Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform turning up everywhere these days, and economic recovery are both popular topics in the blogosphere. Many people advocate various ways of using Twitter for business benefit. If you are still a skeptic who cautions against tweets, like the SF Weekly’s recent piece begging musicians not to tweet, hop on over to ExecTweets.com and see how top CEO’s are using Twitter.
The divide in opinion about the value of Twitter for business is based on observation of one type of use of twitter, the most popular: lifestreaming. These are the tweets we all love to make fun of, and shrug our shoulders about if we see someone posting every time they get a sandwich. It’s highly appropriate if you are Britney Spears and your fans hang on your every move.
CEO’s, SEO’s, online marketers and other savy pioneers of the read-write web know that mindstreaming is far more appropriate for the rest of us. Mindstreaming is the use of twitter to share with your audience the details of what’s on your mind, rather than the mundane detials of your life. This is far more effective and if done well, you are providing a stream of useful questions, insights, and resources of interest to your audience. You build your brand and trust in the way you think amongst your followers.
But there is another new way to use twitter and I hope it catches on. Moneystreaming. We can all help the economy recover if we would tweet every time we open our wallets, indicating what we are buying and how much we are paying for it.
This gives entreprenuers and marketing folks a valuable insight as the recession continues. It answers for us “What WILL people BUY.” This is critical so we can begin adjusting our products and services to meet the needs of people and businesses in an economy that is dragging on. Most of us have no other way of connecting with basic needs, having spend most of our lives in a time of great prosperity. We can’t even identify an essential or basic need anymore.
Please, do your part to help recover the economy. Start tweeting your every expenditure. I suggest the hashtag #$ to indicate that you just spent money. A side beneift is that you can now look back at your tweets and analyze your personal money allocations and cut out anything you really didn’t need. And your followers can help. They can always @reply to you: “OH Please…did you really need that” when something isn’t really essential. Try it, and leave a comment here to say how it helps you.
