Twitter: Far from a Flight of Fancy for Business

This is a post by guest blogger Jonathan I. Ezor.

140: The Twitter Conference is taking place September 22 and 23rd at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. Presented by The Parnassus Group, this conference differs from another major Twitter conference, Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference (which began in New York and is expanding to London and Tel Aviv as well as Los Angeles over the next few months) in its focus on Twitter as a business medium, instead of the Pulver focus on the significant cultural impact of Twitter. For those who may not have used Twitter, or who may only have heard of it in connection with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, the idea of Twitter for business, let alone a 2-day conference drawing speakers such as Tony Robbins, Levar Burton, and Dr. Drew Pinsky, might seem unlikely. In fact, Twitter has become a tremendously valuable resource for businesses, and is growing more so by the day.

Twitter’s power is in its simplicity: it is essentially a text-only service, where users’ posts are limited to 140 characters at a time. Each user generally sees messages (called “tweets”) only from those other people whom the user specifically “follows” and vice versa (although all users’ tweets also show up on the firehose-like Public Timeline unless they have expressly chosen for them not to). Posting something to Twitter is as simple as typing and clicking, and can be done from a computer, a cellphone (via a text message to 40404 from the user’s designated cell number), or a smartphone (there are multiple Twitter programs for all major smartphones, including the Palm Pre, iPhone and BlackBerry). While many users access the service via the Twitter.com Web site, Twitter has enabled 3rd party software to connect directly to the service, which has been the key to business use of Twitter.