Twitter will cut out the waffle
Liam Horan YES. I Twitter. My name is Liam and I Twitter. Often on my own. I don’t really know exactly what I’m doing. Maybe I’m wasting my time, the hour or two a week I end up spending on there. But I feel I’m not. It’s just a hunch, but a hunch is often the most reliable of all. I feel this whole Twitter thing will prove very useful yet. I feel I am headed in the right direction with this whole new phenomenon. I’m Liam, and I Twitter.
In the last week I have:
* Asked for some guidance on who does printed t-shirts in Ireland (I got four replies, all useful);
* Told the world (and now you, you should never miss a trick) of my Championship Man CD in Ballinrobe last Friday night. The world managed to cope reasonably well with the news, and the earth continued to turn on its own axis without much disruption, but a few people I’d like to know about the event got to know about it, so, in today’s parlance, we’ll call that a result;
* Told the world, again, about sundry other business and personal events I’m involved in.
So who picked up on them?
Sometimes it’s hard to know. I follow 262 people, and 113 people follow me (the missing 149 are the subject of some investigation they will find extremely uncomfortable.) I got a few messages back, expressions of goodwill, promises to go into a local shop and buy the CD, and, I suspect, a general noting of the contents of my Tweets.
Michael Fitzgerald is a former Waterford football full-back who runs a design company www.fitzdesign.ie in Galway. I heard him speak recently at a networking event about Twitter. ‘Facebook,’ he said, “is said to be for the people you once knew – Twitter is for the people you want to know.”
It’s not a bad description. A confession: I don’t slavishly follow the news agenda any more. It can drain my morale. I was never less in touch with an election than I was this time. But I still need to get news.
Ergo, I follow the Tweets of some key people whose opinions I would like to hear. I don’t need chapter and verse, just a flavour.
And so, instead of wading through the papers and tuning to the news programmes, I can just pick up something like the following from David McWilliams the morning the most recent Anglo-Irish results came out:
“Following the Anglo results this morning, the full nationalisation of the two big Irish banks is practically certain.”
That was all I needed to know. A couple of hours later he elaborated:
“Re Nationalisation - if others have losses as big as Anglo’s, they will wipe out their cap’ base, govt have to inject more cap and take over.”
(The abbreviations are his.)
The beauty of Twitter is that you can only post 140 characters per Tweet. Thus you have to get to the point. There is no room for waffle, no time for clearing your throat, no opening for you to give history lessons.
It promotes brevity. Sometimes that’s a very good thing. In business, what do you do? Write me in 140 characters what you do? Tell me in ten seconds?
Of course, you can’t tell me all I need to know under such space and time constraints – but, if you use it properly, you can excite my interest.
Give people 2000 characters or ten minutes to talk about your business, and, more often than not, they will bore and/or confuse you (no obvious comments please.) They will tell you things you don’t need to know. They will talk themselves when they should be talking about you.
As I said, I’m not sure where it’s going, Twitter. But I have a feeling that, one day, it will bring a significant business dividend for me.
When it does, you’ll be the first to know. In 140 characters. From my sun-kissed villa a few leisurely miles outside Nice. With a smug smile on my face like Michael Ring the day he got half of Westport elected, or so I’m told.
Liam Horan is the proprietor of Sli Nua Communications, which runs a monthly business network in Castlebar. The next network event is on Thursday, July 9th, and guest speaker will be Robert Grealis (ex CEO of Ireland West Airport.) To be included:
admin@slinuatraining.com or 094 95 42965.
