Twitter and the uncensored voice

We’ve reached March and this signifies the start of the Formula One racing season. We are proud to say that Williams F1 is one of our longest standing clients, a Great British racing team with a web-savvy marketing team to back them up. Williams really understand the value of digital, which is why we’ve worked so well with them for so long. To help kick the season off with a bang, last week we helped Williams launch the team’s new racing livery and present the new FW33 via a Live Broadcast on the website.

As this was quite a high profile event with the watchful eyes of the media and eagerly awaiting fans, it seemed appropriate that we got the conversation going and therefore implemented a live Twitter feed for all tweets mentioning @WilliamsF1Team / #williamsf1 on the homepage along with the Live Broadcast.

Twitter has come on leaps and bounds in a very short timeframe and gone are the days where simple announcements compelled users to tell the world what they’d eaten for breakfast that day. Since then with many companies seeing the value in what Twitter could potentially provide, Twitter became much more than a micro-blogging tool as companies started using it as the main tool to connect and interact with their customers, or in Williams’ case - the fans.

One of the ideas I love about Twitter is also the one aspect that makes me most nervous when using this tool for business and that is the uncensored voice.

We took a bold move in the way that we implemented the live Twitter feed for Williams recently. However, it was the immediacy of the conversation that was compelling, as we showed live mentions to capture and publish the instant reactions of the fans. The real opinions and gave the fans the chance to air their views in such a prime position of the website being viewed by over 30,000 people simultaneously. The reaction was amazing, generating 400+ tweets within a space of 40 minutes and meant that Williams was trending on Twitter for the time that the broadcast was taking place.

With this simple inclusion of such a powerful tool such as Twitter, what would have been a run of the mill broadcast was transformed into a global social media event as users quickly realized their voices were contributing to a larger conversation.

Embrace it and bare all

Naturally not everyone had something positive to say about the new car design, but I’m of the opinion that if you’re letting users speak, bear all and show the rough with the smooth – it makes it far more real and the users appreciate that. Organisations can get too tied up in managing their reputation online, filtering negative tweets to skew the result and ultimately missing the point of social media interaction.

blog comments powered by Disqus