When people say they don’t get Twitter — it’s because they need to be more proactive. Twitter doesn’t work if you lurk, post updates, and do nothing else.
What I’ve learned after using Twitter for a month:
- Follow unto others as you would have them do unto you.
- @comment others to make the most of the experience.
- Link to your stuff — smartly. Frequently linking to your stuff leads to unfollows. Besides, it defeats tweet purpose.
- Don’t take non-responses personally. Conversations fly on Twitter, so people might miss it or simply receive too many @replies to respond to every single one.
- Be patient in getting the hang of Twitter. Twitter’s help is helpless and it has a few quirks for a simple app.
- Avoid addiction by taking care in using addicting apps like Twhirl and other cool Twittapps or else Twitter will suck you in for more time than you can afford. I curb addiction by checking in twice a day (start and end of day) and no in-between (except weekends).
- Use your name or else people won’t know who you are. I started with Content Maven and no face photo. Hey, I didn’t know better at the time.
Does Twitter help your business? Well, I haven’t landed clients or talked much shop through Twitter. But Twitter helps freelancers and solo enterpreneurs feel like we have a little office environment, which produces noise that makes you feel like you’ve got co-workers nearby.
Twitter also offers a nice way to connect with friends and colleagues while meeting new folks. I’ve asked and answered personal and professional questions, which can be valuable or simply fun. I asked a question about examples of good online help and one person responded not to use Twitter’s as an example of how to do it. The irony.
Management using jargon like blue sky thinking, brain dump, thinking outside the box, get our ducks in a row confuse staff more than encourage them. We may have heard “thinking outside of the box” for years (I met that term in my first job out of college), but BBC News reports these terms don’t go over well with employees.
“Thinking outside the box” doesn’t sound bad. I think it’s a simple phrase that reminds us to try to brainstorm different and uncommon ways to deal with something or to find a solution. Perhaps, employees believe management is trying to impress rather than communicate when using jargon. Maybe not the “box” one specifically, but others they encounter.
As a long-time process manager, “best practices” appeared in my work all the time. It still does. But it’s the one phrase I can’t find a better term for. It says exactly what we mean… “best practices” for doing something. To explain it another way would take more words.
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