How CoTweet is helping the Spyder Trap Team with collaboration

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July 8, 2009 | BY Brad Wellman
  


Brad Wellman
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

Perhaps one of the best tools I have found to enable multiple people in an organization to tweet through a single branded Twitter account is CoTweet.

We were fortunate enough to kick the tires on CoTweet, and although it is still in private beta form, it seems to be a pretty solid platform for internal collaboration and brand management. We have found that it is a breeze to schedule posts, track conversations, assign, delegate and create follow-up tasks.

One question that came to my mind initially was, “Why should I use CoTweet when I can simply just share my Twitter login information with multiple people within my organization?”

Well, you certainly can do that, if you want each of those individuals to have unrestricted access to all your Twitter account settings. By using CoTweet, you can enable multiple people to contribute to the voice of your Twitter account, but restrict their ability to make changes to it, including the ability to delete the it.

One of the nifty features CoTweet offers is the ability to assign someone as “OnDuty.” This provides you with notifications when new direct messages and @replies are received. The benefit of this is so you can have one person at a time monitoring the Twitter stream and replying to comments, while subsequently avoiding multiple people within your organization responding to the same message. Conversely, this is beneficial because it helps prevent having nobody respond to a message because it was overlooked, or because ‘Person A’ thought ‘Person B’ already responded to a message, when in fact they hadn’t.

The real benefit CoTweet offers is the ability to allow many different people to contribute to the voice of your agency. This offers fresh perspectives, insights, and for multiple people across different facets of your organization to talk about their specialties, which definitely helps showcase different capabilities your organization can provide.

What are your thoughts? If you’re already using CoTweet, what is your reaction to it? If not, is CoTweet something you might want to use for your organization?

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  • http://localmn.wordpress.com paul jahn

    Good stuff Brad. I haven’t even heard of CoTweet until I read this post. You and I probably had the same initial thoughts with “why would I use this when I can just share login info”.

    I like how you guys are using it. It’s easy to tell when the messages are coming from you, Mike, Jason or Glenn and can see the different personalities. If a company used it with 50 assigned users, it would be too much of an overload for me. My two cents.

  • http://www.twitter.com/bradwellman Brad Wellman

    Thanks for the comment Paul.

    I agree with you completely that it might be a little too much of an overload if there were dozens of assigned users to it for one brand. That’s why its good to find a nice balance where you have more than one person (to get different ideas, viewpoints, and personalities) but not too many people so your followers are struggling to figure out who said what…

    From what I’ve seen, a lot of the companies using it are keeping the number of people assigned to it relatively low, like @MSWindows, @CoTweet, and @TwitterAPI to name a few. I like how they (and us) are showing who sends each tweet. Larger organizations such as @ford, @cocacola and @pepsi aren’t using CoTags (CoTweet signatures) to identify a particular tweeter, but obviously use it for collaboration in managing the Twitter account.