Passions That Pay

Twitter is now all the rage. My Passions Skype room has been doing in en masse (yet another great reason for support rooms – learning new technology together is so much easier!).

Twitter is referred to as microblogging and it exists to answer one simple question -”What are you doing?”. So how can it possibly help business? It is all about relationship building and brand awareness. Through these short (140 characters maximum ) messages we are able to broadcast to anyone who is following us content that can include urls to podcasts or blog posts we have just completed, answer questions and share useful information. We can even add some more personal messages that afford glimpses of the real person behind the brand.

Opportunities can come your way through Twitter that may not have appeared through any other channel. A personal example of this is something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Jason Alba is someone I follow on Twitter and is the author of a couple of excellent books, I am on Linkedin, Now what??? and I am on Facebook, Now what??? (he is planning one for Twitter now). He twittered that he was presenting a webinar in a couple of hours and so I twittered back that I intended to be there. At the Webinar, which is one social media he used our twitter conversation to show one of the uses of Twitter and showed my profile page. I had some free publicity and I gained some new followers.

Joining Twitter is extremely easy and my friend Ann Rusnak, the Time Diva has put some videos together to help you through the process step by step.

Twitter Tools and Applications

Twhirl , a desktop application from Adobe. http://quotably.com/ attempts to group

http://quotably.com/ associates Tweets (a Twitter message) to assemble whole conversations – this can be especially useful if you are intrigued by a message from someone you are following that is directed at someone you aren’t (therefore you missed the Tweet that had the original message)

Word Press PlugIn creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Firefox plugin for twitter/

Shareaholic – a Firefox plugin submits the webpage you are looking at to various social bookmarking sites and also to Twitter

(many thanks to the members of my Passion Skype room for sharing these wonderful resources and in particular to Tamara Wilson )

Remember also that Twitter is mobile- you can use your cell phone to text in Tweets.

To follow my Tweets go to http://twitter.com/KRESCHKE