To ReTweet or Not ReTweet: Interesting debate

I spoke to a group of clients last week about social media. Even though the parent company had urged them to embrace social media, this group was reluctant.

Their question to me: Why should they spend time on social media? How have other clients benefited from being on Twitter?

These are actually reasonable questions. For organizations with small marketing budgets, social media can be effective because there are no fees (currently) to use Twitter for corporate uses. But it does take a lot of time, which can be difficult to justify.

There's an interesting blog post about marketing can do to increase its impact on Twitter. Check out "ReTweets: The next marketing playground" by Steven Hodson.

On the other hand, as Boston Globe's Scott Kirsner has pointed out, Ashton Kutcher, who now has 2 million followers, has a larger group of followers than CNN and other media organizations. What's that mean in terms of impact? How many of those 2 million followers are actively following Kutcher? How can you place a value on that?

Those are questions PR functions have to address.