Friday 10 April 2009

Monsanto goes a-Twittering


It's no secret that Agwired has a relationship with Monsanto the biotech giant.
So when it came out with this it was hardly surprising:

I ran across this article, Planting Cyber Seeds, written by Jeffrey Tomich for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I thought I would share it will all of you. The article is about how Monsanto has worked to tackle big issues through Twitter, the social networking tool that answers the question, What are you doing?

Because environmentalists were constantly trying to derail Monsanto in the media, the company quickly realized that they needed to address some big issues in the news for themselves. The group uses Twitter to discuss controversial topics like food labeling and genetically modified foods. Like many agriculture groups, Monsanto has realized that this is the best outlet to interacting with the nation's food consumers.

Sounds as though Monsanto is on top of the social media game doesn't it? However when you search for Monsanto on Twitter you find a different story.

MonsantoCo shows the company-endorsed face of Monsanto tweets, but over at the official Monsanto blog they linked to a Twitter realtime search which showed 5 pages of more varied results, with anti-GM tweeters hogging the space right now.
Including beekeeper protests and links to media articles about GM crop failures.
Although it has to be said the Monsanto Twitter is hardly overwhelmed with people tweeting it.

Seems that whatever online PR Monsanto tries, it comes to grief.

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