Twitter. My first impression was like yours. “What can I do
with this? Who cares about what I am doing? This is a waste of time.” Today, your boss might think that way too... I was wrong. Your boss is wrong!
I joined Twitter on Nov 8, 2008. One year later, I have been gaining an average of 4 followers per day, and I've got today a little more than 1800 ones. More importantly in the meantime, without been addicted (anymore…), I have found the real value of Twitter, which was definitely not obvious in the first place. I don't want to review here what Twitter is nor how to use it 101, there are plenty of great resources available on the Web. I highly recommend Alltop and lessons by Guy Kawazaki. I am aiming to the core of Twitter, what makes it a great tool for you and for your business.
The first consideration you should keep in mind is that as a 21st Century Executive, you should have a digital footprint and you should control it. This is a larger topic I will cover in future posts: “What do people find when they Google your name?” This is an interesting search to do, and you might be scared… actually at the end of 2007, when I did it for the first, I was…. because I found “nothing”. For your information, more than 85% of recruiters say they have used search engines to uncover information about candidates, and more than 40% say they have eliminated a candidate because of information they found (or not!) on the Internet.(source Execunet)
But let’s come back to Twitter. There is a lot to cover, so for this first post on this topic I want to keep it simple and focus on “The key feature of Twitter”. Actually people who spit on Twitter usually don’t know it, don't use it, and don’t get the value of Twitter at all.
I heard about it for the first time at a local tradeshow in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, maybe one week after having joined Twitter. I was attending a session on Social Media, and one of the speakers explained that “at the bottom of the Twitter user interface, there was this cool feature “Search” that we should try”. Twitter UI is getting better today (not great, even not good yet), but it was the worse UI ever one year ago. Not only it was not user friendly, but it was making this feature quite invisible.
I typed my company name “Qtask” and was stunned to discover people chatting about us! Yes, people I did not know were just talking about our CEO’s presentation a few days earlier in Atlanta. It was a big surprise. So I tried other words… such as my main competitors names… it was fascinating! I was live with people talking about them, positively or negatively.
This feature is a direct channel to listen in real time to your own market, what is going on out of there, what you competitors are doing, what the users are thinking and asking… this is pure gold! Companies like Comcast or Zappos understood it a while ago and have based a good chunk of their customer service on Twitter, having direct interactions with their customers.
Now that you know (if you didn’t know yet) the best and most valuable feature of Twitter, you need to know how best to use it. Twitter original user interface is extremely limited (you’ve got that, right?) and doesn’t give you the power you need to really leverage “Search”.
My recommendation is to use the following tools; they will dramatically change your Twitter experience.
On your PC, rely on Seesmic Desktop (my favorite) or TweetDeck. Both applications offer multi-columns search enabling you to build a dashboard to follow the key words you care about.
On your cell phone or iPhone, the best one for the same reason is Tweetie.
Moreover Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop are multi-accounts, so you can for example work from your personal account and from your company account at the same time without having to logout and login continuously. Pretty awesome!
There are many other interesting aspects to Twitter, which is clearly a great online marketing tool. We will talk about this soon.
In the meantime, let us know how you have heard about Twitter in the first place and how was your original experience. Which tool have you been using and why?
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