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Big boys are the guys who are really good at what they do.

Little boys are the rest of us, who admire big boys.

The mindset of big boys:

1. They truly enjoy what they do
2. They constantly look for new struggles to make them better
3. They ignore competitions
4. They do NOT admire
5. They focus on Now
6. They do not believe in “secret formula”, they do not believe in the answers/solution that can be applied to themselves that are handed by others. Instead, they constantly practice on their own, exchange ideas on the side; and when they find the solution, they are glad to share.
7. They don’t care what “success” is defined, they just keep their heads down, do what they are good at.

The mindset of little boys:

1. They (or we) really admire big boys
2. They keep the little “answers” or “solutions” they learn from “success seminars” to their own, and refuse or do not know how to invent their own solutions for the problem they face
3. They do not really enjoy what they do
4. They focus on “one day”, future. They forget about “now”
5. They don’t truly know “practice makes perfect”
6. They believe in luck way too much.
7. They think about “success” too much

For starters, or aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s important to take that leap of faith: set your mindset as if you are big boys.

I used to admire the hell of every big boy that I can find through reading online (techcrunch, hello?), through my successful friends, even through my windsurf buddies who know how to maneuver every move no matter how vicious (or awesome) the wind is.

The truth was: I believed there are magic solutions out there that I just did not know: if I am lucky, someone might just give it to me.

The truth was: I had no idea what it takes to be really successful is to forget about being successful altogether.

Wake up, aspiring entrepreneurs, stop being a little boy, set your mind to be among big boys.

Do following to set your mind (and yourself) among the big boys:

1. Start working on things that you personally care or have deep experience, or have easy access to.
2. Finding some real world problems within that area.
3. Looking for solutions for those problems.
4. Keep practicing the problem solving skills for your interested area until you find a solution that you are happy with.
5. Once you become happy, you will find more motivation, you will stop admiring, you will start to focus more of your energy on your own. You will become willing to share. You will be constantly above your own game.

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to grow up!

On Dec. 19, 2007, Fastcompany published an article by Robert Scoble, analyzing why twitter will change business communication. 17 months later, we are experiencing this in a big way. I thought it’s good time to take a look at where we came from. (note some information are outdated)

Hard to believe that only 10 or 15 years ago we interacted with coworkers and colleagues with memos and phone calls. Email and instant messaging changed all that. Now there’s a new communications revolution coming. These services mix contacts, instant messaging, blogging, and texting, and they’re poised to make email feel as antiquated as the mimeograph.

The best known of the new services is Twitter. Since its debut last spring, it has been one of the fastest-growing apps in the history of the Internet. The best way to describe it is as a microblog service in which you tell people what you’re doing or thinking at any given moment. The hook is that you’re limited to 140 characters. “It’s strangely addictive,” says NBC videographer Jim Long. “Evidently, people are interested in what I’m doing, and I genuinely care about what they’re doing.”

Twitter’s basic idea has proven so popular that others have copied its premise and added features. Jaiku lets me include blog posts, my link blog, and more along with my mini posts. Pownce users can send files to one another, as well as calendar events. At Facebook, I can add such information as my favorite music and the syndicated Web feeds I’ve shared in Google Reader.

All this adds up to a new way to share information about yourself. Although the content of the messages can vary wildly from voyeuristically interesting to terribly dull, a frequent stream of updates can strengthen your brand. My 4,000-plus Twitter “followers” can get my blasts online or via text message, and each one is also its own Web page, which means that Google can see it and let people search for it. When you’re traveling frequently and working from coffeehouses or the backseat of a cab, these services are great to keep in touch with coworkers back at the office and with customers nearby. “I post where I travel and arrange user meetups,” says Betsy Weber, an evangelist with software firm TechSmith.

The professional intimacy these services create–hey, if you know someone’s whereabouts and musical tastes, you’re halfway home–can also win you clients. “People won’t do business with you until they like you or have a sense of trust,” says Cathryn Hrudicka, a consultant who uses Facebook, Jaiku, and Twitter. She has already gotten referrals from people she has met online because she has shown she’ll be available when clients need her.

Sales and marketing are lagging in seeing the potential here. When I used all these services to tell the world that my wife and I were expecting a child in September, I anticipated hearing from the world’s largest consumer-products companies begging me to try their latest diapers, food, car seats, and financial instruments. What came back? Nothing. Where was Procter & Gamble? Given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there’s an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we’re volunteering so much information about what we’re doing right now, whether it’s working on a project or eating a chicken-salad sandwich. Learning how to tap it correctly–both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts–will be the next major challenge for these companies.

If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business.

Jeff Jarvis, blogger, journalism professor, and author of What Would Google Do?, talks with Senior Editor Diane Brady at Business Week about what executives need to know in the realm of social media, particularly

1. Don’t try to control
2. Don’t expect people to come to you..you have to go to where they are
3. Unleash people in your company to be people. You have to speak in a personal, authentic voice. Case: Dell Computer
4. Don’t be too scared to make mistake…and when you do, admit it
5. Don’t be stupid: Twitter is a real time resource – it actually save your time, spread msg much faster. Use it but don’t be stupid

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)

BY FC Expert Blogger Marcia Conner, Originally published on FastCompany
(This blog is written by a member of “FastCompany” expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone. How companies should use Twitter. More answers to executives’ tough questions about microsharing in the enterprise.)

Business leaders tell me they can’t use Twitter (or its enterprise-strength counterparts) because they don’t have enough space to capture deep thoughts and bright vision. This admission often follows a conversation about why they don’t want their people to use these tools, which ironically often has more to do with productivity and legalities than making room to say something big. As part of my ongoing effort to address the skeptics, here is one specific question I hear frequently and details on how I respond.

Question: How can I say something substantive with Twitter?

Answer: Practice. (131)*

* When you “tweet” (the slang for writing a microsharing message) the number of remaining characters you can use appears beside the box where you type. I’ve included these numbers to give you a sense of how much more I could have been written.

Leadership involves sharing seminal concepts and creating an environment where these ideas can come to life in everyone’s everyday work. In an age of shrinking attention spans and economic distractions, clear concise messages play best. Few of us listen long so stop dinking around the edges. Get on with it. Now’s the time to be brief even if learning to be succinct can take time.

Blaise Pascal wrote (not in Twitter but in a letter from 1656):
I have made this letter longer because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter. (55)

At first, it can take more time to write something laconic than to write something long. In my experience, working with dozens of leaders focused on this specific challenge, the process gets easier and more effective within a few weeks. And this newfound skill can be used in other settings where being crisp sells.

I suggested recently:
Think of Twittering as training for an elevator pitch completed by the 2nd floor. (62)

Short messages allows readers to approach updates with a headline scanner’s mindset, skimming a large number of post quickly, ignoring the ones of no interest, and grasping the interesting ones with little additional cognitive load. This means we can quickly process a message stream and then turn our attention back to other tasks. The efficiency is so palpable.

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. (0)

The aim of these short bursts is not to be simple (although plenty of people use Twitter for updates that are at best simple). I believe we, as business leaders, are most effective when we say important things in simple ways. Offer up timely stats, your analysis, or a direct link to something you’ve just read. If you want to help people work smarter by understanding what you’re seeing, why not point them directly to what you see and then give them a glimpse of why you believe it matters?

George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research wrote:
Thinking that if the financial ship can be righted, the economy should be OK. (63)

An increasing number of CEOs are using Twitter and similar tools for the enterprise because microsharing also provides an opportunity to open dialog within an organization, throughout an enterprise and with customers-to-be. With a few words of prompting, people (who you might not even know) can provide expert testimony, gut-level hunches and field views you’d never see otherwise. You can even collaboratively brainstorm without ordering in lunch.

Jonena Relth wrote:
Growing leaders in our organizations requires modeling what we want people to do and become.

I believe there is no better way to keep leadership and vision in mind than chronicling and acting on it day in and day out. You just need to begin.

And if you’re still stuck on the actual be brief part because you’re a member of my friend and colleague Wayne Hodgins’ ad-hoc club, “Why use a sentence when a paragraph will do?” — begin modeling by learning how.

* Ask your kids for tips on text-messaging shorthand.
* Remove anything that’s implied.
* Edit mercilessly.
* Dust off that thesaurus or crossword dictionary to find shorter words.

Now get on with it. (121)

Have a question you’d like me to answer? Ask here or in fewer than 140 characters @marciamarcia

I had a quick tweetversation with one of the most successful “twitters” (I later found out) @caseywright, and later discovered that he runs the Wright Brothers Communication and has some really great keynotes discuss how businesses and you should utilize social network like Twitter. The video below is one of those, very inspiring: you will for sure learn from wholefoods and zappos.

Social Networking Secrets Revealed from Wright Brothers Communications on Vimeo.