It depends on where you are getting those followers. It looks like you’re following nearly double the amount who follow you. If you’re doing that just to get followed, it means the followers you get won’t be dedicated followers and you’ll end up with low numbers of RTs, visitors to your blog, and conversions to whatever else you try to do. I don’t think its bad to do things that way, but understand that you aren’t going to get tons from that kind of following. As your following grows organically, you’ll end up with a higher rate of conversion.

Erin,

Completely agree that its important for people to be able to relate to a person rather than a company. Twitter is such a personal interface that you need that personal touch and to relate to people where they are to be as successful as possible.

Although it is absolutely necessary to be sociable, colorful — at times even zany — the brand’s bird must be well versed in the CEO’s vision and the brand & marketing guidelines of the CMO or Director of Marketing.

From my experience representing a city community and interacting with IT vendors, I’ve seen that most companies aren’t structurally ready for the social media challenge of micro-publishing. Where canned responses with twists of abstractions has worked in brochures, this same approach will FAIL when applied to realtime, social interaction with customers who want to pierce the veil of buzzwords. So the brand’s bird has another role: evangelizing the marketing department to get real with their lingo, and actually relate to clients in their own terminology. In the words of Squarepants, “Good luck with that.”

Social/Blogging Tracker

I think disclosing who is running the account is a good idea. I know many brands have that information in their bio. I’ve personally tweeted it publicly a few times; however, I also don’t tweet much from my personal account any more [a little busy working on other things and tweeting for @neboweb], so I don’t always think it will help a tremendous amount, it just varies from company to company how you have it setup. If you have time to manage both, more power to you.

For people who don’t tweet much from their own personal accounts a good solution might be periodically linking to a personal profile on a different social network like Facebook, Linkedin, or an about the author’s page if you also contribute to a blog.