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In an article published on CIO, a few business executives raised good points using twitter to their advantage, take a look:

Catching the Eyes of Business Users

Twitter has also led business executives and managers to think about how they might take advantage of the service to improve and streamline internal communications. Drewe Zanki works for Rio Tinto, a British mining company and oversees an IT group in its minerals division in Denver. He heard about Twitter by reading some of his favorite blogs and immediately became interested. He joined just a few weeks ago.

When he first signed on, he noticed that there was a lot of chaos in the amount of communication occurring, but he saw some potential business value.

“Often, the e-mails I get from CFOs or IT directors are half a line anyway,” Zanki says. “Being able to get your business case through in 140 characters or less could be very valuable for everyone’s time.”

Tim Davis, CIO of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, a fast-food chain, says that he joined Twitter back in April after making a commitment to stay more informed about social media.

“This spring I decided I needed to get educated as social media is just taking off and I couldn’t continue to shun it without investing the time to figure it out,” he says. “I also wanted to figure out how this all fits into business models.”

He began following the updates of bloggers, social media gurus and even found other Twitter users who shared his passion for cigars, a hobby for Davis.

Like Zanki, one problem Davis immediately experienced was some Twitter users overusing the service and dominating his cache of messages. “I had to quietly drop Scoble because he would spew out eight tweets within three minutes,” he says, referring to the technology blogger, Robert Scoble, who, at the writing of this article, has 28,336 followers. “Personally I don’t think that is the right use of Twitter,” Zanki adds.

David Elwart, CIO of South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, says that he has experienced similar problems since joining the service. “There can be too much noise,” he says. “Some of them you quit following because of it. But some people are really interesting and can turn you on to new things.”

For instance, Elwart began following a woman in California whose specialty was state parks and recreation. The messages the two exchanged over the service led to South Carolina state officials, at Elwart’s behest, inviting her to speak at their annual conference on tourism so the state could learn from her insights.
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For businesses, there would need to be more specific controls, says Davis of Popeyes Chicken. He says “the verdict is still out” on what a Twitter-like service could mean to his company. “I could see a company setting up a few Twitter accounts for specific types of communication [such as] system-outage notification and disaster notifications,” he says. “It would have to support hierarchies so that you could send one message to a team, a group made of several teams or higher levels. These groups could be departmental or geographically based.”

Popeyes Chicken started a user profile on Twitter to engage in conversations with other Twitter users about its core product. One tweet on June 19 asked another Twitter user, “Take a look at popeyes.com. It is REAL chicken marinated from the inside out. Not that chewed and glued processed stuff!”

Elwart of the South Carolina parks says he can see how his employees—spread out among the state’s 47 parks—may find such a service like Twitter helpful for broadcasting short messages that people have to see but don’t need to fill up e-mail inboxes.

“The welcome center of a park could say on Memorial Day that ‘traffic is heavy,’” he says. “It’d be a lot quicker to post [via microblogging] than writing an e-mail.”

The other upside, he says, is that the technology can be utilized easily on mobile phones since it relies so heavily on SMS text.

First published on ChrisBLogan.com

First Steps

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

11. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
12. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
13. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
14. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
15. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
16. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
17. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
18. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
19. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
20. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

21. You don’t have to read every tweet.
22. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
23. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
24. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
25. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
26. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
27. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
28. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
29. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
30. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

31. Twitter takes up time.
32. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
33. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
34. There are other ways to do this.
35. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
36. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
37. Twitter is just for technonerds.
38. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
39. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
40. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

41. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
42. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
43. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
44. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
45. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
46. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
47. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
48. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
49. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
50. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)