The Boss of You

It was March 2007; I was in Austin for South by South­west Inter­ac­tive, the annual gath­er­ing of the tech-geek tribe, and it seemed like Twit­ter was all any­one wanted to talk about.

The Twit­ter server kept crash­ing because every­one at SXSW was using it non­stop: to tweet about the pan­els & keynotes, to find each other, or just to exult in the adren­a­line rush of being early adopters of what was soon to become a social media tool to give Face­book a run for its money.

And me? I rolled my eyes and waited for Twitter’s shiny new­ness to wear off, and for all the geeks to move on to the next thing that was sure to take Twitter’s place.

Oh, I checked it out. I looked around and sniffed around and just didn’t see any­thing that grabbed me. I was totally uncon­vinced it had any value, except as a sort-of-fun timewaster.

It took me ages to get on board the Twit­ter train. Would you believe, in fact, that it was just a year ago today that I finally woke up and smelled the zeit­geist? Me, a web designer and online strate­gist. Me, an early adopter and enthu­si­ast of all things inter­netty. I resisted as long as I pos­si­bly could, until I feared I’d be laughed out of my industry.

Here’s the thing: I just wasn’t con­vinced it was the best use of my time. I wasn’t con­vinced that I knew enough peo­ple who were par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­ver­sa­tions on Twit­ter, or that I could say any­thing mean­ing­ful in 140 char­ac­ters, or that it could even be fun.

But I decided to try it any­way. It took a cou­ple of months before I started to really like it. Even­tu­ally, though, some­thing clicked and I got it.

Here’s what I like about Twit­ter: I like the asym­met­ri­cal rela­tion­ship struc­ture, where you can choose to fol­low peo­ple who have no idea who you are (like, say, Oprah or the Dalai Lama), and you can read their tweets with­out them hav­ing to fol­low you back — and like­wise, other peo­ple can sign up to get your tweets with­out you need­ing to rec­i­p­ro­cate. To me, this is a won­der­ful com­ple­ment to sys­tems like Face­book or LinkedIn, where all the rela­tion­ships are two-way (and repli­cate real-life ones). You can still cre­ate a vir­tual net­work on Twit­ter based on com­mon inter­ests — but here there’s space for fans (whether of celebri­ties, brands, thought lead­ers, or funny peo­ple like the dude who writes down his cur­mud­geonly father’s more hilar­i­ous turns of phrase).

The Twit­ter rela­tion­ship struc­ture mir­rors the way I think most of us use the inter­net: We read a lot of people’s stuff, but we don’t nec­es­sar­ily com­ment on all of it. We lis­ten to a lot of peo­ple; we may also speak to a lot of peo­ple (through our blogs, for exam­ple); but we engage in mutual exchange with a few.

I run into Twit­ter skep­tics every day, par­tic­u­larly among entre­pre­neurs, who are often strug­gling to mea­sure the ROI on engag­ing in yet another “free” (but in real­ity time-consuming, and we all know time is money) form of online mar­ket­ing. And I sym­pa­thize: There’s a learn­ing curve, there are legit­i­mate resis­tance points, and it’s hard to know what the pay­off is really going to be. But take it from some­one who came late to the party, with a healthy dose of skep­ti­cism: Twit­ter can not only be fun, but it also affords plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­nesses — espe­cially niche busi­nesses like ours. Here’s a quick list:

• Lis­ten to what’s being said about you & your busi­ness (via Twit­ter search, for example).
• Respond to cus­tomer ser­vice ques­tions. Twitter’s real-time con­ver­sa­tional stream is a boon for hear­ing about prob­lems early and respond­ing to them quickly — which can give you the edge on your com­pe­ti­tion and fos­ter amaz­ing cus­tomer loyalty.
• Invite input (on new prod­ucts, blog top­ics, busi­ness advice, rec­om­men­da­tions, or what­ever you can dream up). Twit­ter can be a won­der­ful micro-focus-group (though of course you can’t always count on get­ting as many replies as you’d like).
• Con­nect with like-minded peo­ple: cus­tomers, prospects, col­leagues, or that kick-ass entre­pre­neur you’ve always wanted to meet. The 140-character limit makes it easy to get around for­mal­i­ties and chat with vir­tual strangers.
• Link to inspir­ing stuff, and share what moti­vates you. When you share your dreams with the world, you’ll be amazed at the rap­port you build within your community.
• And of course, the nuts & bolts of self-promotion: Pro­mot­ing new prod­ucts & ser­vices, dri­ving traf­fic to your blog, shar­ing limited-time offers (espe­cially imme­di­ate or short-term ones) — and track­ing the click-throughs (by using tools like Hoot­suite, which also lets you sched­ule your tweets).

But per­haps the most fun thing about Twit­ter is that it’s an emer­gent medium, and peo­ple are always dream­ing up new ways to use it. I imag­ine that another year from now, I may have a com­pletely dif­fer­ent list, and that’s excit­ing. I love that it keeps me on my toes and intro­duces me to new ways of con­nect­ing. That’s part of why I went into busi­ness for myself — to make sure I’d be learn­ing new things every day, and meet­ing new people.

So there it is, my Twit­ter con­fes­sional. Any­one else late to the party, still resist­ing, or just want to give me a hard time for hold­ing out so long?