The power of twitter…Birmingham Banksy

Twitter is like fire; exciting and can spread fast.  It is rapidly becoming a vital Marketing and PR tool with a lot of companies utilising it to give there brand a voice. Social media is winning the race marketers have been keeping there eye on: social media VS word of mouth. We have some social media none believers in the Big Cat office – here is an example of how wrong you are!!

Our Marketing and Digital Director Anthony Tattum was out and about in Birmingham when he stumbled across what he thought was a Banksy on a wall in the Jewellery Quarter…

Thinking that his followers would find this interesting, Anthony tweeted a Twitpic. This simple act resulted in a wave of retweets across Anthony’s 712 followers.  The next day a picture of the ‘Banksy’ appeared in the two top regional news papers Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail (no one can accuse the Birmingham Post & Mail journalists of not being on top of their twitter!!)  There was a photographer down on Henrietta Street within a few hours of the first tweet.

Even @banksynews responded to the tweet… Sadly the picture was a fake, but it is useful to demonstrate the power of twitter and the Birmingham online community.  Would things have moved so fast without Twitter? I don’t think so!

If your names not down, you’re not coming in

Important social media tools Twitter, Facebook and WordPress have been the centre of an ever-growing debate about brands online presence, leading to the million dollar question – ‘Should brands be on twitter’?

This question has been talked about cloak and dagger amongst the twittersphere and the marketing community for months now; cropping up on blog posts, tweets and more recently into the media with a feature about it on BBC Radio 4 this week.

One of the major factors in the debate is that brand tweets are lacking the personal touch. I think that is the point: at Big Cat, most of the team tweet about everyday life, work and general things of interest. We have built relationships, become part of the community and will continue to do so…. We also have @bigcatcomms which is the ‘faceless’ twitter account supporting this blog. We want the @bigcatcomms twitter account to engage in a different community than the personal staff accounts, @bigcatcomms will tweet only about PR to the people that want to listen!

What are your thoughts? My answer: YES companies should have brand presence online!  Social media is the new word of mouth, a way to engage a target audience. Companies utilising these tools are not doing any harm (as long as they don’t spam you).