Had a great conversation via Twitter that was spawned by Christian Knapp from Keystone Mountain. He asked, “what do you think of reciprocating all followers or just following key industry opinion leaders?” My response was the philosophy we apply to the @vignettecorp account. We follow customers, media/analyst, bloggers and people who have interesting things to say about the market we serve. We find new followers who usually end up being existing customers based on listening for key search phrases relative to the markets we serve.

Mike Slone chimed in with a great point that customer centric brands should follow back because it does not send the right message back. He took it one step farther and said that customer centricity starts with understanding who your customers are and then demonstrating that you care.

Does reciprocating make you more customer centric?

For large brands who have tens of thousands of customers reciprocating is a gesture that you may be listening. Following alone does not imply you are listening. Listening means you are proactive by reaching out to those who make mention as well as reactive to complaints or questions. Following is passive, listening is active.

Take JetBlue for example, they are following 119k people. It is more than a full time job to monitor each and every tweet hoping something relevant for you to act on. Unless you are conducting research to gain insight from followers it is not an efficient use of time to read what would be 10's of thousands tweets per day. This is where monitoring solutions like Radian6 come in.

You can set up search phrases to monitor several social networking and user generated content sites. These search phrases can be set to trigger alerts for follow up. In the case of a travel company you might want to know when someone has tweeted "On my way to Keystone". This would allow you to personalize their trip in real time and follow up with them after to make sure everything went well. The possibilities here are endless.

When deciding on who to follow it is important to go back to the purpose of the account and what business goals it supports. The other important consideration is the amount of time you can dedicate to taking action on the request that will come from Twitter.

We all agreed that no matter who you choose to follow, customers are a must.