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Unless you’ve been living in a cave on a deserted island for the past few months, you know that Twitter is a free, 140-character messaging program that lets people “follow” friends and strangers, and lets them be “followed” by people they know and those they don’t.
Do you still see Twitter as a fun game? Could it be of use to you as a communicator if you run a business, freelance, or work in a corporation or professional firm?
The short answer is yes. In just a few months, we’ve seen Twitter and its “tweets” go from a relative novelty to a tool that many businesses and government agencies are using. It even helped organize mass protest demonstrations in Iran after the presidential election in June.
For example, some airlines, such as JetBlue, are exchanging tweets with customers to deal quickly with relatively minor complaints and thereby head off major issues. The CEO of Best Buy says he goes on Twitter and listens to what people are saying about the company in order to deal with customer concerns. Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell monitor their customer tweets to improve their marketing messages. Other companies tweet to refute rumors about their products—instantly.
Oregon’s Department of Transportation began to use Twitter last year, and its followers include reporters, legislators and taxpayers. It’s a way, officials say, to get news out quickly and get feedback—good and bad—just as fast. It’s also a good way to educate employees about new policies and regulations.
Sudler & Hennessey, a global health care marketing and communication company, uses Yammer, a Twitter-like microblogging service that limits participation to people in the same domain. About a third of the company’s employees now use the service to share insights and information and to collaborate on projects.
According to an article by Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times on 14 April, “Doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures,” even tweeting during operations.
Another use for Twitter posts is getting answers to questions and drafting volunteers, immediately, from lots of people you don’t know. David Pogue, The Times’ “Circuits” columnist, tweeted late one night to find people who would be willing to come and make a video in Connecticut the following day. He got 20 volunteers in 15 minutes.
It’s also possible to use Twitter competitively, by monitoring what people tweet about your competitors and then contacting them to offer your own product, which is what Intuit, the parent of TurboTax and other software packages, does at times.
Freelancers can also use Twitter when they need information, contacts or, for example, to send out a message that they have an opening in their schedule or are offering limited-time discounts.
There are downsides to Twitter, of course, including the issue of determining what’s appropriate to tweet about. At auditions for a New York Musical Theater Festival play recently, a casting session organizer tweeted mocking impressions of the actors who were auditioning. Actors Equity, among others, objected to the real-time, public comments as being unfair and unprofessional.
You also may have heard about the PR executive who tweeted a nasty comment about their client FedEx’s home city, which he had just visited to make a presentation at company headquarters. The tweet reached a major person at the client company, and the ramifications were not pretty.
Another issue is how to know whether incoming tweets to a company site are representative of the organization’s customer base or whether they represent only a handful of negatively motivated or unhappy buyers. It’s a problem that hasn’t yet been solved, but some CEOs say they’d rather read bad reviews of their products early and try to resolve them before the problems get worse.
Negative tweets to a political site are also taken seriously. The BarackObama Twitter account, with more than 2 million followers at the time of this writing, is one of the most popular accounts on Twitter and allows people to directly voice their opinions—negative and positive—and feel as if they have an ear in Washington, D.C. For example, when there was a huge public backlash to an Air Force flyover of the Statue of Liberty in April, Twitter comments were monitored and assessed by the Air Force, although “no positive spin” was possible, according to recently released official documents.
How do all the possibilities Twitter offers translate into useful strategies for you?
If you’re in organizational communication, you may need to help your company or nonprofit understand Twitter’s power and how to employ it. Yes, there’ll probably be some other new service soon, but that doesn’t undercut the importance of this highly democratic and wide-reaching communication tool.
If you work independently, Twitter deserves some thought as a strategic vehicle that can promote your business, connections and personal profile.
Here is a mix of ideas to start with:
- Use the tight messages Twitter requires to direct people to a more expansive treatment about yourself, your company, or your news on your web site or blog.
- Tweet to let people know about an honor, an article or a speaking engagement.
- Tweet to let people know where you are. A reporter we know landed an enviable set of assignments because he tweeted his presence in China on a vacation; it caught an editor’s attention because the very destructive earthquake happened a day later and the vacationer became the magazine’s man on the scene.
- Tweet to ask questions and find obscure sources: This can be as simple as “Do you know a good restaurant in Hanoi?” A writer we know needed to find a Basque individual living in Iowa and “got nowhere” until a Los Angeles reporter saw her tweet and put her in touch with another journalist who’d actually covered the subject.
- Re-tweet interesting references and leads to friends and clients—it’s good networking.
- Tweet to find suppliers of professional services who may not be in your immediate network. For example, there are directories of authors, book agents, publishers and related book-trade people available through Twitter.
- Tweet to find volunteers for your company’s charitable causes.
- Tweet to announce your company’s latest product.
- Tweet to get immediate feedback on something you want to know, such as how many people use social networking tools in their business. David Pogue of The Times did something like that at a conference recently and was amazed at the number of immediate responses he received.
- Use Twitter’s search function to jumpstart your research on an unfamiliar subject and find out what people who’ve already thought about the topic are saying.
- Use Twitter chat nights for journalism, PR or small business, to connect with peers and see what’s out there.
- Promote yourself as an expert by making well-thought-out, pithy comments on an issue, leading people to read your blog or article. Provocative rhetorical questions can work: “Is this what the media has come to?” “Want to know the solution?”
There are no hard and fast rules yet for Twitter, so we can all get creative. But there are a few caveats.
First, don’t be trivial. Twitter may have been viewed early on as a medium to tell the world what you’re eating for lunch, but it’s matured. As in all communications, people want substance. If your messages are not worth their time, they simply won’t read them.
And implicit in all this, think and write with care. Clever abbreviation notwithstanding, good writing makes the difference. Be aware of the challenge—because to say something interesting in 140 characters is the ultimate test of your editing ability.
Natalie Canavor is a business writer, communication consultant and journalist who formerly edited national magazines and directed a communication department.
Claire Meirowitz is an editor, writer, proofreader and project manager with a background in publishing and university public relations.
Together they own and operate C&M Business Writing Services, which creates publications, e-media, communication models and training programs. Their book, The Truth About Business Writing That Works, will be published in 2010 by Pearson/FT Press.
Natalie and Claire are past presidents of IABC/Long Island (New York). Reach them at
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