Charlie Four Whiskey

I think, therefore I blog

While we’re letting all the responses to yesterday’s question (on what ‘evelator pitch’ you’d use to describe Twitter) percolate, I’ve decided to share some of the ways that I use Twitter.

While I tend to get most new technologies pretty quickly, that didn’t happen with Twitter (and based on the responses I’ve received so far, that’s also the case for a lot of you). I think the problem that I was too busy looking at what it was, rather than thinking about how I could use it to further my goals. That in part was down fact that at the time of joining Twitter,  I hadn’t really identified my goals. I’d recently stepped down as President / CEO of a small public telecommunications company that had been pretty much ravaged by the first wave of our current economic meltdown, and I was busy nursing the bumps and bruises that I’d picked up along the way.

My challenge was all about deciding whether I wanted to return to what I know (earlier in my career, I’d been both CIO and CTO for three different business units within a Fortune 30 company), jump back into the fray of start-up / early growth companies (always exciting and challenging, but I’ve learned that the mortgage company won’t take stock certificates as a means of payment) or go back to ploughing my own furrow as an independent consultant, sharing the lessons that I’ve learned along the way, and helping other companies ‘improve how they connect, communicate, collaborate, compete and win’.

Okay, back to Twitter, and how I’ve started to use it. If you haven’t signed up and downloaded a copy of ‘Twitter Handbook‘ by now, stop reading this, and go and do it!  Trust me… you will thank me for these words of wisdom later. Because I didn’t do that early on, I spent a lot of time staring at the Twitter home screen, and just scratching my head. Since I started reading the Twitter Handbook, I’ve had a series of mini-Eureka moments (or MEMs, as we call them in the trade) as I’ve learned more about what it is capable of, the ecosystem that has grown up around it, and just how people are using it.

My current focus is on building my personal brand (for those of you who want to learn more about personal branding, take a look at the presentation that I posted up on slideshare, called ‘Left Out of LinkedIn?‘; while it’s primarily a primer on getting the most of LinkedIn, I did cover personal branding, and there are a number of links to some great background materials), and monetizing the brand equity that I build up by winning paying consultancy gigs. In all the channels I use (LinkedIn, several blogs, DocStoc, slideshare.net, and now Twitter, I try to reinforce my credibility as someone who can help others get their heads around this brave new world of social media tools and technologies, and start to use them as part of integrated marketing and communications strategies.

Let me give you an example of how I’ve been using today.  Early this morning, I decided to check out the latest tweets on ’social media’ via search.twitter.com. I find that so many of us in the blogosphere (and tweetosphere) are like the seven blind men trying to describe an elephant. While many seem to suscessfully describe an aspect of this (r)evolutionary approach to communications, the whole truly is greater than the sum of all the parts, and so I find it useful to read, read and read some more. Today, the first thing that caught my attention was Kyle Flaherty’s post ‘Is Social Media the Same As Marketing? Yes! No!‘, which in turn was building and expanding upon Beth Harte’s earlier post ‘Is Social Media the Same As Marketing?‘. I found both posts fascinating, and ended up posting a long comment in response to Kyle’s post, which I’m including below.

This is why I get excited about social media as a great leveler and incredible catalyst for finding, augmenting and creating knowledge. While we’re still in the realtively early days, a great deal of the conversations, experiments and learnings are all about the tools themselves. Looking back over history, it’s always that way when (r)evolutionary technologies come along – i.e. the telephone, the electric motor, the internal combustion engine, the internet, cell phones. After a while, we internalize the capabilities, and focus on using them as a way to extend our capabilities, doing things faster better, cheaper and smarter than we did before, or doing new things that were just impossible before.

Kyle,

Great post. In particular, I love the conversation thread that it’s triggered.

Here’s my two cents on how I look at this. First we start with people, and people have a natural tendency (ok, most of us do) to want to socialize, communicate and collaborate with others. At various points throughout history, various tools and technologies have been invented that have given us more ways to do just that.

In looking at social media, I view the various tools and technologies as the latest additions to the toolkit, and we can use them to improve the way we connect, communicate, collaborate, compete and win.

They start by giving us new ways to connect with others, and to have conversations with them (rather than the old school ‘communicate at them’). Just as in real life, some conversations go nowhere, but others trigger a deepening of the connection, and develops into relationships.

From relationships, things happen. That sounds a little trite, but it all depends on the nature of the relationship, and what common interests or needs/wants surface, and how the parties can each benefits (I believe that while in the short-term, benefits can flow one way, they need to be reciprocative in the long-term, if the relationship is to endure).

BusinessDictionary.com defines marketing as the “management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer”. While social media can definitely expedite, accelerate and greatly expand the reach of your marketing activities, it is also so much more than that.