Twitter and business consulting

My blog has been Twit-jacked by Jamie Wright (@jwright)

February 12th, 2009

A couple weeks ago I found @madefromdolly on twitter. I loved the shirts – and the idea. After searching the site, I found that the creator was @jwright and that the shirts were just the tip of his creative iceberg. So, I couldn’t help but ask him to guest post on my blog and talk about how he is using his creativity and twitter to improve his business(es). Thank goodness, he couldn’t say no to someone with his last name! Anyway, take it away Jamie…

Congratulations, you got a Twitter account for your business because you heard on this inter-webs that it was the new cool and hip thing to do. Now what?

My name is Jamie Wright and I use Twitter as a tool for all of my businesses. I am president of a small consulting firm for software development. I am planning on releasing my own software product soon and I have a Twitter account detailing all of the steps we are going through with the product. I have also been a huge fan of t-shirts which influenced me to start a clothing company. I use Twitter for this business as well to help with customer relationships and get feedback from a community.

I have found that Twitter is an exceptional tool to use for your business and I want to share four tips and ideas I have learned along the way.

1.) Transparency builds your business

Most people don’t know why your business should be on Twitter, hell, most people don’t know what Twitter is all about. How many times do you hear “why do I care when someone is making a sandwich?”. I guess it depends on if you are going to learn anything from that sandwich. Will you learn about a different meat or topping you have never tried of on a sandwich? Will it give you happiness if you now have a better sandwich as a result? Who knows and that is the point.

I recently started a Morale Twitter account in order to be transparent about building a software product. I want to share each step along the way in small, bite size chunks. Twitter is the perfect tool and I have gotten a lot more traffic to the Morale site as a result of this transparency. A bigger advantage of this transparency is the fact that I have gotten responses from other developers letting me know that there are better ways to do various development tasks. I have learned a lot from my community.

Transparency can allow you to learn about your community and your community to learn about you and your business.

2.) Content is King

Twitter is not about tricks and traps on getting a bunch of followers. Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean that they are listening. It’s all about the content. You have to have the content that people care about. Just announcing something and hoping people will show up is what magazines and newspapers do. We all know what is happening to magazines and newspapers now a days. If all you do is broadcast, there is no interaction between your community and you because your community does not care with what you have to say. The method to gather this information is to post useful and relevant information for your audience, listen to the feedback, and be patient. If your content is good, they will come.

3.) It’s just a tool

Twitter and other social networks are just tools and it is really all about content that you provide within these tools. If the community is actively asking or looking for something and your business can help then that can result in a quick sale and probably a a long term customer. My Made from Dolly Twitter account often announces sales via coupon codes . I get some response to these but not much. When I do a search via search.twitter.com and I hear someone say that they are “almost going to consider” one of our products, I send them a coupon code and it is almost always a sale . I think this is because it is some money saved for them but it is also equally knowing that someone is listening to them in the community.

You have to be involved in your community and Twitter is just a tool to allow that to happen on a massive scale.

4.) Customers may not always be right but they can let a lot of people know how they feel anyway

How many people could you tell a few years ago that the service at your local cable company sucked? Ten? Fifty if you knew a lot of people and talked a lot? Today it is thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. Just broadcast this on Twitter and people will get your message. This can be very detrimental and/or helpful to companies. It’s important to search Twitter and watch what the community is saying about you and your business. You need to search EVERY SINGLE DAY. F*** that, search several times a day to see what people are saying. If they are saying good stuff, thank them and let them know you are listening. If they are saying something bad, make sure you acknowledge it and state your side. It is important to catch these little conversations as soon as they happen. If you wait even a few hours, they may get stale and will be considered an out of date conversation. It’s hard to talk with everyone at the water cooler if they are already back in their cubicles.

We recently refunded several users money for our shirt at Made from Dolly because of a mess up in our ordering system. The printer did not know the orders existed for several days and they were not printed on time. When I see this error, I immediately issued a refund and we still printed and shipped their shirts to them. I searched Twitter before this happened to see if I could address any of the users who may have complained. I did not find any results from that search but the good thing is that now we have addressed it and even made the mess up public. Who knows, there may be a nice response to that gesture.

It’s important to know that now, the whole world has the ability to watch your customer service and it leaves your reputation more vulnerable. Make sure you realize that and take the appropriate actions.

Those are some Twitter thoughts and ideas I have learned along my journey. If you have any ideas, thoughts, or complaints, please leave your comments here cause I also search the blogs for reactions to my businesses. I hope you are doing the same.