Recently following conversations happened between consumers and Son -

Consumer A: "Is it possible for you to provide free Wireless LAN connectivity at all Softbank shops across Japan?" (6:28, 6th March)

Son: "Okay. I will arrange battery charger plugs too, by the end of April." (7:12 on the same day) 

Consumer B: "Then it will be great if you arrange some small tables and vending machines too, so that we can use your shop for meeting place." (7:16 on the same day)

Son: "Okay, will try in many shops as possible." (7:49 on the same day)

These are the conversations between Son and consumers over internet within 90 minutes. Internet progress indeed brought completely new way of corporate management like this, where consumers can directly request the head of the big company to improve their service.

The enabler is Twitter, by which one can express the opinion within 140 characters. Estimated numbers of users are around 100 million across the globe.

Initially in Japan, Twitter was popular among Japanese young people who were familiar with internet. Recently, there is gradual increase in corporate management users, valuing its potential of information transmission and readiness. Son is one of them.

For example in February, he announced special mobile charges for the disabled through Twitter. He received a request on 3rd and answered it with the service launch on 9th.

There are many other examples, like a company called EC Navi. They run a web-site where consumers can compare the prices of different products and this year, they recruited fresh graduates through Twitter. "I want to hire who are keen on IT and can push information outside," Shinsuke Usami (@), CEO of the company says. It is also well known that Hiroshi Mikitani (ID: @hmikitani), CEO of Rakuten Inc., is also actively using Twitter.

Behind the benefits, there are some critical issues too. For instance, how a company should be announcing their important information on Twitter.

Looking at the case of Softbank, when the company announced capital investment in "Ustream" in February, Son replied to some queries from Twitter users that its Japanese language version will be launched by May.

"Ustream" is one of the hot topics in internet industry and people might have treated the news as important management information, so some said it should have been certainly published through PR or IR first than on Twitter. The incident gave us opportunity to think the handling of corporate disclosure.

Things mentioned here is mere Twitter, but we should not underestimate it. One of the unique features of Twitter is "Retweet", with which one can copy other person's tweet and post it as it is, just by single-click. For example let's say your comment is read by 30 people. Imagine if those 30 people retweeted your comment, instantly additional 900 people would read your comment, then 27,000, then…, through which we can well understand how much enormous the celebrities accounts can influence, who have several ten thousands followers. 

Now, emerging question is how to control the information; there are many "fake" accounts which pretend to be celebrities or important people in industries. Public agencies such as Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission are closely monitoring the information exchange over the internet and recently they included Twitter too. It may be the time for corporates and organization to set up own guidelines or policies for Twitter. US Government also announced in February that the tweets from Whitehouse will be stored in its archives.

Softbank, which encourages its employees to use Twitter, also sets rules such as "personal information should not be tweeted". Rakuten too says that they are forming internal rules, while stating "Mikitani's tweets are playing two roles, a representative of company, and an individual".

It is high time to think of how we should behave on Twitter when we are representing corporate.

Based on Nikkei Business Online Magazine (Source: http://business.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/topics/20100312/213314/)