Welcome to the first installment of Nan the Power User. You’ll see me pop in from time to time with reviews, tips, tricks and ideas with a business twist. I’m the Chief Inspiration Officer at Salesby5, a marketing and consulting group in San Antonio, TX, where we dramatically increase sales for companies and organizations. Additionally, I am quite the BlackBerry fanboy/evangelist. I’ll welcome feedback and new ideas; I always like to try new things! One of my weapons of choice in connecting with others is to use Twitter.
Connecting with People
In the recent past, there have been small windows of accessibility to the people you aspire to connect with. If you think back, sending a letter was a great way to connect with someone. Then, we evolved into sending these letters via fax because it was more time efficient. Now, looking back, faxes seem ancient compared to sending an email. Those that led the way on using these technologies were able to cut through the noise and connect with the right people. Today, the new window to access people is Twitter. I call it a window because, like the previously named methods of communication, it’ll be ruined by the noise of too many people and will close as a great way to connect.
For those of you that haven’t heard, Twitter allows you to talk to your friends and strangers, 140 characters at a time. This medium requires you to be to the point, which is important since the average human is hit with over 3,000 messages per day. It isn’t that we are too dumb to process information, it is merely a matter of scarcity – there is not enough time to deal with so many words!
Due to Twitter being hip to API’s and allowing people to develop applications to attach to their service, we have so many ways to access Twitter. Although this isn’t close to an exhaustive list, some of the BlackBerry Twitter clients include TinyTwitter, Twibble and TwitterBerry. Each of these applications allows you to post, check out your timeline and the public timeline, send direct messages and more. Some people prefer the location aware Twibble, while others prefer TinyTwitter’s ability to hide ultra chatty-friends from time to time (yeah, I’m looking at you @guykawasaki). My personal favorite is TwitterBerry. I like the layout of the screen for the timeline because the pictures aren’t too big and the font size is just right to be able to fit more tweets on the screen. Additionally, @jaschroe is working on auto-updating feeds and notifications. I would also love to see the ability to temporarily hide friends.
Today, on Twitter, you can meet new vendors, CEOs, CIOs, authors, bloggers, techies, freaks and geeks. During the course of my day, I am able to ping new folks to connect for a drink or a quick meeting. To date, I have developed relationships with world class thought leaders because I spent the time to send a “tweet” that was genuine.
Sharing Your Life
As I mentioned, I live in Texas. It wouldn’t be uncommon for me to see rattlesnakes, armadillos, or Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs. Using TwitterBerry lets me share those experiences with people all around the world who would likely be fascinated by such occurrences. Just because it’s everyday life for me, doesn’t mean that it is for you as well. When I share these sights and sounds on Twitter via TwitterBerry or Twitpic, it weaves my existence more tightly into yours and gives us a bond that we didn’t have before. Recently, I attended CTIA. From there, I tweeted the keynote highlights as they were spoken. Later, I decided to walk from my hotel to the famous Lombard St. I tweeted my progress and supplemented the walk with photos via Twitpic, a service that lets me post pictures to Twitter. My Twitter followers were ecstatic. They basically felt as if they were riding along on my shoulder learning new information from CTIA as it was announced (before the media was able to do so), and later, they received a photo tour of my walk. This scenario would not have been possible without TwitterBerry and its abilities to receive replies and direct messages. Standard texting would have been a hassle due to the number of text messages I would receive in reply.
Bottom line: You don’t necessarily have to be important, powerful or good looking. Being authentic and slightly ahead of the curve—in this instance via Twitter/TwitterBerry—is allowing me to share my life with more people, connect with people who I would not be able to reach in a different mode and find new people who are an asset to my life. I’d say that’s a great use of technology!
As seen on BlackBerryCool.com
Try ubertwitter lots of sweet options for your blackberry and using twitter. I switched to it last night and I refuse to use twitterberry now. Pic uploads for on it and it seems faster then twitterberry.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the corporate side of Twitter and social media.
I recently went to a social media conference where companies were talking about social media on a very simple level. Imagine a room of 50+ people from the old school of media all asking each other “so what is this zany thing called a Tweet?” It wasn’t so bad though because we got on the topic of corporate tweeting and social media. One the one hand, you want to reach out to the customer and be friendly, and engage your market. On the other hand, you’re vulnerable out in the open and the idea of constant, unedited communication has your legal department on the verge of a coronary.
A few talking points:
– What are some best practices for running a corporate Twitter account? There is definitely a balance between engaging the market, and protecting your brand and satisfying legal.
– Can corporate ever be successful in these ventures? Personally, I can’t bring myself to follow many of these accounts because they remind me of link bots; just taking the safe route and sending out product links and updates.
Social media is quickly becoming popular in traditional companies (nice one RIM!), but it’s apparent the old and new schools are in many ways mutually exclusive. Someone help!
Thanks Chris, that’s exactly what I use. This piece was written many months back on BlackBerryCool and chose to republish it for those that might not have seen it the first time. I really appreciate you stopping by!
I think that the major thing is that many people don’t understand the concept of Twitter, which, as you have eloquently put, is to connect and to be to-the-point. I personally like the Opera Twitter widget; I find it very easy to use and update while I am working (I have a very cheap phone, so I usually just text tweets when I’m on the go).
Twitter, I feel, is about networking. As I’ve posted in my own blog, Twitter is part of the social networking revolution, which is becoming more and more important to name-brand identity for corporations. As much as many people don’t understand it or dislike it, I don’t think it’ll become a thing of the past very soon.