I Trump Jayson Blair (Part Two)

As I noted previously, there have been two recent cases in which Twitter users requested information from their friends to cite in blog posts they were composing. I was happy to oblige, which led to mentions of my name (well, my alias) in posts by Geoff Livingston (see previous post) and Doug Haslam.

Specifically, Doug Haslam requested examples for use in his blog post Twitter: Where's it @ for Business?. Let's start with Doug's explanation of why Twitter and its 140 character "limitation" is important for business.

Twitter’s limits: 140 or fewer characters per message, stripped down functionality, feed into its strengths: ubiquity, and an easy source for quick responses.

Doug then notes Twitter's ability to allow people at conferences to connect:

[P]eople at conferences have been able to connect with each other and more importantly, with those who cannot attend. More important to event organizers than the live-blogging conversational, community aspect of this (which I wrote about previously on Media Bullseye) is the promotional side. Attendees let people know the best of what’s going on, and spread that information beyond the previously self-imposed borders of the event.

One great example sent to me from Twitter was from a man who likes to be known as “Ontario Emperor,” who took part in the Twitter group set up around Oracle Open World, an “Unconference” that the software giant established for its community. You can read the results on the “oow” Twitter page.

One minor point of clarification to the casual reader - Oracle OpenWorld itself was not an unconference but, as Justin Kestelyn noted at the time (see The Beginning of the Long Tail), there was a lot of user-generated content that was associated with the 2007 conference, of which Eddie Awad's @oow tweet aggregator was but a single example. If you want to see how this aggregator helped to collect comments on Larry Ellison's keynote, see my November 18 post on the topic.

But back to Doug Haslam's post, which talked about a number of other examples of Twitter business use. Identification of potential employees and contractors, word of mouth advertising, brand establishment - those are a few of the examples that Haslam's friends cited of the business benefits of Twitter. And it goes without saying that Doug used Twitter to gather all of this information in the first place.

To find out how to make Twitter work for you, read the rest of Doug's post.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

Sphere: Related Content