Twitter and tweeting for business

Like a lot of people, I thought for a long time that Twitter was just a time-suck. It’s not — not just a time-suck, that is, although it certainly can be that if not managed with a steely eye and an iron hand.

Then I started a Twitter account, @tao_of_grammar and I started to get an idea of the many ways that people use Twitter for business purposes.

Whatever your business, chances are there’s a case to be made for Twitter. From Twitter 101 for business:

Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. 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.

• It can help build your brand
  As Kaitlyn Wilkins writes on Fresh Influence, brands are built — or torn down — lightning-fast on Twitter. No other medium has the capacity to get a message out as quickly to a large group of people. She describes how a tweet about a bad experience with UHaul customer service prompted dozens of others to tweet about their own bad experiences. And all the people following those people would see their messages:

  “So, for those of you playing along at home - in less than two hours, dozens of people responded to a single Tweet regarding UHaul, and effectively told 3,763 other people that they disliked the brand.”

  People Twitter about great customer service experiences, too. The lesson is: Twitter can make your brand highly visible — make sure it looks good.

• Address issues as they come up -

If UHaul was privy to the conversation about them — which they could have been, immediately, through Twitter — they could have immediately begun damage control and looked at rebuilding consumer confidence.

• Use that same capacity to improve customer support -

  On Mashable.com, Ben Parr writes about how Twitter can improve not only customer support but also employee buy-in: It’s faster, less expensive and also gives employees a perspective on how their service impacts others. As a bonus, the whole conversation is on record.

  Kaitlin Wilkins writes about her own experience in her post on using Twitter for customer service (Well, that’s not what she calls it but… I’m not calling it “Twustomer service.” Nope.)

  A few weeks ago I was having trouble logging on and posted a frustration Tweet. Within 20 minutes I received a direct message from @sixapart providing me with an email and phone number to use to get my problem resolved immediately. An hour later I was back up and running.

  Note: She didn’t even send a message to the company’s Twitter account. They obviously track the the conversation about them, picked up on the mention and responded quickly. That kind of support and customer care gets noticed, gets tweeted about and — apparently — written about.

• See how your brand is perceived –

Watching the conversation about your brand can yield important insights into public perception, issues and trends that you can use to your advantage.

• Share content or information

Twitter is an amazing venue for sharing information or getting answers to questions. If you’ve got content to promote, Twitter can get it in front of a lot of people quickly. And if they like it, chances are they’ll get it in front of more people. See how that works?

• Crowdsource -

  You also get questions in front of a lot of people quickly. People are generally more than happy to help, whether you’re looking for insights into a market or a nitty-gritty answer to a software question.

  Dan Cohen conducted a crowdsourcing experiment during the Digital Dilemmas Symposium in New York, using Twitter for a line of inquiry that traditionally queries journal readership:

  I set up what in the age of the print journal would have been a ridiculous deadline: only one hour for the crowd to solve the mystery. For a bit of theater (”stunt lecturing”?) I flashed the Twitter stream behind me from time to time during my talk.

  It took much less time than an hour for a solution: nine minutes, to be exact, for a preliminary answer and 29 minutes for a fairly rich description of the object to emerge from the collective responses of roughly a hundred participants.

  …Twitter was remarkably effective in multiplying my voice. Indeed, in the first five minutes about a dozen others on Twitter retweeted (rebroadcast) my mystery to their followers. This “Twitter multiplier effect” meant that within minutes many thousands of people got word of my experiment

• 
  
• Connect with industry leaders -
  

  In 5 Twitter Tactics for Building a Stellar Brand, Andy Beal explains the wrong / right way to connect:

  “Don’t be the guy that jumps on Twitter, “follows” 10,000 people, then tweets “@” them every two minutes. That’s not the type of reputation you want to build for yourself.

  Do be the guy that follows those that have influence and audience in your industry. You’ll learn a lot just from listening to their often unguarded comments, but if you have something valuable to add to their conversation, send them an @andybeal or @chrisbrogan, or @garyvee. If you can engage them in a conversation, they might just @ you back–alerting their thousands of followers that you’re a person worthy of their time, in the process.“

More resources:
Chris Brogan’s 50 ideas on using Twitter for Business
Bruce Clay’s http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2009/03/twitter_your_we.html”>Twitter: Your Weapon in the Internet Marketing War
Michael Stelzner’s How to use Twitter to grow your business

Need help getting started? See Mashable’s Twitter Guide Book.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Why Slackware is still being developed and why you should try it

Slackware 13.0 was released last week. Apparently there are solid reasons that it’s the oldest Linux distro still in development.

There’s a great interview with Eric Hameleers in Linux Magazine explaining why you should try Slackware. Here’s a quote:

“This continuous influx of ‘converts’ is one of the reasons that Slackware has not disappeared into oblivion. Slackware assumes you are smart! This appeals to people.”

Aha! Now I understand the pipe. (Remember “pipe-smoking intellectuals,” anyone?) That assumption might be refreshing. I know for a fact that Vista thinks I’m an idiot — and quite likely a dangerous one, at that.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Skype sold for $2.7 billion

Not that I was worried about eBay’s finances, but I was glad to see that Skype had at least held its value since the purchase.

Mark Andreessen and fellow investors plunked down $1.9b cash and allowed eBay to retain 35% investment equity. The total value is reckoned to be $2.7b. Here’s the press release.

Pen testing through the mail — attack not real but the malware is

Someone’s been mailing letters purporting to be from the National Credit Union Administration to credit unions throughout the U.S. The letters ask the recipients to view training material on enclosed CDs. Not too surprisingly, the unexpected letters turned out to be fake and the CDs loaded with malware.The surprising part, though, is that the attack was fake, too.

Dennis Fisher reports:

“The malware-infected CDs that were mailed to some credit unions may have been part of a penetration test designed to gauge whether an employee would run the software. The SANS Internet Storm Center says it was notified by a representative from Microsolved that the mailing was part of an authorized pen test.”

As far as I can work it out, the letters were fake. Maybe double-fake, since they were from penetration testers pretending to be attackers pretending to be NCUA officials warning about attacks… or is that triple-fake? But nevertheless, the malware was real. The NCUA has issued a warning that playing the CDs could lead to a security breach or have other adverse consequences.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Deperimeterization — outside the walled garden

Deperimeterization was widely reported to be dead a few years ago, despite the best efforts of the Jericho Foundation. Nevertheless, as Jon Oltsik wrote for CNET, the scenario that it was designed to deal with seems to be happening anyway:

“According to ESG Research, the 2004 Jericho Forum vision is now a solid reality. In a recent survey, 60 percent of enterprise (i.e. organizations with more than 1,000 employees) share confidential data with non-employees.”

Privacy for cyberbullies?

“If a parent comes to you… and says that their child is being anonymously cyberbullied by someone from school, and their child is being affected at school because of it - and you do your investigation and find out the identity of the bully… do you have to keep the identity of that bully private because of FERPA?”

There’s a discussion of this issue on the Cyberbullying Prevention Website.

How to send a private message on Twitter

File this under “Lessons learned through pain”: When I first started playing online Scrabble, I frequently tried to look a word up in the dictionary and didn’t realize until too late that I’d been in the chat function instead. Leaving my friends to ponder what I meant by “kraqi,” for example. And then I’d have to cleverly cover my tracks by following up with “is not a word, apparently.” Slick.

So now I’m terrified of doing something similar on Twitter and looking like an idiot not just to my nearest and dearest but to the hordes of people that might, potentially, see my message.

The only way to send a private message on Twitter, as it turns out, is to DM — direct message. Not reply or retweet, both of which will make your message public.

So, um, that said — I probably wasn’t talking to you, per se, when I asked you to pick up a bottle of wine on the way home. Then again, could it hurt?

HP upgrading storage line to 6 Gbps SAS drives

Beth Pariseau reported on HP’s plans to upgrade its storage line:

Hewlett-Packard has pledged to upgrade its entire storage line to 6 Gbps small form factor (2.5-inch) Serial-Attached SCSI drives, and many expect the whole data storage industry to follow by offering 6-gig SAS as an alternative to Fibre Channel (FC) in enterprise data storage systems.

Nettops need more power?

At theONbutton, Neil Berman is less than thrilled by the low processing power of nettops:

Whilst we are eternally grateful to Asus for the original EEE PC and the Netbook offspring it spawned, why do OEMs continue to think it’s OK to package an Intel Atom with GMA950 graphics in a home PC?

Apart from the potential electricity savings why would a sane person ever say, “I’d sure like to have an underpowered home PC which will struggle to play YouTube vids”. And given how much longer this PC would have to be powered-on to complete tasks which an Intel CULV chip could complete in a fraction of the time, are there really power savings there at all?

Your typing errors = revenue stream for ISPs

Our Word of the Day today is DNS redirection, a hot topic since Comcast announced they’d be testing the practice under the name “Domain Name Helper Service,” in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington.

Here’s Karl Bode’s analysis:

While ISPs enjoy painting the services as ultra-helpful consumer-centered affairs, their primary purpose is to deliver a new revenue stream to ISPs driven by your crappy typing skills.