Located online at www.twitter.com, Twitter stands for “Typing What I’m Thinking to Everyone Reading,” and is easily accessible from the Web or the latest generation of smart cell phones and PDAs. Twitter users compose “Tweets,” quick entries consisting of no more than 140 characters. Tweets range from talk of today’s lunch to breaking news; many forward-thinking businesses use the service to get quality content to readers and to build brand loyalty while promoting awareness.

Like many tools on the Web, Twitter began as purely social—a tool for friends to keep tabs on one another via quick updates about their days—but quick-thinking entrepreneurs and businessfolk knew a good thing when they saw it. Now many businesses are on Twitter, monitoring chatter about their brands, promoting deals, and answering customer questions. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s not a purely promotional tool—what it really promotes is good conversation.

If you’re not on Twitter, are you missing out? Wondering how to get started, and what to do once you’re on board? Take a look at our white paper, How Can Twitter Help My Business, and you’ll be setting hearts all a-Twitter in no time!

Once you’re set up, be sure to follow our Social Media Swami, Shashi Bellamkonda, @shashib.

Good luck, and happy Tweeting!

(I am hampered by the fact that I am not a sociologist — not even an armchair one. But let’s ignore that for now.)

I’m getting hung up trying to figure out how much of these generational differences are due to inherent attitudinal differences (brought about by reactions to prior generations, defining historical events, other external factors), and how much is simply due to the technology not being available.

Basically, it’s the question, “Would your parents have Twittered? How about your grandparents?”

The technologically-deterministic view says that human nature pretty much stays constant, so changes in technology are what matters. Because the desire for communication and recognition are pretty constant, you can map the behaviors we see with social media tools now to analogous behaviors in the older offline world. The role taken by Twitter now was fulfilled by… I dunno, malt shop gossip and other real-world social interactions, as well as things like snail mail and physical bulletin boards. The function that Twitter serves now, and those venues served then, was basically the same — social status updating and self-promotion.

Which basically suggests that my teenage self, my parents, and say, the characters from Little Women, would have used social media in similar fashions, had the technology been available at the time. Though subject to the mores, modesties and values of those particular times, which is a pretty huge caveat. Hence the problem of figuring out where the technological factors end and the generational ones begin.

Also, I don’t think it’s true. Some behaviors are just simply new, born of technological change. For example, the idea of nostalgia didn’t really come about until the industrial age (if nothing ever changes, there isn’t anything to be nostalgic about). I’m not sure at what point the metaphor breaks down. Private paper diaries are radically different from publicly published blogs; putting a bumper sticker on your car is nothing like a social status update.

However,  expectations of fame, expressions of reputation, and the existence of microcelebrity have probably always existed in one form or another — first among physical relationships, then in early media-enabled connections, then expanded across online networks. Even something like celebrity culture is nothing new — if anything is new, it’s the expectations of access and the (largely illusory) idea that you can have a deeper, authentic relationship than you could before.

I guess the question really isn’t “Would your parents have Twittered?” but “Would your parents have Twittered the way you Twitter?” Pretty clearly, the answer is no; technological determinism can only go so far, and that’s where genuine generational differences kick in.

For my next entry, I think I’ll take a look at some of the attitudinal differences that influence my own use of social media, and how it differs from those darn kids today.

Does any of this make sense? Please leave a comment either way.

Fast forward a year later and I signed up for this new product still in beta called PeopleBrowsr (spelling is correct here) and was intrigued by its approach to monitoring your life stream. I used it a little bit over the last year and when I was in LA last week for the 140 conference I saw that PeopleBrowsr was sponsoring and Dave was there with the PeopleBrowsr team to promote its new release and demo the product.

According to their site “PeopleBrowsr is a data mine and social search engine for real time conversations. We’ve built a set of applications sitting on the data mine to monitor your brand, identify your audience, analyze tweets sentiment, filter the buzz, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously.”

I find it is great for personal brand and corporate brand monitoring but I will let Dave tell you himself. Here is the interview with him and the demo in the video below:

Despite this there are some real benefits for a small business in using Twitter and one true caveat that will mention at the end of this post.

Six Small Business Benefits of Using Twitter

I recently came across this article from the Kherize5 Marketing Agency on Six Small Business Benefits of Using Twitter:

1. Expand Reach. As a small business it can be expensive to advertise to build awareness. Twitter allows you to search, converse and engage while at the same time gaining exposure for your product/service.

2. Interact with Customers. Most small businesses attract new business by word-of-mouth.  Tweeting with customers shows that you are attentive to their needs and do not stop after the sale is completed. This also provides almost instant feedback on your product/service and saves time and effort in researching reviews that customers may have posted on other sites.

3. Receive & Share Information. Following leaders in your industry will provide invaluable information that you inturn share with your followers and/or customers to show your level of involvement in your industry.

4. Offer Help. Searches assist in finding people who are in need of help.  Offering a solution allows you to showcase your area of expertise and engage people. This will take time to become a trusted information source however while interacting with people, it will expose your business offerings.

5. Enhance Email Marketing.  Whether you are currently utilizing email marketing campaigns or plan to in the future, Twitter is another source to further the campaign by driving people to the landing page for the email.

6. Meet Local People. One of the biggest benefits of Twitter is to meet-up with other local tweeters. This is not just another networking event where people just show up, Tweetups bring together a community of people that acquire and share information.

HOWEVER….Consider the Opportunity Cost of Twitter as You Integrate it into Your Small Business

While you think this might be a whole new sales channel, you should consider the opportunity cost of Twitter. Direct Marketing Observations blog defines it well – “Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics because it implies the choice between desirable, yet mutually exclusive results. Which is desirable? Making a cold call or reaching out via Twitter to someone you might get business from? Which is a more effective use of your time? Are the results mutually exclusive? Maybe. But not immediate.”

They go on to say “The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently. If I have 2 phones and 2 computers with 2 Twitter accounts-which will be more efficient in the long run? Or the short run for that matter. Opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs:  it can be the real cost of  lost output or lost time. Twitter can be quite  inefficient when it comes to working it into the prospecting flow of your work day and treating it like you would your outbound marketing. You have to know how to use it correctly. It compliments, but it doesn’t replace.”

You can easily just pick up the phone and reach out but like e-mail or web sites, it is a way to reach out and engage with current customers or start a conversation with a new customer that might see Twitter as its primary communication channel.

Are you Using Twitter? What has been your experience? Leave a comment.

So is your small business already using Twitter? What has been your experience? Please leave a comment and let’s have a conversation about this interesting topic.

I love the Small Biz Trends site during my search and came across this little gem: 137 Great Twitter Tips

Back in May of 2009 they asked readers, to submit their best Twitter tips. They asked readers to simply answer one of the following 6 questions:

1. Getting Started: How would you suggest other small businesses get started on Twitter?
2. Smart Marketing: What’s the right way (or wrong way) to promote your business on Twitter?
3. Observing Etiquette: What is your #1 Twitter etiquette tip for small business owners?
4. Spreading Your Message: What is your best tip for getting re-tweeted?
5. Time Management: How do you manage your time on Twitter?
6. Advanced Strategies: What is your best kept secret (something not widely known) for using Twitter in business?

All of the tips have been compiled into one PDF document which is available here.

Some of my favorites?

“Identify keywords as well as the “experts” in your industry. Then, visit http://search.twitter.com and
search on those terms. Once you identify the right people, look at who they’re following and who is
following them as your potential pool of people you should follow.”

“Automated DMs aren’t worth sending. If you won’t invest a few seconds to compose a
140-character message I don’t want to invest 5 seconds reading it.”

“A quality “T.W.E.E.T. is: Timely, Worth-reading, Educational, Entertaining, and Tweople-connecting.”

“To get retweeted, it’s all about value. That can be in the form of an exclusive Twitter offer, or a blog
post or article that adds something new.”

“Schedule and treat tweet sessions like these as you would a meeting, be selective.”

There are tons more but you get the idea that this is some great advice from experienced Small Business Twitterers.

Likewise, in March, I complained about obvious spammers who still managed to gain reciprocal followers, presumably from auto-followers, or folks otherwise trying to inflate their follower counts.

After a while, though, I stopped really caring so much. Despite my early complaints about Twitter spammers, it still wasn’t that much of a problem, with the bulk of the issue at the time being relatively benign: Marketers and silly Twitter users playing the follower-collecting game, much as we saw in the early days of MySpace. (Other similarities between Twitter and MySpace can be found in the Cody Brown blog entry, “MySpace Is to Facebook as Twitter Is to ____,” that folks were buzzing about earlier this month).

Since it wasn’t that big of a deal, and since Twitter spam was relatively easy to ignore, I just didn’t pay that much attention to my follower list. While I never crossed over into deliberate follower-seeking behaviors (like begging, or posting trending topic or other hot keywords specifically to troll for followers), I let my follower list creep up steadily past 400 (chump change, even in the land of chumps).

As Twitter became more mainstream (marked by the celebrities coming in and blowing all the merely “Internet-famous” people out of the water), and as Twitter spammers become more prolific, more persistent, and more pornographic, I found myself turning the “nuke spam follower” dial back to “ruthless.”

Even as I did, I thought back to a post by my friend Stephanie, “Followers Are Not Your Friends,” where she advocated not fussing over spam followers (or followers of insufficient quality, whatever that means). I agreed with her up to a point, but parted company when she likened having concern about spammers in one’s Twitter followers to worrying about not having control over who reads your RSS feed.

The difference in this case, is that the list of your RSS readers isn’t published, whereas your Twitter followers are visible. While it’s not an endorsement per se, for people with human-manageable numbers of followers (say, in the low hundreds), I think that one’s follower list does kind of say something about you (though, of course, not nearly as much as your list of Twitter friends — the people you follow.)

But there are so many other, more pernicious forms of Twitter spam (hashtag spam, fake @replies, etc)  that not swatting the obvious spammers in your follower list seems minor in comparison, right? Well, if the number of blocks factors into Twitter’s decision to nuke a spammer account, maybe it does matter.

On a related note, check out TwitBlock [link via Mashable] which ranks your followers and other Twitter users by their spammer potential (I am happy to say I’m a zero on this scale), as well as flags potential spam accounts by their reuse of avatar pictures (link potentially Not Safe For Work due to increasingly obnoxious pornographic avatars — another reason to beat down Twitter spammers.)

It’s getting hard enough to distinguish spammers from real people (both because spammers act more like real people, and some real people act more like spammers), so I do think it’s important to do what we can to knock them out, and if a mechanism to do that is policing one’s own follower list, I guess it does matter.

What say you? Do you think blocking spam followers matters? Leave a comment.

Recently, Twitter has finally started to show its business model and realizes that one way is to help companies and brands utilize Twitter for all sorts of things. Network Solutions in fact utilizes it for customer service and community outreach and has seem immeasurable success in using it along with providing a channel for customers to reach out. You can find us at NetSolCares.

The new Twitter Guide for Business, uses this explanation for businesses thinking about signing up but asking about what it does, what they can use it for and the value/return they could see from it:

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

I have found that there are three primary ways to effectively use Twitter for Business:

1.) Customer Service – This is probably what Twitter is known the best for in business circles with companies like Comcast, Dell, Starbucks, Zappos and Etsy to name a few using this channel to communicate with customers having issues or to thank them when there are positive mentions. Network Solutions has use NetSolCares to great success and I think about how many issues have been resolved or the customer put in touch with the right person because they reached out on Twitter and we listened.

2.) Community Outreach – This goes beyond customer service to informing people abou things that will help their business and engage the broader community. This can be done on the same channel as customer service and we use this channel to post blog headlines from our various blogs in addition to putting out notices to the community about changes or issues they might be experiencing (e.g. System Downtime on Friday for new Network Solutions brand switchover).

3.) Selling those that want to be sold to – This is a challenging on that Dell Outlet does extremely well. They have often said that they make $1 million a year off of Twitter. This is because they set up a specific Twitter channel/handle for selling Dell Products.

What Ways Has Your Business Used Twitter Effectively?

I know I mentioned the “Top 3″ but I want to start the conversation and hear from you how you are creatively using Twitter with your business and gather a longer list of best practices for everyone in a future post.

So it seems that Twitter is getting hip to what’s going on with businesses and realizes that there are a lot of brands wanting to know how to take advantage of this microblogging application. To help businesses out, the great folks at  Twitter have put together a “How To” website that gives a beginner’s tutorial for how businesses can use the site. But there’s a lot more than simple elementary advice. To be truly valuable for companies, this website includes some case studies, resources and even a dictionary to help you understand the terminology.

I think that what’s helpful about this website is the ability for new brands to see the entire process on how to use Twitter. It’s not just some random website where you have to search for help. It’s a step-by-step tutorial that will give you a simple explanation about what’s going on. One thing that author and founder of public relations firm FutureWorks, Brian Solis, noted was that in the beginning, executives were often left wondering what Twitter’s usage for business is. This helpful guide sets out to answer those type of questions:

Twitter is a communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and other people who care about your company. As an individual user, you can use Twitter to tell a company (or anyone else) that you’ve had a great–or disappointing–experience with their business, offer product ideas, and learn about great offers.

First you’re going to learn about the purpose of the website (that’s the homepage). Then you’re going to move onto understanding what Twitter is before learning the lingo behind this platform and how it’s used. From there you’re now able to move to read about some best practices for how to use Twitter right before reviewing some successful case studies of brands using the platform for their campaigns. And if you need any more information after reading the case studies and getting an introductory view of Twitter, the creators of this website have offered up some additional resources for you to take a look at.

But if you’re not getting enough information just by understanding what Twitter is, then relax, as the folks at Twitter have also included the case study section that gives you examples of what other brands have done with the platform. They’re not all Fortune 500 companies and many of their solutions can also be tailored towards your brand usage if you want. So check out what companies like Dell, Etsy, Pepsi, American Apparel, Current and JetBlue is doing right now with the technology.

But wait…does that answer one of the fundamental questions about how do businesses use Twitter? Sure, you might understand what Dell, Etsy, Pepsi and all the brands listed in the guide do with Twitter, but what else can Twitter be used for? Simple. Twitter connects you to your customers right now, in a way that was never before possible. By that I mean that it allows you to monitor what people are saying online about you. Imagine Twitter as one giant conversation happening at a large event. Sure, you’re not going to be able to follow every single thing at first, but through some clever searches as you browse around, you’re able to hear conversations about your brand, product or company. That’s your time to listen and respond – it’s all about immediacy and real-time engagement – that’s what Twitter does for the customer service relationship.

So now you’re happy to know that there’s a simple Twitter for Business guide out there…what next? Well you need to share this information with your colleagues and anyone else that might have an impact on the Twitter usage in your brand. Once everyone understands what this Twitter thing is, the better your interactions with your customers will be. This website is very user-friendly in that it also offers itself as a downloadable PDF or you can print the site out in its entirety to share with whomever you wish.

If you’re a brand eager to understand what’s going on with Twitter, I’d highly recommend looking at this website first and then engage your customers. This is a really helpful “tutorial” of sorts that will give you insights that until now, you were left to figure out by yourself or perhaps left to scour the web looking for answers. It’s all here.