Not everything makes a great Twitter campaign, especially not the crap we’ve been given

I got an email from my client last Wednesday. There was an exclamation mark in the title. My heart drops. Shite. What did I forget? Oh god, there’s a question mark as well.

On closer analysis the email reads “I’m on Twitter! Can you follow me?”

A cursory browse of the client's Twitter page reveals they’ve set up an account, followed Stephen Fry and tweeted the world that they “don’t really see the point of this”. Great.

Part of me believes this could be the start of a much better client relationship. Maybe finally I’ve managed to persuade this guy that I have some value? But in my heart of hearts, I know, there’s something more sinister going on here.

Next email nestles into the inbox. “Let’s use Twitter for this campaign. But we need to show ROI.” Brilliant.

Don’t get me wrong. We like Twitter, its fun. And we’re delighted that our dear client has taken this important initial step. And we know that part of our job as PROs is to help clients to learn about using social media. That’s fine. We love to help them understand what Twitter is for and how to use it to start conversations.

What we can’t do is magic up a zillion Twitter followers because you have got a copy of a book to give away. And yes, we’ve read the trade press too, we KNOW that Dell sold loads of computers via its Twitter channel. That’s because it was offering something useful – cheap laptops. But when you’re offering an ‘optimised personalised solution platform tool’ (that we’ve begged you to rename 17,000 times) and that has a target market of about 2,000 people, most of whom don’t use Twitter to do their jobs, maybe Twitter isn’t the best channel?

Oh, and by the way, you know that Twitter stream that you think is so completely and utterly brilliant? Well, sorry, no, we can’t get The Guardian to reprint it verbatim. Apart from the fact that no one prints Twitter streams and it’s full of typos, IT BARELY EVEN MAKES SENSE.

The End. Please feel free to retweet this post, it’s not as if our clients are going to be there reading it …