Twitter Contributors enhances SIM Voices
In my book Social Media Marketing for Dummies, I introduce the concept of SIM voices or Social Influence Marketing voices. These SIM voices are the voices through which you engage with consumers in the social web across any touch point or social platform. Twitter understands this and their new features that allow multiple authors to support a business account is spot on. Called Contributors, it lets a business account have multiple authors so that a specific user can be added to the byline of a business account. Read on for why you need to develop a program around SIM voices.
The SIM voices (think of them as your strategy behind the Contributors feature) can take the form of one voice or many and they all must share the following characteristics - they're multiple, authentic voices (think twitter.zappos.com or razorfish.alltop.com), they are easy to find (that means they need to be "googlable"), they are engaging and conversational , the voices are usually unique to the person, they're always manifested in real people and they're only used in real conversations.
Why are these SIM voices important? Because they're very different to the traditional brand voices that most companies have and project through all their marketing and corporate communication efforts. These SIM voices aren't consistent across platforms, they're not designed to appear across all touch points, they're riskier (because they're real people who may leave the company at some point) and they do not perfectly reflect the brand personality. But they are undoubtedly increasingly more valuable and more obviously authentic than the brand voices or brand personalities that serve as the faces of large companies today. People connect with each other across the web and less so with brands. If you want to connect with your consumers you had better have your SIM voices do it because fewer and fewer people care about big anonymous, faceless brands.
Many different people inside an organization (or outside in the form of spokespeople) can play the role of SIM voices. Arguably, in some form Tiger Woods was a SIM voice for Accenture though he wasn't representing them on social platforms. It is getting important for companies to put SIM Voice programs in place so that they have strategic, codified and thoughtful approaches to identifying cultivating, focusing, nurturing, amplifying and harnesses SIM voices in their organizations.
After all, it is these SIM voices that will increasingly become the face of the brand. Just look at Best Buy's Twelpforce to see what I mean. The Twitter Contributors feature makes it easier for SIM voices to support and enhance a brand presence which is why I'm excited by the feature. One other point - as brands move in the direction of SIM voices they'll increasingly evolve into social brands themselves. But that's a point I'll leave for another post.
Find more on SIM Voices in my book Social Media Marketing for Dummies.
Follow me on Twitter (@shivsingh) for more insights on digital strategy and social media.
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