Northrop Grumman – Plenty of job opportunities and an odd desire to rebuild a German “stealth” fighter from WWII.

One of the biggest challenges that I often face is in convincing firms that they are – whether they like it or not – already being discussed online in the social media networks and that they at least have to be aware of what is taking place from a positive/proactive perspective.

To highlight this point, I have randomly selected a group of Fortune X00 companies (all of which will be highlighted in this series) and performed a 24-hour “keyword search” to track related tweets. These tweets are generally a mix of positive, negative, promotional or even humorous musings (“anybody from MyCorp want to get together for drinks after work?”).

I’ve started to refer to negative tweets as Tweetsmack – comments for which there is no corporate reply anticipated or delivered. I believe that they demonstrate that social media is worth tracking to help develop future communications and messaging strategies – strategies that engage this growing base of social networkers who are willing to openly discuss their thoughts in front of millions of fellow tweeters (who are often all too willing to virally re-tweet what they read without question).

I have high respect for all of these firms, and my intent is to educate, not criticize (I am not endorsing the tweets themselves). This current post features the notable defense contractor Northrop Grumman, and while they had plenty of positive coverage, there were also some not-so-kind posts and an interesting linkage to Hitler’s manic desire to dominate the airspace during the waning days of World War II:

Northrop Grumman

• Tweets: 100+
• Trend #1: Job or Employment Related Tweets 20+in the first 100 tweets alone
• Trend #2: Positive News Related Tweets: 25+ (lots of tweets on positive awards)

Possible TweetSmack (negative coverage):

Interesting/Noteworthy:

Odd TweetSmack (who really thinks Northrop designed their stealth technology from German WWII fighters?):

What do you think? Should major corporations merely ignore this type of chatter? Or should they monitor it to be aware of what is taking place and proactively use this type of open commentary to help shape their future marketing and communications strategies?

My vote? Monitor anything and everything. Those events that deserve a response will be abundantly clear.