Twitter’s downfall will be corporate America jumping on the Twitter bandwagon without an original strategy on how to make this social media platform work for them. DiGiorno’s “Twitter strategy” (if you want to call it that) is to have their PR agency identify “influential tweeters willing to host tweetups, or in-person get-togethers prearranged on Twitter, in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.” Advertising Age. And then DiGiorno will hook you up with some free frozen pizzas.

Here is where Kraft and DiGiorno went wrong.

1. The Advertising Age article implies that Kraft’s PR Agency Weber Shandwick will be in charge of reaching out to these influential twitter folks – not that they have decided what makes a Twitter user influential yet. Social Media is all about transparency and engaging with your customers. Farming your account out to your PR agency doesn’t really accomplish that.
2. All this hype has started in the blogosphere without DiGiorno having any sort of presence on Twitter. While integrating your marketing efforts is critical to building a strong social media presence, you need to have at least some sort of interaction going on before you start tooting your own horn.
3. So now that you’ve gone and talked about how brilliant your Twitter plan is there are currently 2 Twitter handles that could be managed by Kraft, or by some smarty pants who was up on their reading for the day and said “hey, these folks don’t have their act together, I’m going to make their plans even more difficult, and register a new Twitter account using their brand name!” Because people are like that. And the lack of a custom image, updates or follwers isn’t doing you a favor if it is under Kraft’s control.
4. Lastly, your plan is boring. Twitter has been around for a while now (believe it or not) and companies have come before you and already done similar things and built their following naturally. Look at Zappos, Southwest Air, Jet Blue…they have all been around for a while, gave discounts and perks to the early adaptors of Twitter, built their following to THOUSANDS of people (Jet Blue has 313,561 followers last I checked) and then stopped or greatly reduced the freebe’s. Now for the most part, these accounts are used to engage customers and get them to love your brand without having to bribe people with free stuff.

The bottom line DiGiorno is that you showed up too late to the Twitter party to use this approach. It’s been done. And unless people already LOVE your brand (and who has that kind of love for frozen pizza?) you might be in for some surprises on how ineffective this might be fore you. Go back to the drawing board, figure out something original and new that is going to gain attention naturally and then come back to the Twitter pool.