Coke and McDonald's sign up to CoTweet

by Staff, revolutionmagazine.com 09-Nov-09, 14:30

LONDON - Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Microsoft are among the brands that have signed up to use the services of a new company offering to manage brands on Twitter.

CoTweet said the brands has signed up along with Ford, Whole Foods and others to its CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Programme.

The programme provides analytics of how far Twitter messages are reaching, click-through rates on links and can report on different message types, such as direct messages, replies and mentions, as well as the most active users.

The idea is to help companies manage their brands on Twitter, with customers paying $1,500 a month for the service. For this, companies get access to a tailored set of tools as well as an account manager to provide analysis, product support and training. The company has a partnership with bit.ly, the URL shortening site, to provide analytics as to who is clicking through on links.

Jesse Engle, chief executive of CoTweet, said: "Companies must monitor their brands, provide customer service and measure the impact of outbound marketing."

Earlier this year CoTweet revealed it had raise $1.1 million in funding from the likes of Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

Comments

Mark Palmer - 09/11/2009

According to Paul Furlong it takes 20 years to build a brand and 130 characters to kill it. Kety to this is not the numbers the ability to sensibly manage the sentiment and react to the issues that follow. However, Co Tweet works the relationship with the client must be very close.

Lars Tong Strömberg - 09/11/2009

"Social media customer service" here it comes... Very good points Mark. Definitely needs to be a very tight and very quick integration with the customers for a service like this that monitor real-time conversations. Smart B2B idea overall though from CoTweets. Helping companies manage their brands on Twitter is clearly an underdeveloped market.

Nigel Cooper - 10/11/2009

This is interesting - agencies have been offering this service to brands for a while, but very interested to see if this works. It's hard to replace in-house community managers, so as Mark says, you'd need an incredibly close client bond. My agency has managed Twitter profiles for some clients - but by far the most effective model we've found is where we research and map communities and feed ongoing insight to an in-house community manager to help them to effectively engage.