B2B Micro-blogging - Twitter

Original Post  - March 27, 2008

Since I’ve seen it covered in the news quite a bit lately, and many other vendors integrate with it, I wanted to do an overview of Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool. According to Wikipedia, micro-blogging is:

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.

Twitter is a free and has an easy sign-up process. Once you have an account, you can update it (or twitter) with what you’re doing by several different means: the website, your phone, email, IM, and through twitter-specific applications. People can see your updates by visiting your page on Twitter, or by “following” you through updates on IM, phone, etc. Twitter updates can also be integrated into other web pages - such as blogs.

Ok, so why would anyone care and what good is this for B2B? Personally, you probably have friends and family who are interested in what you are doing - going to the gym, reading a book, etc. As a business, you also have customers and partners who are interested in what you’re doing as far as your business is concerned. Twittering (yes, it is a verb now) and other micro-blogging tools are a great way to send little updates to keep your customers up-to-date with just a minor effort on your part.

I have a Twitter feed for sazbean, which you can check out to get an idea of what Twittering is.