I think Niall Cook’s Five steps to a successful corporate Twitter presence (Registration required) is useful for corporate spokespeople interested in adopting Twitter for one particular kind of communications, but Cook may leave some with the impression that this is the only “acceptable” way for a company to use the service.

Cook refers to Twitter as a “microblogging community” and a form of “social media.” Both community and social suggest interaction, and while interaction is a desirable characteristic, it is not required. I subscribe to Twitter feeds from the New York Times, Harper’s, PBS and many other media outlets that do not interact with me, nor do I expect them to.

The beauty of Twitter is that it is what you make of it, and you can make so many things of it. It doesn’t make sense to apply one communications “model” to Twitter and then say, “anyone who doesn’t do it this way, doesn’t get it.” Twitter can be a microblogging site, a community, a social network, chat, instant messaging, a news feed and a “pointer site.”

The “right” way to choose a Twitter ID and brand your company’s Twitter profile and avatar comes down to how and why you use Twitter. While some identifiable employees, like C-level executives and community managers, may best use Twitter with their real names as identification, this practice does not make sense for general corporate communications or customer support applications. It doesn’t scale. People don’t want to search for or have to remember the name of the person who does customer support for JetBlue or Zappos or Comcast. And with people moving in and out of various organizations within a company, using individual names for customer support or for corporate communications is a nightmare.

Other advice is also useful, but not universal. For example, the suggestion to carry on all conversations via the public timeline and to not use direct messages may violate consumer privacy. Watch @ComcastCares (and others) on Twitter who often tweet “DM me your phone number,” so as to protect consumer privacy.

I recommend, in my eerily similarly titled piece “Seven Rules for Establishing a Corporate Presence on Twitter” that companies consider their objectives when choosing a communications model and accompanying Twitter brand identity.

Tags: Niall Cook, corporate presence, Twitter