twitter101

Interesting move by the Twitter team – they released Twitter 101 for Business — A Special Guide last night and regardless of whether you’re in business or not, it’s worth a read. They describe Twitter as a “communications platform that helps businesses and their customers do a number of useful things”. That’s precisely what it’s grown up to be and incidentally why I think it will continue to be of interest to Microsoft and Google – because it’s a platform. Like the Windows platform people are using the Twitter API’s to build ever more interesting applications and usage. This is where I think it differs from Facebook which is more of a community than a platform in this sense – I’m reminded of Marc Andreessen’s post back in 2007 about 3 kinds of platforms on the Internet (the original post is now gone). Twitter is a level 1 platform, Facebook level 2 and Azure and Amazon Web Services are level 3.

Anyway, back to the point – this post from Twitter attempts to help businesses understand how they could, and should, use Twitter. The killer point is buried in here

 

Twitter shrinks the emotional distance between your company and your customers

 

That’s why people like BrawnGP are on Twitter. It helps decrease the degree of separation one notch further. It’s a smart move and therefore no surprise to hear Howard Schultz of Starbucks talk about their Twitter and Facebook presence during his remarks to investors at their Q3 earnings call. That just wouldn’t have happened a year ago – Twitter is becoming part of the fabric of doing business and while some may still scoff, you only have to look at the the recent report Charlene Li published with Wetpaint to see how seriously big brands are taking Twitter.

If you’re a business still thinking Twitter is nonsense and waste of your time, it may be worth reconsidering. Check out the additional resources from the Twitter guys

 

 

 

…and if you really want to know more you could do a lot worse than have a chat with my pal @paulfabretti who knows his onions on this stuff.