Some things have changed dramatically. For one thing in our absence people have developed something called “Micro-Blogging” and it’s, no pun intended, huge.

I’m going to dispense with making a case for this, and get right into how to get started and tell you straight up, all you need to do is get on Twitter. If you spend 30 minutes of your time on Twitter looking for your customers, and are not excited, you probably aren’t going to get it. Trust me, on this, you will get the essential mechanics really fast. I’ve shown lots of people how to use Twitter, and, especially compared to using a blog, everyone of them figured it out the mechanics right away. If you need more incentive, see this article from Business Week. It will take a little while to really start amazing your company with Twitter, but the amazing thing is it’s within everyone’s reach to do that.

Let’s Get started!

1. Go to Twitter.com and create an account. Use either the name if your business (e.g. shadowboxstudios), if you work in a big company make sure no one will freak out if you use just the company name, or something about your representing your business (e.g. larryatshadowbox), which is a bit safer in larger companies.
2. Get comfortable, take a deep breath and make a simple post (called a Tweet). It must be brief as their is a 140 character limit. The suggested starting point is to simply answer the question: What are you doing? That’s the essence of it right there. Congratulations, you’ve created and started using your new Corporate Microbl0g.
3. Now for the fun part, use Twitter’s search tool to start searching for words that relate to what value you provide. It’s very easy to grow your visibility on twitter if you are helpful. That should be easy to do once you get comfortable, after all your business is all about being helpful. If you are a powerful brand you should have no problem finding people talking about you on Twitter. If you are not you can find people using words that relate to what you do, and enage with them.
4. Once you find someone Reply to those people, thank them for their support, help them solve their problem, tell them about a new way you can help them, in short show them that you care and are listening. Be prepared to answer questions, after all you want to start a conversation, not just impart information. 

Two things to keep in mind to make the most of your new Micro Voice

1. Revisit your blog strategy and tweet in support of that strategy. Don’t use it to simply do short versions of your press releases (though you can tweet about your press). Post things that happened during the course of your business day that you don’t mind people hearing about.
2. It’s much more effective if your tweets clearly convey that these tweets come from you, an individual person. For that reason you can, and should, tweet about things that are just interesting to you. Tweet things like: how much you liked an article you read online (provide a link!), or how pretty the day is, or what networking event you are going to. These kinds of posts should not outnumber the ‘on message’ tweets you provide, but they should be in the mix, to help convey that you are an individual joining the conversation, you just happen to be representing your company as you do it.

I’d love to hear about what your experiences are using Twitter as a company representative. Please share!

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