As a part of bringing ‘social’ to my blog today I am hosting my first guest blogger. My first guest blogger is Marcus Schmidt, Windows Community Manager. Marcus is a member of our Twitter outreach team and below he talks about how we use CoTweet on our twitter accounts @MSWindows or @windowslive. Here is the post in Marcus’s words.
We’ve introduced a program called CoTweet (in limited private beta), shown in the illustration below:
It enables multiple people to collaborate and manage one twitter account. Some of the things the Windows Social Media Team has found useful about CoTweet include:
- Shown above, you’ll see the easy to manage inbox of @replies and direct messages (DMs). Managing these is critical as these are the conversations your customers want to initiate with you.
- CoTweet also keeps track of who responded to different @’s and DMs. This helps make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
- Real people are identified as the doing the tweeting via CoTags, in my case ^MS which corresponds to my initials. We also have ^JT and ^AW.
- You can assign items to people, which helps you route @’s and DMs to the right subject matter experts. That way one or two people can manage the whole account, and then allocate the detailed responses to others. We have yet to fully use this feature but are looking at it.
We’re just now starting to really use CoTweet, and are looking forward to learning more about it. Have you tried it? Or what other twitter tools do you use to help you or your social media team?
Happy tweeting,
Marcus, Windows Community Manager
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Thanks for having me as your inaugural guest blogger!
We’ve just begun using co-tweet for our team’s Twitter feed and so far it has been really great. I think that the program will grow very quickly, especially as Twitter grows. Another feature I use is tracking my bit.ly stats in Co-Tweet. It helps see what tweets are gaining the most traction.
I’m one of the volunteers at Social Media Club Seattle. Marcus was instrumental in coordinating our February event, which was generously sponsored by Microsoft. We observed Marcus and his team at @windowslive and @mswindows using CoTweet, and have followed suit. @SMCSeattle is now using CoTweet and we’re very excited about its capabilities. Thanks!
Neat! On a similar note, I think that companies (or divisions at larger companies) should hold quarterly meetings to discuss social networking in general, though.
Programs like Cotweet can really help teams communicate, but if the motivation to work hard and focus isn’t there, they can also lead to unproductive employees. Cotweet definitely looks like a good tool for those in the marketing communications field, but we, as employees, need to figure out what works and what doesn’t in regards to social networking.
First of all, great meeting you last week!
Secondly, we’ve been playing with Hoot Suite (http://hootsuite.com/) from your neighbors in Vancouver. Pretty tight product…
Great post, Marcus. We’re thrilled to see you using CoTweet and look forward to hearing your feedback and new feature ideas.