Living The Tweet Life - How Innovative Businesses Are Harnessing Twitter For A Competitive Edge
Posted on Mon, Apr 04, 2011 @ 01:08 PM
Dr. Amy Vanderbilt (@DrAmyVanderbilt) served as a Judge for the 2010 B2BTOTY Program and is Founder and Chief Strategist at TrendPOV.com, GPS for the business strategies of more than half a million executives worldwide.
The B2BTOTY awards are all about businesses doing better business via smart use of Twitter. I thought it was only fitting to dive into just exactly how smart some businesses are at harnessing this microblogging platform to its full potential.
Businesses use Twitter for either external use, internal use or both. Far too many businesses use it for neither and that is you, here is your invitation.
Businesses are using Twitter externally for marketing and customer service, which you are probably familiar with. Follow your favorite brands and tweet your issues at them and you have (I hope) often received a response. More innovative external uses for Twitter have emerged including not just interacting with your customers but using Twitter to deeply understand your market. What is important to your customers, who they are, demographics, social graphs, influence and more can all be harvested from Twitter.
Hiring a new employee? Businesses often tweet it out, but more innovative businesses take it further by using Twitter to search for candidates, and using tweets as part of the application process. Real time demos, and customer training now include twitter Q&A in forward thinking businesses. For the shy or proprietary-conscious businesses, private broadcast and tweet channels fit the bill.
For those businesses hardened enough to handle it, there is significant potential in using Twitter for competitive intelligence. Your competitors' employees and customers are spilling a virtual river of useful information your CI department of enjoy. In fact, while you are out there, make yourself aware of what your own employees and customers are giving away.
On the internal side of the house, private team-based tweet streams are helping all manner of businesses organize fast responses, coordinate and share updates. It's not just operations that benefits from Twitter inside a company. Microtraining (which has higher retention rates) via Twitter is a simple and effective way to fit in regulatory based training and even management and leadership training among many topics.
And now for an innovative use of Twitter that I would love to see in action but have not yet seen any company try... A private company-wide stream for innovation wherein employees tweet their ideas as an entry mechanism into your corporate innovation processes. A tweet versus a lengthy explanation could be a great way to trim down your time to process new ideas. Let's face it. If you can't express your idea in 140 characters, you need to go back and think on it further.
Get creative! Real advantage comes from doing what others have not. Dream up new ways to use Twitter in your business. Real time, short, to the point, private or public - Twitter may be a perfect, free, and analyzable way to go.