This week my interactive marketing team has been coaching me on how to use Twitter as an arrow in the business development quiver. I’ve also invested time, training, and even dollars in Compendium Blogware (who support this blog) and other social media tools including LinkedIn, Plaxo, FaceBook, and Ryze.
Twitter is in a class by itself. By far the fastest-moving and most viral of the social media that I have encountered, it is also the most intrusive. I subscribe to a philosophy that as an entrepreneur I have 100% control over my time, should I choose to exercise that control. Yet Twitter is a continual invitation to get sidetracked and interrupted.
The growing Twitter community includes a broad spectrum of participants–many, many solo entrepreneurs and individual Internet marketers, as you would expect, but also there are many much larger players taking part in a corporate role or occupying both a corporate and a personal presence.
To deliver more products and services online is a key component of The Whale Hunters business development plan, so engaging in social media experimentation seems to make sense. It may indeed be a fundamental requirement of what we are trying to accomplish. But it’s got me wondering how to maintain these “presences”, how to evaluate ROI, and how to manage the time pressures.
I would love to hear your thoughts, and I invite you to share your own experiences in this realm.
