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How many times, we feel like talking to someone but can't even take the first step. It starts with "How to approach" and once you approach "How you build a meaningful conversation". If the conversation goes like flowing water, than it is of no worry but if it does not, "the onus lies on the initiator to transform a talk into a conversation".

I had an interesting experience during my association with a startup where we handed over free gift to each person who helped testing our product. The free gift was definitely priceless for us since it would help us to spread our word [as our name was printed on the gift] but very few people noticed it. That is where each one of us started interacting with every person during the testing process[spending an extra minute or so] to explain about our product and startup through the "name" which was printed on the freebie.

It is a universal truth that "Pictures speak louder than words" and to demonstrate that we have this Twitter T-Shirt[which I ordered months back] from Pringoo

The T-Shirt contains my Twitter profile and 400 of my randomly selected followers. It is an excellent marketing tool [much more than just putting your company's name on it]. These are some of the basic things it does :

Effective story telling
As Seth Godin points out that Great story telling should capture the imagination of the audience. This is what the T-Shirt does perfectly. It not only eye catchy but also makes a person to craft his/her own story around the picture. This curiosity makes him/her to clarify whether the guess was right !!!

Starting a conversation
As pointed in the beginning, this is a great tool to make up a conversation. I was travelling in a bus and a guy came to me asking "Is this your Twitter profile" and at the end of it, we exchanged business cards and got connected elsewhere. That person was curious to know "Not only about Twitter but also about the other guys pictured on the T-Shirt"

Popularity of your service
In this case, the T Shirt was spreading the word of Twitter & to build my own brand [IMHO having 400+ followers is no big joke ]. What if your service had more than XYZ followers and you randomly selected first ABC & got them printed on some medium. It would definitely help spread the word much much faster !!! Even better would be if this was handed over as a gift to some lucky user of your service.

This is just one example of so called "great story teller". May be next time when you hand over a freebie, the first question that should come to your mind is "Whether it would help build a talk or conversation" !!!

If you have any other thoughts about the Twitter picture, do share them by leaving a comment & the same would be included in the article.