How can Twitter help with integration and collaboration?
This is a guest post from Brian Barnes You can see his blog at http://brianbarnes.wordpress.com/ and follow him on Twitter @BriCallAssist
In business, we all have things we’re good at and not so good at, things we enjoy doing and things we would rather do without, but I had my eyes opened wide less than 1 month ago.
After signing up to Twitter on 2 seperate occasions, it didn’t really appeal to me.
I then tried it from a business perspective and signed the business up to a Twitter page.
I got some good advice from @AnnHawkins who said that people relate better to people rather than a nice logo.
It made sense, after all, people not only relate better to people but I am a firm believer that people do business with people and not business with a business.
I got to setting up a personal Twitter page for the third time, and in my case third time lucky. I got a picture of my ugly mug stuck on with the business twitter background and got to work following people in a similar business.
Still not 100% sure of the whole Twitter phenomenon, my followers have increased slowly in a month, but hoping that I have contributed enough to start that increasing. None of this has anything to do with Integration and Collaboration as such, but Twitter led me to a fantastic group of people who I now consider an essential part of Tweeting, but it not only introduced me to to this group, this group has introduced me to some fantastic tools which have already made my life much easier in a business sense.
This is the Integration and Collaboration bit.
Literally doing nothing one night, I hijacked a thread on Twitter between @hlsbs and @Totally4B. They were talking about Xero, an online accountancy programme. From that initial hijack, the lovely Helen and Nicola introduced me to Capsule, a CRM which integrates seamlessly with Xero. I couldn’t believe it, with the one ‘conversation’ my business was now keeping track of invoices, emails, conversations all in the one programme.
What did that piece of advice cost me?
Nothing!
It was the kindness and generosity of two fantastic Tweeters. As well as streamlining my business, this one thread taught me a lesson. ’Collaboration can be much more effective than competition’ And only today, part of my motivation to produce this second blog was the result of a conversation with @Totally4B She won’t change my ‘flakyness’ and pedantic attitude towards things looking and sounding right, but she gave me a right kick up the A@@ today which is really what we all need every now and then.
What stories have you got about how Twitter has helped you with business, information or inspiration? Leave us a comment below or send us a guest post!