Comments on: Using Twitter As A Business Communication Tool

By: Chris Mahan

Chris Mahan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:18:09 +0000

@simonstapleton: If the tweeter is irrelevant, why are you still subscribed? Prune the Tweet Tree.

By: simonstapleton

simonstapleton — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:41:03 +0000

Wouldn’t the relevance/currency of a tweet be dependent on the tweeter?

By: Chris Mahan

Chris Mahan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:02:56 +0000

@Mark: I disagree on the replying to tweets less than 5 minutes. I think that if what you say is insightful and/or genuine, people will listen. If I tweet something like:

Oh, I’m so far behind. I’m reading last night’s tweets from @SomeBloke and can’t seem to catch up.

then people will really get an understanding of my mood and state of mind.

Twitter is about making connections with other human beings. Anything that can strengthen the heart-to-heart is good stuff.

Text BBS was so expensive… I remember paying something like $120/month in 1994… insane! At least I had 14400… Remember netsplits?

On personal productivity. I put in twitter what I’m working on (coding, mostly) and that motivates me, as if in the back of my mind I imagine the whole world watching me (well, my 37 followers at least…).

By: Mark McClure Coaching

Mark McClure Coaching — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:18:16 +0000

@Chris – I hear you. I’m currently restricting my Twits, Stumbleupon and linkedIn (Q&A) tasks to before 8am and after 10pm-ish as part of an offline personal productivity drive.

I recall Paul Colligan (a mover and shaker in the Podcast world IIRC) saying that no point replying to tweets older than 5 minutes… coz nobody’s reading them. (Thoughts?)

Before I heard of Paul I was replying to tweets received the previous day… almost like email!!

(Ah, text BBS – those were the days. I still have the 2400bps Datatronics “pocket modem” aka brick I took with me to try and send short text-only emails from Hong Kong to UK back in the stone age (1990). lol)

By: Chris Mahan

Chris Mahan — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:57:22 +0000

Agree entirely on knowledge network. I would have to add that twitter makes it very easy to bring out the humanity of an individual. I would also say that this is what people really look for. Are you pimping your product and blog? Sure, no problem, but make sure your followers don’t end up thinking of you as a Press Release generator. Twit about your personal life, your project, interject semi-private messages, demonstrate your fears somehow, and you become really human in the eyes of your follower. This allows them to create an emotional bond with you as a human being, and this will reinforce the impact of your “press releases” (which should be few and far between).

@Mark: It can be distracting. But distractions are useful, no? They let you take a step back and see what’s really going on. The worse you can do is charge headlong in the wrong direction. Better to stop and re-orient every once in a while, no? Well, interacting on twitter gets you a very good feel of where the herd is heading right now. Reading your blog-feeds can do that to some extent, but the twits are more immediate.

By: Mark McClure Coaching

Mark McClure Coaching — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:06:24 +0000

I am still in two minds about Twitter – is it an another arrow for the social media bow or just a distracting waste of time?

One practical use I can see is as a Question taking tool which holding a teleconference. Much quicker than email (as long as the Tweet servers stay up… they do get bashed quite hard) for interacting with the host.

I also get some blog traffic from curious tweeters.