It sometimes seems as if Telstra and BigPond have missed all the terabytes of stuff that has been produced describing how to do social media or social networking effectively.

Their latest foray into this part of the world – via Twitter – has been amusing to observe. It is almost as if some people heard a garbled story about Twitter at a pub and then went home to experiment. Instead of checking out some of the really successful corporate users of Twitter – like Comcast or Zappos – they’ve just dived into a social network without taking the time to understand the culture.

It is amusing to see that the most common response via Twitter is a very Telstra-like just fill out this form and wait for us to get back to you.

Given what we’ve seen with up until now with nowwearetalking I suppose this outcome was predictable. It will be interesting to see if Telstra can learn how to use this channel effectively or if it will be just another amusing anecdote to explain what not to do in social media.

UPDATE: Just catching up on RSS and noticed that @mspecht has a good post on similar theme too