Getting Down to Business

Okay, so everyone’s a-twitter about social networking. Nielsen Online clocked 7 million unique visitors to Twitter during the month of February, about a 1400 percent increase from a year earlier. eMarketer predicts there’ll be over 18 million Twitter users by 2010.

Numbers like that don’t get overlooked by the business world. Already, companies are finding creative ways to integrate Twitter into their marketing program. A recent BusinessWeek article suggests some business marketers are trolling Twitter for leads. A business owner said she “keeps tabs on her competitors.”

Other business executives are following their clients on Twitter. Chip Lambert, owner of a Phoenix business consultancy, told BusinessWeek:

“You can look at conversations and reposition yourself, your products, and your services in a way that appeals to the market you are reaching out to.”

Twitter wasn’t necessarily intended for business use. Services such as LinkedIn, a network designed to help people establish business contacts, are probably more appropriate. (LinkedIn has over 35 million registered users.) But Twitter might be an Internet phenomenon that naturally crosses over from the consumer to business user.

Take the case of award-winning photojournalist Jim MacMillan. He left his job at a newspaper and established an online business, joining some forty social networks, including Twitter, according to a report in Knowledge@Wharton. “Today, he has close to 14,000 followers reading his posts on Twitter – a number on par with some celebrities. … He believes he reaches a larger and more engaged audience” than when he worked for the newspaper.

Twittering might also be a legitimate way to re-establish yourself if you are laid off or leave a job to go solo. But as some Wharton professors point out, social networking is not without risks to your personal brand. Professor Andrea M. Matwyshyn says:

“Your professional branching-out can be commingling with your personal friends’ accounts, and you are exposing all of them if somebody decides to give away your information or post something imprudent.”

Professor Eric Bradlow thinks “you need to seed the right people, to develop a word-of-mouth army” to be successful.

So go ahead and use Twitter for business. Just be sure whatever you tweet doesn’t come back to haunt you.