Innovative Uses for Twitter

Twitter is a relatively new communication tool that's commonly referred to as a "micro-blogging" platform. Users can send "tweets," or short messages limited to 140 characters or less. The messages will be delivered to people who are "following" the sender, or people who have asked to receive their updates. It is 100% permission-based, meaning that it is completely impossible to send unsolicited messages via Twitter. It's easy to follow someone (or stop following someone) with a single click of a mouse button. In other-words, it's spam-proof! And if you don't want strangers following your posts, you can easily block them from following you.

Recipients can get their messages a number of different ways, but the most common ways to get the messages are by logging onto the web site, downloading the companion software called Twhirl, or by getting SMS text messages delivered to their cell phones. While you don't need to install Twhirl, you're missing out if you don't. Sending all of your messages via the main web site is inefficient, and it requires you to log in and check for messages proactively. So, unless you have a reminder set in your Outlook, you're likely to forget. Also, since it's a feed, you only see the most recent messages when you log in. Unless you log in continually, you may end up missing a lot of the messages this way. Finally, though, if you're using the web site as your sole means of accessing the service, it means you don't get the point. This further means you're likely to quit using the service because you don't see the point in it.

The real strength of Twitter lies in its ability to quickly deliver messages in real time. I'll discuss the specific uses of this benefit in the hub. For now, though, just bear in mind that every message you send will be delivered in real time to the people who are accessing the service via companion software. This means that if you annoy people by continually tweeting irrelevant, useless information (such as, "I'm doing my laundry now,") people will ignore you and/or stop following your tweets. If you're in sales and thinking of tweeting about your products and services, think again. The Twitter community takes a dim view of spam. If you send pertinent, funny, or useful information, you'll build relationships and people will start to perk up their ears when they see one of your tweets. Like any other social networking service, it works better when you use it to help other people and build relationships.

As you'll see as you read through this hub, Twitter opens a world of possibilities. There are a number of community-building ideas that just wouldn't be practical to do with e-mail, the telephone, or conventional means of communication.

A "tweetup" is a specialized form of a meetup. A meetup is just what it sounds like: people meeting up. If you're not familiar with meetup.com, check it out sometime. You can use it to find people with common interests who live in your city. You type in a ZIP code and search for groups near you who are meeting. For example, there might be meetups where the members meet to play chess, discuss philosophy, watch comedy films, or any number of other things.

As for the purpose of a tweetup, that depends who you ask. But tweetups are typically social meeting that are announced via Twitter. The chief advantage to this is that it can be done impromptu at the last minute. For example, you might tweet, "I'm headed over to the coffee shop if anyone wants to join me." It's not always done this way; sometimes meetings are tweeted well in advance. But in my humble opinion, the real-time aspect of twitter is what makes tweetups unique.

Tweetups are something that could be built upon in a much bigger way, and you'll probably see this happening soon. For example, your department or team at work could start using Twitter as a communication tool. You could have informal meetings about specific topics. It might look something like tweeting, "Jill and I are in Bob's cubicle discussing the ABC project and we think we figured out how to solve XYZ issue." Then, any of your co-workers who want to get in on this can walk over. Or, it could be as simple as, "I'm going to Burger King. Anybody want anything?" Or just, "Who's ready for lunch?" Or, "The parts department is headed to happy hour at 5:30. Everybody's invited."

If used appropriately, Twitter could serve as a means of scheduling urgent meetings and quickly corralling the troops when fires pop up. For example, a department head could tweet, "There's an urgent situation with customer X. Everybody in the conference room NOW." This would, of course, need to be limited to situations where it's actually appropriate. In other cases, it could be used to stop fires before they start. For example, if an employee in the department found out about the situation with customer X, they could tweet the rest of the department, put together their own impromptu meeting, and handle the situation before the boss gets an angry phone call.

For any of these communication tools to work, it would need to remain permission-based. In other words, don't shove Twitter down your direct reports' throats as a means of getting them to quickly jump when you snap your fingers. This approach will eventually backfire on you, as this sort of management usually does. Also, don't start doing all of your meetings impromptu just because you can. Tweetups work well when they're used for very specific, timely, relevant meetings. They work badly when you use them for pointless meetings, and you don't need Twitter for meetings that could easily wait until Monday. Use it to make their lives easier. Don't use it to be a pain in the ass.

You can just as easily use this in your personal life. For example, you could use Twitter to invite your neighbors over to watch the game. Or, you could use it to tell them about a rare bargain on a brand new lawn mower that's being sold at the garage sale down the street. Or to invite your friends over to watch the TV show that's coming on in 20 minutes.

Use your imagination. What kind of tweetups would YOU create?

You have questions. The people you know have answers. Until now, the means of matching up the two have been limited. When the Internet first bloomed into full swing and hit the mainstream, questions were answered in online forums, newsgroups, and discussion boards. This was popular in the early days because it was an easy, free way to get advice from people you wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise. But, like other forms of electronic communication, its value soon became diluted by information glut. People used discussion boards for inappropriate purposes, or just posted too much repetitive information. Nobody had time to sift through the avalanche of junk to find rare nuggets of good information. They just fell back on direct e-mail, which of course has its own limitations. In the last couple of years, a number of more mainstream Q&A forums have emerged, such as Yahoo! Answers. However, this type of forum has the same basic problem: it's impossible to moderate effectively when users aren't paying for the service.

Enter Twitter. Since Twitter is completely permission-based, moderation happens at the individual level. Since you don't have to accept tweets from anyone you don't want to hear from, you have the power to banish individual users completely from your Twitter experience. This has strong implications for questions and answers. You can now post a question about anything to the list of people following you, and it will be sent directly to them if they choose to get it. This is much more efficient. The old way was to post a question for the whole world to see, where it would quickly be buried under a pile of other questions. Add to this the fact that people abused the service, posting both questions and answers that chiefly consisted of spam, and you really couldn't count on getting any kind of quality answers at all.

I must admit that my response rate to questions that I tweet, thus far, has been low. But I will say that when I do get an answer from someone, it's always a real answer to the question I actually asked. That's much more than I can say for any discussion forum I've ever been on. But I also have to consider that I only have about 50 followers or so, and the odds of one of them knowing the answer is slim. But this network is in its infant stages, so we'll surely see growth in this area.

I found out about StumbleUpon a few months back, and really didn't see the point in it. This was mainly because I was regularly e-mailed links to videos posted on StumbleUpon. But when I started to hear more about, I decided to take a closer look. As it turns out, StumbleUpon is a great resource. It gives users the opportunity to submit web sites to their service, and tag them under a category. Then, other users can "stumble" onto these same web sites. It's basically just another means of telling the world about a cool web site you found. Your profile will then reflect the sites you've marked as "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down."

Now, I can't speak for everybody, but I haven't spent any time looking at other users' StumbleUpon profiles. While the people I know may have posted some gold nuggets up there, I just don't have time for this sort of thing. Instead, I just Stumble to a few web sites a day, and when I find a cool one, I tweet it on Twitter. Some examples of web sites that I tweeted were a clock made from human figures, a video about environmental sustainability, and numerous others. The basic idea is this: I only tweet sites that I find useful, funny, beautiful, or worth looking at. I'm serving as a human filter to remove the clutter and send out the cream of the crop. Already, I've had people thank me for tweeting the web sites. It's not hard to do, and it helps build relationships. (Ok, I just snuck in another link to a video just then).

You probably have at least one family member who, at one point, became notorious for forwarding 20 e-mails a day. These might have contained web site links, long lists of jokes, political rants, or just about anything. You may have responded to one of these e-mails at one point only to say, "Stop sending me this crap!" That's the beauty of Twitter. Since everybody knows that if they get annoying, they can be silenced with one click of the mouse button, there's an unspoken etiquette that would never allow this scenario to happen in the first place.

If you don't have the StumbleUpon toolbar, try downloading it and setting up an account. It's free and only takes a few minutes. I'll typically do 10-20 "Stumbles" a day, and this usually takes only a few minutes. I've found out about some great web sites myself this way, and I've had the opportunity to share them with other people as well. If you do this and do it well, you can have people looking forward to your tweets. This is an example of using Twitter in a simple, beneficial way. It also stands in stark contrast to blatant self-promotion. But more importantly, it will help StumbleUpon to work more effectively. Imagine if everybody used Twitter and StumbleUpon this way. Cool web sites would have a chance to get found very quickly, and if they were really cool, they'd soar to the top of the search engine rankings quickly. In the same vein, boring web sites would sink quickly to the bottom. I think we'd all be happy with the result.

Give it a try!

My father used to work at a privately-owned department store, and he told me that when the original owner used to run things, he would occasionally go on the loudspeaker and create hype by announcing a last-minute sale. For instance, it might go something like, "50% off everything in men's formal wear for the next 10 minutes!" I wasn't there, but I can only imagine the frenzy this must have whipped up (and the nightmare it must have been to serve the slobbering throng of savings-hungry customers).

That set aside, there's a gold mine in what I refer to as "Easter Egg marketing." (The term may have been invented by someone else already, but in my mind, I invented it!) The basic idea is to give away perks and special deals to customers that they weren't expecting to get. But it's not just about boring things like special pricing. Part of the sex appeal comes from the fact that it's a surprise. Easter eggs are hidden in the little nooks and crannies. Imagine what it's like for a little kid to find one when they weren't even looking. Software companies have figured this out, too. Blizzard Entertainment, creator of the WarCraft games, included a hidden feature where if you clicked on the same character over and over again, they would start to make sarcastic remarks back at you. The joy came in the surprise of discovering it.

Twitter offers a whole new way of doing this. For example, retailers in shopping malls could start their own Twitter accounts and put up a sign in their store advertising the Twitter follows. They wouldn't promise anything; they'd just post them. Or, they could ask users for their Twitter names when making purchases. This particular strategy probably wouldn't work as of this writing, because the service isn't really in mainstream use yet. But the idea would be simple. They could send tweets announcing, for example, that if you stop by in the next 5 minutes, you get a free ice cream cone. Limit one per customer, and you have to show them the tweet on your cell phone.

This sort of thing would get old pretty quickly, so you'd have to keep getting creative. You might also solicit tweets from your customers, offering a prize to the person who tweets the funniest haiku about your store. Or, you could offer a free appetizer to the first person to tweet the correct answer to a trivia question. A radio station could give away free concert tickets to tweet #99 after playing a certain song. There are plenty of directions to go with this. But the main idea behind all of this is to give your customers a one-of-a-kind experience interacting with your brand name that they'll tell all of their friends about.

If you haven't tried TweetDeck, check it out. TweetDeck is a Twitter app that allows you to view tweets in multiple columns. By default, TweetDeck is configured to show you the tweets of everyone you're following, the direct tweets sent to you, and reply tweets (broadcast messages containing your user name).

There are a couple of interesting things that you can do with TweetDeck. You can add a "group" of Twitter users, and put a column into TweetDeck that displays tweets from only that group. That's useful for keeping tabs on your friends, particularly if you have a large number of followers. At the time of this posting, I personally have only 600 followers, which to me is a large number, but there are some Twitter users who have upwards of 30,000 followers. (I don't really get why you'd want that many followers).

The most interesting thing that I've started experimenting with lately, though, is listening for keywords. TweetDeck will allow you to add a "search" column where you can add a search term, and it will display, in real time, all of the people who are tweeting that term (whether you follow them or not). This can be highly useful for PR purposes; if you want to know what people are tweeting about your company, you can add your company's name to this field.