CoTweet And CoTags

So, I guess it was bound to happen. Companies and other groups of Twitter users can share single accounts, but how do you manage corporate Twittering in the large?

Jesse Engle at Launchability has introduced the concept of CoTweeting and an eponymous tool to help corporate social media folks do it.

I am not sure exactly where I stand on brand twittering, but if people are going to do it it would be good to keep it as social and person-oriented as possible. So Engle and company have suggested the use of a new Twitter ‘code’, the use of the carat ‘^’ prior to a cotwitterer’s name.

[from LaunchAbility / Making Brands Human on Twitter || From idea to business. On the web. Fast.]

CoTweet brings more people from your company to the social media party — now they just need nametags. Specifically, there’s a need to identify the people behind your brand Twitter account and a way to signal when each of them is tweeting.

Introducing ^CoTags, a new convention for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account. It’s really simple—just the carat character followed by the person’s initials, or other identifying set of characters.

As I mentioned in a recent piece (see Power Twitter: Plumbing v. UX), more codes will arise in Twitter over the next few months. They will soon start to collide — what happens if others want to use the ‘^’ to indicate location, or a timestamp? — and so we are confronted with a land grab of sorts.

I am throwing my support for ^ as an indicator of authorship, so-called ‘co-tags’, since companies can’t be stopped from joining the party in Twitterland.

I hope to spend some time using CoTweet in the next few days, and I will report back on that.