NewsBusiness

Just reading an item from the smartcompany website by founder of RedBalloonDays, Naomi Simson, on why the ‘About Us’ page on a website is so important. Couldn’t have put it better myself:

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/get-out-of-my-way/20090327-old-lessons-for-the-new-world.html

You may have already seen this YouTube video. If you haven’t, you should watch it.

Jump on Google and tap in this question and you’ll see you’re not alone if you’re wondering what Twitter is all about. I took a look at it about six months ago but only really got to grips with it over the Christmas break.

Twitter itself started in 2006 (see this Wikipedia entry) but it only reached its ‘tipping point’ in the last few months, with a current estimated 6 million users worldwide.

How Does It Work?
Basically, Twitter allows you to send short messages (a maximum of 140 characters) out to the Twitter network. Originally used by friends, family members and co-workers to keep in touch – much like an internet equivalent of SMS – Twitter has evolved into something much more useful from a business perspective, if only due to the huge increase in the number of users.

Twitter allows you to ‘follow’ people ie read their messages (called ‘tweets’) and in the same way people can follow you as well.

When I started off I decided to follow Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull just to see what they had to say, and then slowly added people I knew – business and personal contacts – as well as people whose newsletters I subscribe to, or authors of business books I have read recently. What I found was that as I followed other people, they would often follow me back, so my list of ‘followers’ has grown as quickly as the list of people I follow.

You can search Twitter for people, but it’s also easy to search the overall Twitter conversation by topic, or geographic area (eg ‘Brisbane’).

So – how does Twitter help my business?
Much like a blog (see our previous post on blogs) – in fact Twitter is sometimes referred to as a ‘microblogging’ site – Twitter is a way of talking regularly to your ‘fan base’, for want of a better analogy.

You can use it to notify people of your business news – for example if you have added a new blog entry, or you have written a new report or whitepaper, or if you are speaking at an event. Twitterers also use the service very effectively to ask questions and during the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai, Twitter users were the first to know what was going on – ahead of the media – as people who were caught up in the attack updated their friends on what was happening using Twitter on their mobile phones.

So Twitter may be a marketing tool you can add to your armoury if you want to get information out to the world. But not everyone is a fan of Twitter, as you can see from these recent forum posts I found here when I Googled “Can somebody please explain Twitter?”.

Surprised to see my name mentioned by “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” author David Meerman Scott, I clicked on the link and go to this take on viral marketing from Gory Bateson (no relation!). I heard about this in a ‘tweet’ by Meerman Scott on Twitter. More on Twitter soon…