If you are in business and are using your Twitter business account to flood your network with your latest conquest in Mafia Wars, then this post is for you.
I recently needed to hire a vendor for an event and had it down to two possible choices. I made initial contact with both via Twitter. The first vendor returned my tweet within the hour and had a meeting scheduled with me. The second vendor, not only did not make contact with me but he was an avid Mafia Wars player who flooded his Twitter stream with his latest conquests. I had made initial contact with both vendors about three weeks ago and to this day and never heard back from the second vendor. However he was still flooding my Twitter stream very diligently with his Mafia Wars victories. So you might ask, who got my business? I think you know the answer.
If you are in business and are using your Twitter account for business purposes, playing Mafia Wars and ignoring potential clients may cost you business. It did in this case. For those of thinking that it’s no big deal because it’s only Twitter, it is a VERY BIG deal when you are using your Twitter account to advertise your business. You never know when a potential client will make professional contact via Twitter. Using your business account to flood your network with Mafia Wars or other internet games not only looks unprofessional and makes you lose your credibility but it also can lose you potential clients. Lesson learned; save Mafia Wars for your personal account or else it just might cost you.
You have highlighted what I believe is something that is about to become a hot topic within social media. That is the separation of your business life from your personal life. Not just should you do it or shouldn’t you do it but how much. Have you come across James Governor? We were having Christmas drinks back in 2005 and he introduced me to a concept called Declarative Living. I think you get the point, but back then social media sites tended to be split quite definitely between business and personal personas. Then along came Facebook and everything changed.
As a digital marketing agency, Interactive Mix (and therefore me) take the view that we should be practicing what we preach and therefore on the leading edge wherever we can but you are absolutely right that what I do in public can affect how customers see me professionally. Plus of course there are only so many people in the world who are remotely interested in how much vodka I consumed in an evening. Declarative Living is a responsibility not a right.
Our solution was to think of social media as a series of channels and circuses (just like a London street map). Channels are places where the outside world encounters our social media activity and circuses are places where this activity converges. Using this method allows me to operate single entities and keeping the professional activity amongst professional contacts and the personal activity amongst personal contacts. This is because we channel the activity from one place to another and take care to ensure that the traffic stays in the direction that meets our overall digital marketing strategy.
We should also be posting some blog posts soon on this subject. If you are interested I can leave a comment when it is finished so you can see a bit more detail.
Thanks for the post and the opportunity to respond
Hi Aaron, thank you for your comments and feedback! I really appreciate them. It sounds like we are on the same page with this topic. Unfortunately I am seeing it more and more with businesses and it affected me personally and in turn impacted the business by losing a client. Unfortunately I have similar experiences/stories that will make their way into this blog, so stay tuned. Once I have more content published, I will share the blog posts on Twitter in hopes to get more feedback from my network. I am definitely interested in your blog posts. Do, let me know when it is finished either here or via DM on Twitter.
Hi Monica. Thanks for the reply. I’m sorry t hear that you were impacted adversely by this kind of thing. Declarative Living is sometimes a difficult concept for business to cope with because instead of hiding things about ourselves, which was the norm a few decades ago, it puts everything up there warts and all. The argument of course is that if everyone is doing this then everyone’s warts are on show (and let’s face it we all have done things that remove any and all sense of cool from our personas). The point though is that if you or I want to find out about each other it’s actually incredibly easy to do so, and so instead of hiding it why not put it on display (and then channel it through to an area where it can be monopolised). The point about broadcasting your mafia wars achievements is well made though and may very well have some screaming ‘get-a-life!’.
I don’t think you would have the same response to relating your recipe for green chicken Thai curry or if you extolled the virtues of a particular bottle of Fleurie, and so it is horses for courses.
If you didn’t find the RSS feed for the blog it’s http://www.interactive-mix.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2
Then you will see each post as it is posted. I try to post every day but not more than once a day. Once your site is optimised you can leap up the Google rankings for the subjects you are writing about but you want your content to spread as far as possible. It’s very tempting to splurge everything up at once but slow and steady gives the best distribution of traffic. Best of luck with the blog and keep the thoughts coming!
I just signed up for your RSS feed and newsletter. I look forward to reading them. I plan on getting hosting for the site and it’s own domain. I was just hoping to get a feel for blogging in general and using wordpress first. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions so I know I will always have something to write about.