Agencies and Twitter in 2022

What should agencies advise clients with regard to Twitter today? It has obviously been a very turbulent couple of weeks since Elon Musk took over, but what does that mean for communicators?

Chip and Gini explore this question that they have been hearing from many agency leaders in recent days. They emphasize the need to understand what is right for individual clients and their target audiences rather than substituting our own personal points of view.

There are lessons to be learned from what is going on with Twitter and how it impacts agencies and their clients that go far beyond this individual social platform. Recognizing the value of focusing on client needs while determining your own “red lines” are important things for agency owners to consider.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “We are an agent of the client. Therefore, we may not love every statement we put out or everything that we have to tell a member of the media or every strategy that we put together, but we’re doing what’s best for the client based on their perspective, not our own.”

* Gini Dietrich: “You have to look at it from a client perspective and say, Where is the audience? What’s working, what’s not working? And then make a recommendation.”

* Chip Griffin: “Be clear about the difference between deciding not to play there because it’s a values judgment versus because it’s no longer effective.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Is it still effective? Can you set aside your values? Where’s the line?”

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And today we’re gonna talk about a little thing called Twitter. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of it, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: I have, in fact, a little bird. Yeah, I’ve heard of it.

Chip Griffin: Well, we’ll talk more about it right after this.

Gini Dietrich: Great.

Chip Griffin: So I take no pleasure in our topic today. None whatsoever. I would really prefer not to hear about Twitter and Elon Musk really ever again.

Gini Dietrich: Well, it’s, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s not gonna happen.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I think unfortunately for those of us who are in communications and agency land, that’s not likely to to happen any time soon.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m getting asked by a lot of people, what should we be doing about Twitter? How should we be advising our clients? So you know, we’re gonna bite the bullet and we’re gonna jump in here. Of course, we’re recording a few days before we release this. So who knows what will have happened between the time we record this.

Gini Dietrich: It could implode.

Chip Griffin: So to be clear, we are recording this around noon Eastern time on Monday, November 7th. Anything that happened after that, we don’t know about it. Don’t know. Cause we do not have that crystal ball that allows us to see into the future. And if we did we would not be doing this podcast. We would be going play the ponies or something and just get rich.

So,