The Real Power of Twitter

NOTE: Thought I’d share a post I made on the UK Business Forums. It may be blindingly obvious, a blinding revelation or somewhere in between the two… Anyway, here it is:

——————————————————————–

Here’s my 50,000ft view of Twitter. I’m keeping it general and not necessarily business orientated because to get the business side of it, you need to get the phenomena as a whole IMHO.

The 140 character tweet may be seen as the closest thing we have as an expression of a single unit of thought (this may have been verified somewhere important – can’t think of where).

This is important when you realise Twitter is growing by around 5,000 to 10,000 new users per day… with each user expressing multiple units of thought, which is building an ever changing, ever evolving matrix of human thoughts.

The power of micro-blogging (I believe twitter is just the first incarnation of this phenomena) is the ability to search this “matrix of thoughts” in real-time and connect* with people whose thoughts are in congruence with your thoughts (or business intentions).

*When I say connect, I mean “have-a-conversation-with”, not “spam-the-hell-out-of-them”.

I guess it’s rather like over hearing someone talking about a problem you know you can help solve, then humbly offering them a hand. A bit like the local plumber in the pub overhearing a person talking about the problems they’re having with their boiler and asking them what noises its making etc. You get the idea

And that, I believe, is how you can use Twitter. Not only to further your business, but to connect with like minded people in general. I won’t go any more specific than this because the principles can sometimes get lost in the details… and everybody has their own way of doing things anyway.

Cheers,

George

PS: As far as business effectiveness goes, a couple of tweets earlier this year led to a £15k deal. Not bad for a few tweets…