Let's get started ...

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.

Twitter 101 - Twitter for Business

For those who are looking out to use the medium of Twitter for Business purposes, the wait might just be over.Twitter has released the OFFICIAL guide-Twitter 101.

Below is the officially released guide for business users using Twitter

Case Studies
You can find some interesting case studies here. In case you are looking out for more case studies you can head on to my LinkedIn question[status - closed] here

Related articles
LinkedIn - The Twitter success story
The Twitter success story - Updated

[LinkedIn] The Twitter Success Story

The question which was posted on LinkedIn about Twitter - Success story through Twitter has received excellent response from guys from different geographical locations.

A gist of some interesting answers below -

Story - 1
Just to share an experience on Customer Service and Listening. I have been on twitter for 6-8 months now, I just shouted out about @cleartrip not giving out any offers on twitter. cleartrip listened to my shout out and rolled out the offer in twitter. Now that's definitely gotta make a customer feel good.
Twitter is more about engaging with your customers, to know what they want and more importantly act on it.
Then there are companies in the b2b business finding leads through twitter. So its happening, but companies are more or less just absorbing the stuff which can be done on twitter.
-Rahul Nambiar,Interactive Solutions Architect

Story - 2
Kogi bbq, a korean taco truck in Los Angeles has attributed much of its rapid and recent growth to twitter. http://twitter.com/kogibbq as has Coffee Groundz, a cafe in Houston http://twitter.com/CoffeeGroundz.
-Gary Sanchez, Consumer Marketing Leader

You can check the remaining answers/contribute your success story here

EVANGELIZE yourSELF ...

It has been almost a month since the last update on this blog. Past few weeks have been pretty bad where I had an incident which made me realize "How search agents like JustDial can lead to mis[information] instead of providing information"...More on that in a separate blog article.

Just came across an interesting audio presentation which touches on The art of evangelizing oneself , hope you find it useful too ...

Success stories through Twitter [Updated]

Few weeks back, I had posted a question on LinkedIn about "Twitter's usage in Business". Today, I just stumbled upon an interesting presentation[shown below] that not only explains Twitter's usage but also backs it up with a good number of case-studies. BTW, the question is still open here

[LinkedIn] Success stories through Twitter ...

It has been almost a month since my last article & once again busy schedule has distanced me away from my blog Few weeks back, there was an article on this blog about Twitter and since, than I have been much more active on it

Well, we all know about Twitter & it's usefulness for business. However, there has not been [at least I have not read about it] similar news like this one where startup/company has generated sales through Twitter.Below is the question that I have posted on LinkedIn and to answer it, you can leave a comment below or head-on directly to LinkedIn

There would be many more startups/companies [apart from Dell, Sun etc.] generating SALES through Twitter

Twitter, a company that is making news without making any revenue is familiar to all of us. Though, most of us on Twitter use it for personal use; I would like to know about the following:

1. Is your company/startup using Twitter ?
2. If the answer to (1) is yes, how have you used the medium e.g in generating sales, getting feedback ?
3. Is there any success story [apart from Dell making $1 Million in sales through Twitter] where a startup/company has been able to generate sales through Twitter.

PS - I posted this question after I could not gather much information from leading blogs/ websites/newspapers.

How to use Twitter effectively ?

It has been more than a year since I am on Twitter but I was never caught in the the web of Twitdiction [Twitter Addiction].The first question that always comes to mind is "Who would read my tweet" and if at all someone reads my tweet, why would (s)he bother to reply me with a solution.But this turned out to be a misconception just like the one we have about Blogging.

For the past few days, there has been a steady growth in my T-follower count & T-following count, which gave a trigger to this article.

Below are my picks on how to make EFFECTIVE use of Twitter :

1. Use Twitter like LinkedIn:
LinkedIn has been a great tool for Business Networking[link here] and it is a place where you would find guys from the top to the bottom part of the corporate ladder.Seeing Twitter's phenomenal growth, you wouldn't be surprised to see the same set of people here as well.The idea is connect with them; check their followers list and follow the relevant people in their network. To take it further, Twitter is one step better in terms of transparency since you won't require the other person's email-id to follow him/her [exception is when the profile is locked].TweetSum is an awesome service that helps you more efficiently decide whether you should follow someone back once they've followed you on Twitter

2. Understand the time-zone :
Once you have established the network, you need to maintain it properly. How would a follower feel if you tweet "Good Morning tweeple,howz you?" and your follower in a different time-zone reads that in the night It is bound to happen that after irrelevant tweets like these you may loose a handful number of precious followers. We are no celebrities like @BarackObama or @ShahrukhKhan or @Padmashree Warrior etc.,that our followers would be interested in whether we had tea or doing coding or sitting with girlfriend; such tweets would surely bring down your follower count. This becomes very important when your precious followers are from various parts of the world.Though Twitter tag line says "What are you doing", it's meaning is much more than that !!!

3. Tweet & retweet relevant content :
This is an extension of the previous point, tweet[or even retweet] something meaningful which might be interesting and relevant to you & your network, keeping in mind that each tweet should bring in more RELEVANT followers on board[There should be some ROI for each tweet].Use HashTags or tags like [MY BLOG],[TECHNOLOGY],[STARTUPS] etc. wherever required so that uninterested followers won't spend time in reading that tweet.The crux is Tweet less , tweet relevant ...

4. PASSIONATELY LISTEN to your followers :
This would be the basic usage of Twitter and needs no elaboration. If you are a brand, it becomes necessary to look into what the Twitter(ers) are saying about your brand & be proactive enough to reply to their tweet.For example: Online travel company Cleartip was fast enough to respond to one of my tweets that referred them[Tweet here and Cleartrip's reply here], I really like their UI but this quick response doubles my liking for them.Freshbooks have proved that Twitter is a great platform to create passionate brand evangelists;their must-read case study here.

5. Use "Social Media Monitoring" tools for your links :
Being only limited to 140 characters, links that are posted on twitter have to be shortened using URL shortening services[list here].Though each service gives us a short URL, many a times it becomes important to know status of the link[how many read, percentage of people reading from different parts of the world etc.];to keep it simple-we need something like Google Analytics for short URL(s).These analytics would help you understand whether twitter is REALLY working for you & your brand. My personal favourite is Cligs, you can find the pros & cons of various services here

6. Maintain an effective Twitter background :
This just came out from my personal experience.Being passionate about Entrepreneurship, once I changed the twitter background to my current one; the number of followers increased at a very steady rate.Compare the profile page with RSS Feed; we read an article based on the title & it's relevance to us[even though the complete article may not be present in the feed !!!], similarly an effective backgound gives a clear idea about "THE REASON WHY YOU ARE ON TWITTER". This even saves the other person's time & his/her decision to connect with you becomes faster !!! TwitBacks also helps you creating custom Twitter backgrounds that would make your profile page more meaningful


7. MONITOR your twitter behavior :

One fine day, you realize that 'N' followers have stopped following you, hence before this happens it becomes necessary to check your TWIT(avior)- Twitter Behavior.TweetEffect helps in understanding which Tweet of your's caused a negative effect on your followers and helps you keep a check on your activity.

Note:
If you liked this article, we could get connected on Twitter & LinkedIn.

In case you have some more interesting points to add, please leave a comment and the same would be added to the main article [with due credit to the commenter].

Hubert Chang , Google's third Co-Founder ?

All of us know about Larry Page and Sergey Brin but what if , after ten years of incorporation of Google ; a guy comes out and claims to be the third co-founder A guy named Hubert Chang claims to be the third co-founder of Google. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki's tweet for this information. Check out the shocking videos below where Chang explains how the Google journey began...

You can check out this article [which has an interesting tag:"If you liked this post please spread it"] for the shocking information.It would be interesting to keep a watch on Washington Post for updated information where they claim to have mailed Professor Rajeev Motwani of Stanford University for more details.

On the lighter side , this makes me wonder :
Q. What might be Google's immediate move ???
A. Ban Hubert Chang from Google search , just like John Chow [check out here]