ConnectTweet is a simple utility built under the concept [reality in my opinion] that all groups, companies or brands are just collections of many people whose passion, ideas and behavior completely shape it. Often those people’s voices are drowned out in communications by a need to feel “official” instead making it feel robotic, monochromatic and cold… this is especially evident as companies are showing up in social mediums like Twitter where forced news releases and push marketing stick out like a sore thumb.
There needs to be a better way for a company to be represented on Twitter by many passionate people on the inside versus a robot or a single voice.
Making it happen with ConnectTweet
ConnectTweet flips that equation for groups and lets the real people all across your organization to show through on Twitter and be your voice. They can have real, human conversations with customers and share their unique perspectives and passion for their work as people at the front lines of your organization. This unique transparency shows the vibrancy that networks like Twitter have is inside your organization it’s just waiting to be shown the light of day.
First, you need to find and tap the passionates… the people all over your organization many of whom may already use tools like Twitter for their own uses, ask them to be your voice, to share openly their perspectives, interesting tidbits (guarantee you will learn something too) and to answer other users questions about the company on Twitter tagging each of their company posts with #companyname.
ConnectTweet can be then setup to gather up the tweets from the approved users and post them to your organization’s Twitter account allowing your followers to clearly see the human voices on the inside and give your organization that true human interface your customer always wanted to see.
A simple example
Below ConnectTweet has posted to the Twitter account of one of my tools a message I relayed from my personal account to let the tool’s approximately 1000 followers know about something cool that just happened. I simply posted this to my account, and the below tweet appeared in @retweetradar‘s stream. If ten people worked for retweetradar.com they all could do the same thing creating an organic stream of information about the site right from the people on the front lines.
ConnectTweet is in a limited Alpha test but I would love to hear if you’d find it useful and would be interested in trying it out.
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This is very useful for SIGs. I help run our local Dorkbot clone and would love to be able to group retweets from members of the local (or global!) Dorkbot community without having to (mis)use hashtags to aggregate identity.
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What I’m not getting is how much different this would be than just tracking the conversations using hashtags.org – I do understand that a software tool would do it at a higher standard. I like your reasoning and thought process. Do keep me updated. http://twitter.com/jonlyles and http://big-chi.mp/
Hey Jon,
Thanks for the comment. The intent here is that the conversations tagged be posted to the main account say @yourcompany rather than just be a conversation out in the ether that can only be found by search.twitter.com. This would allow less savvy people (e.g. mainstream users) interested in @yourcompany to follow it and actually see all the chatter between your internal employees who I believe shape the company. I will think more about the feedback and how I could make the idea or execution better.
Thanks,
-Ben
What you are proposing then reminds me of the twitter feeds of the election or democratic nomination where a special page updating with all comments relating to the election.
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I’m a bit new to Twitter, but I am fully aware of it’s vast potential. I am trying to create a type of forum for my school where help can be sought and offered. I want posts to show up on the main twitter page (as in, @yourcompany), but I am looking for a way to limit tweets that show up on the main page to only include school related information. Of course if the school’s page follows the student pages, all the personal tweets will show up on the school page, cluttering it up.
It sounds like ConnectTweet may be the solution I’m looking for. Do you think it does what I am trying to do? Basically, it sounds like with your app, the students could send school related tweets that would show up on the student page, only after they tag the tweet with a certain code. Is this correct? And all other basic tweets would not be displayed? If so, that’s what I’m looking for.
If not, can you recommend any other apps that do this?
Thanks!
Alex
Hey,
This looks really interesting. Can you tell what language this is programmed with? Also is this similar to helpwith at tweetapp.com? If so I got a really great Idea to create a site that uses the same thing. Could you describe this with a little more detail?
I like the idea of ConnecTweet. I would also like to see a way of tweeting within a company without having the tweets be visible outside. Could be a useful tool to collect diverse opinions among employees on a tool they are increasingly use during the day.
I’d really like to get involved in using your application, either in this planning phase or in the rollout. Thanks
This sounds very much like another tool: http://grouptweet.com/ what will be different with this one?
Lisa-Marie,
First I had never seen grouptweet.com but here are the differences I see… When ConnectTweet combines your employee’s voices on Twitter it adds links to their account to every Tweet this allows people to discover the people that make up your organization – so not just a utility for connection but for finding underlying connections. Tactically ConnectTweet does not use direct messages and is always public. It might be worth checking out some live examples of ConnectTweet in action either http://twitter.com/googlers or http://twitter.com/sprint
Thanks for asking,
-Ben
Howdy;
Some greets from Germany .
Sounds great – So keep me update too, if its possible
-> twitter.com/pierro
Ben, found this service via @jowyang’s tweets today. You are on to something very awesome. Would love to experiment with this service for my company and/or our clients. Happy to provide feedback, add engineering value, etc. DM if interested – @joconnell
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Ben,
I have a twitter page but am looking for an easy way to have multiple devices updating my one page, as yet Twitter have come up blank and i stumbled upon your page.
The reason i want the multiple updaters is for during the sports season we can provide a score updating page, but obviously it wont always be the same person at the game sending updates.
Cheers
Tim
Any updates or news about it ????
salut
This is very interesting. Any news on when there will be a public beta test?
Ben
The tool sounds very interesting. When can I try it out?
regards
Kinshuk
I love it. Exactly what I’m looking for. When will it be available?
Hi,
we are looking for right the tool, your are working on..
Sou can you see, when it works, or can we try it in e betabeta?
Would be great, to get e short feedback!
best wishes from Germany
team DB Quality
Hi Ben! ConnectTweet was mentioned at the Social Recruiting Summit in June and sounds like it would be a great resource for our recruiting team at Yellowbook. Do you think we could schedule a time to discuss in more detail? I know it is still in test mode, but we are very interested to try it! Thanks!
Hi Ben – We’d like to use connecttweet for our internal corporate recruiting team. Can you please advise on how to implement?
Kind regards, Brooke Willey, AVP – Corporate Staffing, Yellowbook
brooke.willey@yellowbook.com or direct at 319/790-3599
I think that ConnectTweet was mentioned specifically for social networking sites and it sounds a great source for me.
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This is very interesting
We are a part of Public Radio and are interested in partaking in your Alpha release.
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Looks like a great idea! Can’t wait to try it out.
This sounds great, Ben. Its a “classical” problem in our organization. Is the Alpha version available for trial and where could I grab it?
GREAT….NICE…..>ONE…..>LIKE….>>IT……….
Couldn�t be written any better. Reading this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!
This is a really great idea. I’m the editor of an lifestyle magazine. My writers and I collectively use CoTweet for our magazine, but have to go to CT’s site to post to the company Twitter account. It’s very important to me that there be a person behind the company tweets, but it’s sometimes hard to get the writers to take that extra step. It would be great to productivity and user trends if they could simply post to our company account by adding a #tag to a tweet on their personal account. Thus removing the extra step.
How does one apply for a alpha or beta account?
ConnectTweet can be set to collect tweets by authorized users and sends them to the organizations Twitter account to see clearly that the followers of voices from within the organization and allow true interaction between the customer has always wanted to see.