Business Cards, Meet Dust Bunnies. Expect to Be Friends for Awhile.

After weeks mulling it over, I wrote a how-to on using Twitter to build brand integrity. It was published on MarketingVOX today.

I was pretty skeptical of Twitter at first; to be frank, I thought it was a load of time-wasting crap. Well, it definitely contributes to my procrastination factor, but it also did something really neat: it reconciled relationships to networking. (I've complained about the contrived feel of classical networking in the past.)

For real-time relationship development, and just generally getting people to give a crap about what you have to say, few things beat Twitter. Not social networking, not blogging. (Although they help.) I actually feel like I have a social life waiting for me every time I approach the monitor.

Which in retrospect is really kind of lame.

But there are offline elements to this as well. At ad:tech SF last week, I met Twitter friends in person and made new ones, too. That, coupled with whomever added me on Facebook, means I don't even feel the inclination to dig through the fresh stack of business cards I came home with. Everybody I want to know, I'm in contact with at any given moment.

Much nicer than the unwanted cold call and awkward martini meeting that follows (if you're lucky!):



While on this big evangelistic high, I considered preaching the merits of Twitter to my parents. Then I thought against it; my relatives are sort of religious. And then I wondered what Twitter could do for religion. 

Ooh. The plot takes a sinister turn.