Wednesday, 21 January 2009

Brands in Social Media

This morning I was added on Twitter by millercoors. My first thought, because it helps me clarify how brands should behave in social media was, what would that mean if I was on the program with Alcoholics Anonymous?


It's a good question because I didn't invite Miller Coors and I think any alcohol brand that wants to engage in social media should think about this. The broadcast model also tries to play as fair as possible by not advertising at certain times and avoiding the use of young and sexy people in their communications. Miller Coors didn't do any of this, they added me because they thought I was an interesting person..... So they say.


In any case, given that no attempt at dialogue was made, my first tweet was as follows:




To which Miller Coors (or Tyler as I later learned) responded with the tweet at the bottom of this screenshot.





I thought the idea of being dragged around by a beer wasn't funny and I made that clear. But Miller Coors, or Tyler made a Tweet that he deleted pretty quickly. Fortunately I have a Tweetdeck screen grab for you. Here it is.





Now I don't know if Tyler really is the social media representative for Miller Coors but I think it goes without saying that for a person who had been on Twitter for all of five minutes that it might have been a good idea to learn the rules of engagement. Particularly this post over here that I wrote a few months back and which contributed towards Gavin's best practices in social media.


I'll leave it to you to work out what the implications of all this are, but I do like to learn from experiences, and so this is what mattered most once Miller Coors had really stepped over the line.





You can read my full responses over here in sequential order but I think the most important point to understand is that Tyler has deleted his account. Now all I need to know is did Miller Coors hire him or was he pretending to be a beer all on his own? Can anyone help?