If your only account on Twitter is a corporate account: Stop.

Start over.

In the past few weeks I’ve been seeing and hearing about more groups joining Twitter but completely try to join in and dictate the terms of the channel.

My contention is that this sort of strategy contributes to ruining the brand of the company, and whoever is associated with it.

Why is this so wrong?

Let’s examine some good cases then compare them.

Starbucks; Here is a common example that we are seeing more of. Everybody knows a company like Starbucks, and some people are big Starbucks fans. The important part is when Starbucks made their Twitter account, because everyone knew the company, it was pretty obvious what was going on. Presumably Starbucks was going to start engage with customers through social channels and promote the brand in whatever ways. That’s fine. They actually gave the account some personality which was even better.

RedWire, Disqus, AideRSS, Refresh Events, Akoha, Zemanta; You can find example after example of corporate accounts on Twitter, but the important part is that all people who manage these accounts each have their own personal account on Twitter as well. Each one has a personal account to separate between their personal network and those who aren’t interested in receiving info about the particular company.

In the two sets of examples here, either the company is worldwide and globally recognized (aka not your company), or the people behind the company have all done their foot work to establish a reputation for themselves. It all really a lot of common sense.

Company X (real company… unfortunately); The company does something, its hard to tell. The name associated with the twitter account is somebody, you can’t find any information about him/her though. They rarely go to social media events, but without even developing a rapport first or becoming part of the community in anyway, proceed to make people feel weird by pushing their goods and sorely mis-representing themselves and their company.

Melding a personal and corporate persona on Twitter is a bad move if neither your personal brand or company brand has built up any value with the people your trying to connect to. It is also even worse if you try to actually pimp yourself.

All these sort of actions are not transparent.

But just because it’s not transparent doesn’t mean people can’t see through you.