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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.

An article on FoxNews.com brought up a few introductory tips for businesses using twitter. The key points are following:

1) Use an application: Twitter.com is just one way to access Twitter updates. Applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck and Twitterrific give you a lot more control over what you see on the screen and keep your contacts and topics organized and characterized. Twitter will make it faster and easier to post your own items as @replies, direct messages, and web links. It is very efficient to link your Twitter account with other social networking pages like Facebook.

2) Get followers through common interests or industries: During signup, Twitter will let you scan your e-mail address books to see which of your friends are using the service. Since the key to having a good experience is following the updates from people you care about, this is a vital step to getting started. Pay attention when Twitter suggests following several popular celebrities — you might not want to hear all of their tweets.

You can find followers who are related to your business and special interests through Twellow.com, TweetFind.com, and search.twitter.com. For example, a publicist who is a beginner can engage in conversations through the #journchat (simulation twitter chatroom).

3) Break through the clutter and make yourself attractive: This is very important. When you engage, comment, retweet and share links you become more memorable than handing out your business card. Unlike other social networking services like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter should NOT be a “who has more friends” contest. The key is to build quality lists of business contacts who are trusted advisors and potentially a source of business referrals.

4) Ten to one rule for business expansion: No more than 10 percent of your tweets should be self promotion. For example: Don’t miss @IACEZ on FOX News. Ninety percent should be about personal thoughts or ideas, marketing relevant information and engaging with your Twitter community. We briefly touched upon hashtagging and retweeting. When you first join, look at the public timeline or special interest groups for information that would be of interest to your constituents. Respond to or ReTweet 4 or 5 of them a day. For example:

RT@TheNYTimes Chrysler and Union Agree to Deal Before Federal Deadline http://bit.ly/otvXT

#followfriday in honor of SaaS:@iacez @crakowitz @benkepes @sunir @cloudworks @dobesv

5) Beware of Privacy issues and public disclosure: It is urgent to remember that Twitter is an open forum: Everything you type can be seen by anyone who follows you, and by default anyone who wants to follow you. Your tweets are also catalogued through Google. You can, however control access to your updates:

— If you want to block random users from following you, you can set your account to “protected.” Then when users want to follow you, you’ll have to approve them.

This is useful if you want to use Twitter as a private communications medium, but you shouldn’t over-control your Twitter account.

If you have something you want to say and you don’t want the Twitter world to see it, put it elsewhere. Twitter works best when you join its larger community.

— There’s a protocol on Twitter for replying to particular user’s updates. If you want to comment on something someone else said, write@and then their name in your post (or “Tweet”). For example, “@IAC_Heather, Interesting point.” Then the user will see what you said even if they are not following you, and anyone else who sees the update will know it’s a reply to another user.

— Direct messaging or (DM) is a way to send someone on Twitter a message that they will only see. In order to use it, preface your post with D, for example “D IAC_Heather Please call me at 212-222-2222 accounting emergency.” However you can only DM someone who is following you, so if you want the person you’re messaging to be able to DM you back, make sure you’re getting their updates. Type F (for follow) and then the user’s name. I.e.: F IAC_Heather. A follow command will be recognized by Twitter but won’t show up in your list of updates as a post.