Whole Foods is huge in Japan! I mean, Twitter!

Want your company to succeed on twitter? Make like Whole Foods, surrender to the medium, empower an employee…and use your “Authentic Voice.”

CNBC names @WholeFoods a Top 10 company on twitter.

“Whole Foods uses Twitter to go deep on their customers’ needs, test concepts, and extend the conversation about values that drive them.” ~ CNBC

I remember being at a social media panel put on by Naturally Boulder, an organization here in Boulder (in case you didn’t guess) and hosted by Fresh Ideas Group, where @elephantjournal was honored to be featured as an example by @gwenbell of a company rocking twitter. Only, we’re hardly a company—more of a laptop + a dream + a bike + too many Americanos.

Whole Foods is a real company, with $548 Billion dollars (okay, made that up, have no idea) in annual sales. And so I was inspired to learn that, in their view (they were featured on the panel), their success derived from their bold surrender to the personal nature of twitter. To paraphrase: “We used twitter for awhile, but didn’t have much success, get many followers. We just used our PR/Marketing voice, talked about specials…finally we empowered one person to tweet, and to do so in a “personal,” “authentic” voice. Suddenly we had kajillions of followers, and it’s been huge for us.” [I’m paraphrasing, again, based on my Americano-soaked memory]

Whole Foods is to twitter as Godzilla is to Japan, only in a wholesome way.

This virgin geek has some great tweeting (and Facebook, and LinkedIn) twips: