Twitter is a fantastic tool for not only getting marketing, sales and advertising messages out, it’s also great for keeping in touch with a community formed around a brand, company, association or even governmental entity. I’d go into proof about this, but most everyone who reads this blog already knows this. If you need an example, just ask Oprah.

When it comes to enterprise use — as opposed to individual use — of social-media tools like Twitter, there’s issues surrounding compliance and security, as well as overall policy. To put it simply, your company may not want you to tweet (140 character posts to the Twitter site) because of whatever internal or external policies or laws to which it must adhere.

But what if your company had a way to enable employees to tweet, which in turn helps your company to better communicate with its client base and … yes … even make money? No toolset currently exists that can help out those organizations, right? Well, that’s about to change.

OnTargetTweet is a service that’s so brand new, we’re still developing it. To put it succinctly:

OnTargetTweet is the easiest way for your company or organization to make sure that messages sent by your employees to the massively popular Twitter service are on target with your marketing campaign or mission.

With our platform, you or someone in your organization now has the power to approve on-target “tweets,” or messages intended for the Twitter audience. If a message is off-target, it can easily be sent back to the employee with suggestions on how to put it right back on target.

As you can see from the both tagline and the above statement, we also envision OnTargetTweet to be a means to keep messages being tweeted from an organization’s employees. After all, there’s no better way to wreck a great marketing campaign or message by having it contradicted by workers or contractors.

There’s also a third market; one with which I personally am very familiar: news organizations. From my 15+ years of involvement with various aspects of journalism, I can definitely see how a tweet with unchecked or inaccurate information from a reporter out in the field can quickly ruin a newspaper, TV station, etc. OnTargetTweet gives editors, producers and others at a managerial level the same level of control on Twitter messages they already have, when it comes to publishing stories (newsprint, Web, TV, or radio).

In short, we enivision OnTargetTweet for three audiences:

1. Companies and other organizations that have compliance or policy issues, in regards to Twitter use
   1. Banks
   2. Financial-services firms
   3. Health and medical
   4. Many others
2. Companies and other organizations that want to emphasize specific messages to a Twitter audience
   1. Corporations with sales forces
   2. Organizations with active social-media participants
   3. Many others
3. News/editorial organizations that want editor control over what field or newsroom-based employees tweet out on Twitter
   1. Radio
   2. TV
   3. Newspapers
   4. Web-based news organizations
   5. Many others

We’re hoping we’ll be finished with the development of OnTargetTweet in a week or two, and then opening a free beta-testing period. While our initial outbound marketing campaign will focus on associations/non-profits and the news media, we’ll be accepting any kind of organization that fits into these categories. Heck, we’ll speak with any organization that sees a potential for using the OnTargetTweet platform — it doesn’t have to conform to those three areas.

If you know of a company or organization that wants to use the power of Twitter. but needs to have control of tweets before they actually hit their Twitter stream, please let me know. Or better yet, have them go to the OnTargetTweet.com site and sign up for our upcoming beta period (FREE!). There’s a short video there that explains OnTargetTweet’s objectives as well.

You can also follow OnTargetTweet at (where else?) — Twitter. We’re @OnTargetTweet.

One other thing before I hit “Publish” on this post. After we first established our outpost on Twitter, we were mentioned in this tweet:

gillyarcht new player @ontargettweet #security #twitter #technology @twitter welcome–force for good we hope!

I’m sure we’re going to get our share of detractors. They’re going to claim we’re bad for social media. That we discourage the free-flow of ideas and thoughts that social media was specifically designed for.

I’ll be following up on this idea directly at the OnTargetTweet Blog — probably in a week or so. For now, though, I’m only going to say that we are definitely a “force for good” as @gillyarcht put it. We see our tool as a good way for many more “voices” to participate in social media, and Twitter is probably the place to be anymore in social media. Without this tool, there won’t be as many companies out there talking to — and listening to — their audiences. In a lot of cases, it’s because of compliance and policy issues that organizations may not have anything to do with. OnTargetTweet gives them a crucial tool with which to use Twitter while at the same time adhering to their policies.

Even after hearing that, though, we’ll probably still have detractors — and that’s okay. That’s because while they’re out there dissing us, we’ll be helping organizations to be on Twitter. A pretty good trade-off, in our opinion.

Contact Bob Woods at Infonitum.