do nothing but spew blog links are pretty boring, and very few people will put up with it. So if you have a company Twitter feed like we do, you should have at least one human attached to it.

The idea is for the company to have its own presence on Twitter so that it gets some direct brand benefit instead of the indirect (but tangible) benefits that come from having your employees on Twitter.

The inconveniences are obvious, of course: you can’t be linked up to two twitter accounts with your cell phone, and I don’t think you can have more than one cell phone linked to any one twitter account anyway.

Pretty much the only way to contribute to the group account is from the web interface—which isn’t the end of the world, of course. It’s just annoying.

This is an experiment in progress. I’m sucking an extra four character off all of my tweets on the joint account by appending them with “(JP)” so that people know which human is responsible. I assume we’ll get feedback from others along the way.

Marketing is about relationships

Growing your business with social media tools means building relationships. We’ve been saying that since 2004, and it’s a true now as it was then (maybe more so).

From an employer’s perspective, there’s a certain amount of give and take with this. Your employees will be building their personal brand at the same time they’re building yours. That’s because people on Twitter have to be conversing with real people (or fake people, I guess) instead of some nondescript corporate entity.

In other words, your business brand is going to get more from enthusiastic and active employees tweeting about their work than you are from having an impersonal corporate account.

The problem is that Twitter users tend to come in two camps: those who think 80% of all tweets are “noise” and wish it would go away, and those who think twitter would be boring without it.

I fall into the second camp. Twitter is about getting a running snapshot of the people that you are following, and each new tweet as an opportunity to connect with them.

I would be very tempted to un-follow people who only tweeted about “serious” things. I want to know that your back hurts, I want to know that you’re grabbing lunch at the Quiznos in Redmond, because these are all bits and pieces of who you are, and that’s what I love about Twitter.

So what makes a good corporate Twitter policy?

The best case scenario for brand building is to have one person own the company brand Twitter account. Often this is the founder or CEO or ombudsman of the company.

Coming up with a good Twitter policy and plan of action really depends on what your company does and how that fits in with Twitter. That said, I think there are some ground rules that make sense for most businesses out there.

If an employee has a personal Twitter account and they plan to tweet while at work, then:

1. Employees are required to display the company logo on their background (like I’ve done voluntarily).
2. At least 20% of those tweets should relate to work. It makes sense, because work had better be “what they are doing.”
3. Employees should be encouraged (but not required) to @tweet the company branded twitter account at least once per week.

Beyond that, I think it’s poor policy to ban at-work tweeting. If your employees are already on Twitter, it’s going to make them resent you and it’s going to lower their presence on Twitter.

Even if their tweets aren’t directly about work, your brand does get some benefit from that, and it’s probably not worth the friction with your employees, given how Twitter takes up comparatively little time.

Of course, I’m hardly the end-all be-all when it comes to Twitter policy. Am I making sense here? I’d love to have everyone’s thoughts on this.

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