What Am I Doing Now? – I Started Twitter

After being a Twitter skeptic for some time (see Twitter Enters the Enterprise? and Unending Growth? Part Two - Twitter, well as an admirer (see More on the Twitter Market from Dion Hitchcliffe and Will the Twitter Application Market Match the FaceBook Application Market?), I have decided to give it a try. Twitter was vigorously defended when I questioned it and a number of people have urged me to join. The tipping point was my involvement with TVissimo, our free television search engine. As a member of a new start-up, we decided to provide a Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/TVissimo). I have heard from a number of people involved in start-ups that they have used Twitter as another communication channel so we decided to give it a try. The feed is listed on our TVissimo TV Schedule Blog. Please feel free to follow our feed, as well as our blog.

I asked several of the startups I interviewed for App Gap if they have a twitter feed and a number of said yes. They see it as an alternative channel to reach their clients and not a replacement. Zappo shoes has gotten a lot of press because of this. Jermina Kiss of the UK Guardian writes about this in Brands on Twitter. She mentions a site, Social Brand Index. She said that a “glance down the page of represented brands is quite interesting, and there are several hundred listed.” One of these is our TVissimo feed.

We have also provided a feature for our TVissimo users to send Twitter alerts to themselves or others when a show (or a show with a certain actor, etc.) they selected comes into to the two week advance window.

So after starting our TVissimo twitter account, I started one of my own (http://twitter.com/BillIves). I have picked up a few followers and am happy to accept more. I will write more about the experiment and experiences with both Twitter feeds. Let me know your experiences with your personal twitter feeds and any company twitter feeds. I am new to this so very appreciative of any suggestions.

Post script - BusinessWeek just came out with an article, How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands.

Comments

[Patrick DiDomenico]

Nice post, Bill.
Welcome to Twitter. I've been on it for a while and have found some value. I've written about it here: http://lawyerkm.wordpress.com/category/twitter/
Of particular interest are the enterprise twitter-like applications. Yammer has been getting a lot of press, but there is another enterprise micro-blogging platform called Socialcast (read about that here: http://bit.ly/3Lb6zl )
[I'm not affiliated with any of the products or companies mentioned]
Patrick

[bill Ives]

Patrick - Thanks. Here is a piece I did on Socialcast. http://www.theappgap.com/socialcast-brings-twitter-style-functionality-into-the-enterprise.html I was recently contacted by Yammer so i will likely do a piece on them soon for the AppGap. I liked your twiiter posts. I am going to include them in an upcoming post. Here is another related post I just did today on Fast Forward - http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/09/18/more-on-enterprise-twittering-dr-vaine-on-corporate-blogging/

Bill