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 In my June 22 HomeTrend Forecast e-newsletter, I advised you that "as a marketer, you should sign up for Twitter yourself to get a sense of what it is all about, even if all you do is follow the major news media to stay abreast of breaking news."
Have you taken my advice and signed up for Twitter yet?
If you have not, it may be because you are thinking the same thing Times reporter Steven Johnson thought about Twitter when he first started covering it. Here is what Johnson wrote in his June 5 cover story on Twitter:
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I recommend that you start using Twitter because I believe that you will discover -- like Johnson and millions of devotees have discovered -- that Twitter has, in Johnson's words, "unsuspected depth." Even if you ultimately decide that you don't want to have a Twitter account yourself, you really do need to keep your finger on the pulse of this social media tool that Steven Johnson and many others think will "change the way we live."
You may already have signed up for Twitter. You may have created your profile. You may even have started getting notifications that perfect strangers (and some quick-rich-quick schemers) are now following you. You may either be wondering what you do now or you may be thinking that Twitter is a waste of your time because you really don't want to know perfect strangers so well that you know their daily routine and vacation plans.
For now, a good way to get your feet wet with Twitter is to look at it as a time-saving way to receive information. Instead of having to go out and find the latest news, the latest news comes to you via Twitter. You can follow the major news organizations to get the latest breaking news. You can follow the American Marketing Association, Marketing Profs, Ad Age, and Marketing News to keep your finger on the pulse of new developments in marketing. You can follow companies like Razorfish and Mashable and people like Jason Baer and Rick Burnes who are on the cutting edge of social media.
Or, you can follow me. In fact, my goal is to become the "go to" person for housewares and home goods marketers. I want to be the person you follow on Twitter to stay abreast of what's happening in the worlds of housewares and home goods and in the worlds of product development and design, marketing, and social media. I promise that I won't be tweeting about what I ate for breakfast. You won't have to scroll through tweet after tweet of trivia and nonsense to get to the good stuff. I'll be tweeting about interesting articles and blogs that I've come across that I think you might be interested in. I'll be tweeting about consumer insight that I am gathering from my HomeTrend Influentials Panel and from other research companies. I'll be tweeting about useful tools and resources that you can find on the Riedel Marketing Group web site.
Want to give it a try? If so, go to http://twitter.com/AJRat4RMG. If you have already joined Twitter, login. If you haven't joined Twitter, click on the "Join Twitter" link at the upper right hand corner of the page. Then click on the word "follow" under my picture.
By the way, the quickest way to learn more about Twitter is to spend an hour listening to the AMA's archived webcast "How to Use Twitter for Business" (click on the link under "recordings") and read Steven Johnson's piece in Time magazine.
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