I've been following United and Jet Blue on Twitter and think it's about time that Continental gets its act together and joins too! Am I the only one?

Twitter is . I'm of the opinion that CO should focus on the multitude of huge changes coming in the next six months versus joining the latest social marketing trend which is popular for reasons passing my own personal understanding.

Errr...

So you don't understand it, therefore they shouldn't do it?

Continental should absolutely join Twitter and be able to provide its loyal followers updates and announcements.

But we have Alex.

To provide what information? Fare sales? Half the ones United provides don't earn miles and the jetBlue ones are only one-way. I'll pass.

If there is a compelling value-add I'm sure they'd get on it. But there isn't much of a business case to be found for it that I can see right now.

I don't quite understand why Twitter is so wildly popular, but a lot of companies are seeing value in social marketing as an important tool to engage with customers on a less formal basis.

I think Continental setting up shop on Twitter would be a natural evolution of their social marketing strategies, a follow-on to their move to bring Scott to Flyertalk. Twitter would have a similar effect, only likely reaching a much larger, more mainstream, and probably more "average Joe Consumer" audience.

Some of the work I do now involves researching and advising on social marketing trends, and one of the cardinal rules I offer to customers is to avoid looking at Twitter as a sales tool. People aren't visiting the site in order to get sold on some product or service, they are on to engage and interact with people/entities within their 'social network'.

If anything, I would advise Continental to focus any Twitter-based effort strictly on informal, friendly, personable, 'real' customer interaction. It works well to conduct nonscientific market research, to get a pulse on customer sentiment, and see what your customers value. Unfortunately, I could also see it becoming a new complaint department, so any move in this direction would definitely have to be handled with care.

Where CO can make Twitter value add is creating an account that is not used for announcements but one that is used to explore complaints and issues.

A lot of people complain on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Continental%20airlines and it may be worth it to explore some of the complaints further and try to rectify the situations. Positive press and/or noise can't hurt.

If people are seeing "Continental Sucks!" and then "Wow, CO solved my issues", people may be less reluctant to fly them in the future.

Put an intern in there to monitor it and make a report of how many complaints are posted on Twitter every day/week/month and come up with a way to try and reduce that.

How about general company news? Updates to rules? Announcements addressing issues like turbulence-gate on Monday?

Companies are always looking for communication platforms to reach new and expand audiences, as well as provide updates to current customers.

I work professionally in the world of communication, so I absolutely can see the value.

Agreed. I think they could even post weather delays at their hubs. They send text messages, why not a simple Twitter message?

the only half useful thing I could see for twitter would be for posting delays with a bot. anything else is worthless.
You can't resolve client issues in a microblog format, you can contact them from there already, you don't need to add to the net fluff by microblogging more unless it is useful.

I wasn't suggesting they solve the issues using a Microblog format, I was suggesting that they at least explore issues. CO's issue handling through the website and phone number are easy to be confused by, they could scour Twitter, find people with issues and Direct Message them an e-mail.

I'd be really impressed to get a message from someone like Scott (not saying it needs to be him) asking me to send him an e-mail with details of my issue. Not sure how that can be viewed as a poor idea.

Targeted versus useless? If I'm on a flight I want to know about delays. If I'm following CO on twitter I don't care that EWR is, once again, delayed due to ATC on a day I'm not flying.

I agree that using it as a CSR tool has potential upside, but I'd much rather they fix the existing WeCare2 curd than just add another avenue for which CO reps can write "wx issues; not r fault"

I wasn't saying seeking out and resolving issues was a bad idea, that is always good. I was saying adding fluff posts in twitter is a waste of everyone time, and that is what I find is in most twitter accounts. Posting for the sake of posting is

Imagine Scott doing like some people do on twitter:
On flyertalk posting
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going to the elevator to attend a meeting
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preparing a letter to a client
-

stuff like this gets old

I completely agree. VX, AS and WN seem to do this and their reputations on Twitter are quite good because of it.

For a few months, I've thought about starting a similar thread about CO and their lack of involvement in social media. While I am not a user of most of the popular social media sites (and I'm not convinced social media will survive in its current format), I think CO really does need to create and maintain a presence on these sites. When a company has free access to millions of current and potential customers, it is almost silly for them not to be an active participant in these sites.

That does get old, but I don't know of a single business Twitter account that does that. All of them are either posting news or links to changes.