Twitter as a corporate tool? Six reasons your company should be communicating in 140 characters or less

By now you've likely heard about Twitter. TIME let us know why everyone was talking about it, BusinessWeek told us why it mattered, and Forbes named a Twitter King. After reading Federal Computer Week's cover story on Twitter earlier this week, and excellent posts from social marketing guru Chris Brogan and Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang on the value of Twitter for business, and how to jump in (here and here, respectively), I decided to pull together some ideas for the use of Twitter as a corporate tool.


But first, some Twitter love from businesses who are already using Twitter to communicate.
37signals, the software company behind popular Web-based applications like Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack, shared their benefits with Twitter:

"We're able to see what people are saying about us or our products, and if they report a problem or slowness with Basecamp, immediately twitter them back. If they have contact information on their profile page, we send them a direct email from our support address asking for more info so we can troubleshoot the problem for them. It opens up this whole new level of contact with our customers and we're able to proactively handle support requests within seconds of problems being reported."

Last year, the CEO of calendaring startup 30 Boxes weighed in with their goals for communicating via Twitter:
1. keep those people who are interested literally in the development loop
2. provide an offsite status location in case there are any site issues–so bookmark http://twitter.com/30boxes.
3. provide a direct and instant feedback mechanism in case any of you find something drastically wrong, have a creative impulse, or just want a private channel (add 30boxes to your twitter account and you can message us directly)

Want other examples of who's doing this well? Check out Dell, Comcast, Zappos.com, Southwest Airlines, Siemens, JetBlue, and Intel.

Back to the point of the post. How can you use Twitter for your business?
1) LISTEN. Want to know what your customers, partners and target press/analysts are saying on Twitter? Use tools like Twitter Search (formerly Summize) and Quotably to not only find, but track conversations. If you want to be notified every time somebody tweets about your company, product, competitor or market, set up Twitter alerts (similar to Google News Alerts) via TweetBeep.

2) COMMUNICATE. Using Twitter for business is about more than just observing what people are saying about you. Use it as a tool to communicate with customers, partners, media, analysts and your broader community on the trends impacting your industry, product / service news, or company culture. Respond to the questions and feedback you receive. Above all else, make sure that the company voice is authentic, and that if you are hearing customer feedback via Twitter (even bad) that you take the opportunity to actually help.

3) SPOT TRENDS. Use tools like Twist to compare the relative popularity of words and phrases (similar to Google Trends), Twitbuzz to track the latest popular links, and Tweetmeme to identify hot trends.

4) REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT. Use tools like TwitterFeed to feed your blog (or other corporate RSS feeds) directly to Twitter.

5) ENGAGE YOUR INFLUENCERS. Just like the rest of us, an ever-increasing number of analysts and journalists are using Twitter to communicate, source stories and stay in touch with their communities. Follow those people for the same reason you want to engage with customers and partners - to observe what trends they are watching and what they are working on, to engage in a dialogue on industry trends, and - above all else - establish an authentic and personal relationship with those contacts. SageCircle maintains an excellent Analyst Twitter Directory, and Twellow is a people search engine that will help you locate other influencers.

6) PROVIDE REAL-TIME UPDATES DURING EVENTS. During its annual user conference in June, SpeakerBox client Red Hat used Twitter to keep attendees up to date. For Red Hat Summit attendees who were not Twitter users, Red Hat took advantage of a large, open wall in one of the convention center's central areas and projected the Summit feed onto the wall. Each time I walked past, large groups of attendees were gathered around the Twitter wall catching up on the show's real-time updates. Industry conferences are using it to communicate as well. Check out the RSA Conference's Twitter feed for one of my favorite examples in action.

At the end of the day, the true value of Twitter for businesses is the forum it it offers to create authenticate relationships. Don't think of it as another place to test marketing messages or sales pitches; its not. Twitter is your opportunity to show brand transparency, authenticity and sincerity by listening to and communicating directly with your community.

- Stephanie Stadler