Many good things happen if you are prepared for them.
Last Monday we had a successful 140 Character Conference in Des Moines. (You’ll read more about it next week. We are working on making more information available for those who could not come.) It was an opportunity to connect our online connections in real life. It was also an opportunity to create some serendipity and see what we could build from attending and participating in the conference.
I’m meeting with Shannon Latham from Latham Hi Tech Seeds to see what we can create out of the 140 Character Conference.
A group of us are creating Social Media Midwest – Dave Murray, Becky McCray, Erik Granning, Ryan Johnson and Gus Wagner. Dave and Erik have built Social Media Michigan – and we thought it would be a great idea to do something for all of the Midwest. If you’ve got ideas, why not post them here? I’ll happily forward them on to the group.
Debworks received a request to write an article aimed at the decision makers in companies about why they should be using Twitter. Now I need your help. Do you use twitter? Why? I know the answer for my company, I’d like to hear what you think! I’ll also include some of your answers (with credits if you give them).
Those are just a few of the projects that came out of attending and participating in the 140 Character Conference!
picture found at http://columnary.blogspot.com/2011/01/serendipity.html
There are so many reasons I use Twitter it’s hard to narrow it down. It has helped me in immense ways both professionally and personally. I’ve found many clients (and they’ve found me) and if not for Twitter I’d have been hard pressed to stay in business during the downturn in 2009.
On the personal side, my life has been truly enriched by the friends I’ve made. Some of the most important people in my life are people I’ve met through Twitter (including you, Deb!)
To say Twitter is a waste of time or not worthy of peoples’ time and attention is completely inaccurate, it’s worth every minute I spend.
Suze –
thanks for the kind words – and sharing how twitter has helped bring in clients. It’s good for the decision makers to hear that – it’s not all talk talk talk!
NARMS is a trade association for retail marketing service companies. The members have a need to source labor on a 365 calendar. Since 1996, the website at narms.com has helped them connect with reps at a low cost using a JobBank and a searchable database that contains well over 100,000 qualified reps. In 2007, we started pushing the jobs out to aggregators (indeed.com, simplyhired.com, etc) and in 2008, we started pushing to twitter as well @narmsjobs 4 times a day. There are about 8,000 job listings per month.
This year, we also pushed to Facebook (facebook.com/narmsjobs) but the bulk of the traffic through social media comes in through twitter. We’re also able to continue to attract profiles from reps at an increased rate because they find us through twitter.
Anyway, an example of a forward-leaning trade association using twitter to solve a challenge for their members. Hope this is useful for you.
Gerard –
That is EXACTLY what I was looking for! Thank you for those stats.
Deb