By Joyce Hooi

WHILE companies in the United States have joined one big and noisy Twitter party, the Twitter scene in Singapore looks more like an awkward secondary school dance. Some companies are hovering on the sidelines, unsure how to approach customers, while others are content to let someone else go in their place.

'I still don't see a lot of local firms emerging on the Twitter scene. They are still trying to strategise on how they can best use Twitter,' said Claudia Lim, a director of 24seven, a local social media consulting firm. 'Big firms, especially, take a lot of time to strategise because there are so many layers of clearance.'

In the US, participation ranges from banks to airlines. Wachovia Bank, with over 5,000 followers, responds to individual questions about client accounts. JetBlue Airways, with over one million followers, even offers the names of customer service officers on duty. So established is the use of Twitter in the US that customer service sites have set up rankings of the best corporate Twitter accounts.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, followers of the SQairlines Twitter account were surprised to learn earlier this year that the account, replete with the Singapore Airlines logo, was not an official SIA account, despite having over 2,000 followers.

While SIA continues to monitor the account, it is unperturbed over the use of its identity by an unidentified Netizen who regularly posts links to flight deals on the SIA website. The airline also has no current plans to get involved in Twitter in its own right. 'Our view is that the social media space, and online communities, should be user-driven and user-generated,' said an SIA spokesman.

24seven's Ms Lim disagrees that companies do not have to get involved.

'While social media might be about the users, corporations should use it, not so much to push out content, but to respond to users' questions or their needs,' says Ms Lim.

While Facebook and Twitter seem to be one and the same bewildering social media tool to the untrained eye, companies here have cottoned on to the tangible differences between the two sites.

M1, for example, despite having a popular Facebook page with over 1,000 fans, is still 'evaluating the use of Twitter'.

'Twitter is very different because once a tweet is sent out, any user can read it. On Facebook, only fans can. So a Twitter account needs more resources, like someone to actively manage it and reply to messages. That contributes to why firms have been slow to start using it,' said Ms Lim.

The site's open nature that has given firms pause over using it has also turned entities without any Twitter aspirations into unwitting casualties.

Last week, the Land Transport Authority learned the hard way about Twitter's ability to compromise confidentiality when it was forced to lift an embargo on the news of the off-peak car revision ahead of schedule after the news was leaked on Twitter.

Some local firms, however, have shown themselves to be extremely comfortable with the open microphone that is Twitter. Shaw Organisation, which runs a Twitter account, recently started expressing opinions on movies.

One of its tweets praised District 9 for having a 'smart story' but said that the book was better for Time Traveler's Wife.

'We don't usually give out such comments but that was something we wanted to try, to see what the response was like. We want to move from just informing to engaging the customers in feedback,' said Terence Heng, vice-president of Shaw's media division.

The conversation with users also spills into after-work hours. Daniel Goh, who leads the marketing effort on Twitter at Samsung Asia for Singapore, responds to samsungsg followers at home and on weekends. The account has over 200 followers.

This approach has gone down well with Twitter users like Matt Rigbye. 'It's important to engage people in conversations. The companies that just blast out ads don't get much response, but the ones who chat with people seem to get a lot more momentum.'

Despite increasing hype from marketing gurus and ministers, the number of followers for brands remains small in Singapore. Most companies log several hundred followers at most; in comparison, blogger Dawn Yang has almost 3,500 followers on one account.

But while doubts have been raised over the ability to measure Twitter's return on investment, it might be paying off for Brewerkz. 'Our followers attend our 'tweetups' and then tweet about it. These tweets have more credibility than just Brewerkz tweets and result in better profits for us,' said Lisa Tan, Brewerkz's marketing executive.

The Twitter scene, however, has to be navigated with care. Impersonation is increasingly rife and some local companies have approached Twitter to get other users to hand over accounts bearing their corporate names.

The marketing conversation on Twitter is also set to take a more cynical turn. While Australian media firm uSocial lets its corporate clients 'buy' followers, another firm (ChurpChurp) is paying Twitter users in Singapore and Malaysia to tweet messages that are essentially its clients' ads.

'As a Twitter user, I would not engage in these ads. And as a businessperson, I think it defeats the purpose of word-of-mouth advertising. The conversation needs to be genuine,' said Brewerkz's Ms Tan.

This article was first published in The Business Times.