In addition to pre-launching the NEW, fun, educational and eco-friendly wall art for children of all ages (Officially released on Wednesday, July 29 for viewing and sale at http://www.greenie2steps.com) @Greenie2Steps
publishes information about the business, engages with the community to get their feedback and opinion, provides special offers and coupons, and shares news & fun facts about animals and the earth, as well as tips on making out planet a better place to live!

We’d love to share more of our story if you are interested! We found GBTV through switchingGranny!

Because we work with musical instruments and gear for recording or pro audio, and because our clients use this gear for so many different applications, we have a lot of fun and relevant topics to discuss, from software how-to’s and recording techniques to cool new products or just fun music-related topics.

First, it’s important to note that we DON’T use Twitter to blast a never-ending stream of deals into cyberspace. Using Twitter, we tweet real-time updates on new product announcements, new product arrivals, notable deals, and highlights of unique gear (like limited edition guitars). We link to relevant articles and videos (not just our own, but relevant articles and videos posted by others too), announce software updates, and post about events happening here locally at our facility as well. We also ask our followers what sorts of things they’d like us to tweet about, and respond with more of those sorts of tweets.

Our communication is not a one-way street – with Twitter, we can interact in a variety of ways with manufacturers, customers, gear and music bloggers – including forwarding interesting posts and commenting or directly replying to their posts both privately and publicly.

Besides making sure our Twitter communication is two-way, another very important aspect of Twitter is staying in tune with what’s being said. That means watching for mentions of our company’s name and mentions of the names of brands & products we carry. This has been the most effective means for us to identify customer service issues, and we’ve been able to communicate with customers, whether via Twitter or directly, with very positive results (for instance, we had some interaction with social marketing blogger @heidimiller about a defective product she’d purchased from us, and it turned into a pretty interesting customer service story).

People are pleasantly surprised to find out that a company is paying attention and that we’re willing to respond to them directly and address their concerns. It’s also really fun to share in their excitement when they tweet about a recent purchase arriving on their doorstep, or the latest copy of Sweetwater’s ProGear Directory in their mailbox.

What’s worked best? Real-time announcements related to new product arrivals or promotions, links to how-to articles, and direct interaction to resolve customer concerns. What hasn’t worked so well? Some products generate less interest than others, and local-interest items have, well, only local interest. : )

Thanks for asking the question, Cali. I’ve really enjoyed seeing the replies so far and I’m sure this will generate a lot of great conversation.

John Grabowski
@sweetwatersound

The key to success using Twitter for business is “giving”. Become a source of useful information, lend an ear and give advice and interact with the community don’t just sit on the sidelines. Having a huge number of followers looks very impressive but if you aren’t interacting with them in a two way conversation you’re missing the whole point of being “social”. Without that relationship you’re just a salesperson knocking on doors, but interact with the community and the doors will open.

Cali, you asked the question but you’re the perfect example of how to do it. You “give” with your podcasts, blogs and tweets and in return you have a community of almost 50k Twitter followers waiting to interact with you. That’s how you do it!

Our little Electronic Design Automation industry — developers of tools for electronic circuit and system designers — just had its single biggest annual event, the Design Automation Conference (DAC). Twitter search on #46DAC to see the many active tweets and discussions related to this technical conference and vendor exhibition.

Very few firms used it for outright promotion or PR flacking as you might expect. Instead, you’ll mostly see examples of effective personal communication and supportive sharing that could never quite happen without Twitter.

Business-wise, Twittering for my client provided a whole new way to build positive awareness, with a direct connection to some of the industry’s key influencers that was much more effective than a small firm can achieve with traditional PR. Twittering for myself helped build awareness of me as a smart marcomm consultant — hopefully! — but more importantly helped me feel a greater connection to the industry and the people shaping it than I have felt in some 20 years of participating in this show.

I’ve been using online forums since the late 80s, so I’m not a complete luddite. I’ve had a profile on LinkedIn since they opened their doors. But my impression of Twitter was that it was a gossip engine for adolescent shut-ins. But I created an account, and began following @missrogue and a few other Open Source luminaries.

And at first it was just what I expected; “OMG I can’t believe my hair looks like this” and “saw the cutest shoes at Macy’s” and “meeting Jen for lunch”, etc. And then, “registering for this conference”.

I followed the link, and it was a conference on entrepreneurship. That’s *my* corner. Why don’t I know about this conference? And OMG it’s in two days! I registered and went.

Very interesting; I was by three touchdowns and a safety the oldest person at the event. They had a great program, and while I didn’t learn much about entrepreneurship, I did learn why I never saw these folks at *our* conferences; we weren’t using the communications channels they were listening to.

Since then I’ve become a social networking fool. By following other coworking pioneers like @alexknowshtml, @tonybgoode, @juliegomoll and others, I’ve learned a lot about growing our coworking studio. By following other thought leaders in the tech space, I stay on top of emerging developments in the entrepreneurship sector. And by tweeting announcements of our livestreaming webcast episodes, I’m building an audience of early adopter types.

Turns out, Twitter is a *trust* engine for digital pioneers. And an invaluable business tool.

As a twitter user, rather than a business, this is a fine line. Between the bots and the businesses I think that Twitter is slowly be irrevocably being hurt.

There are *some* great business uses of twitter. http://www.usetrackthis.com/ and http://www.vark.com would be a good examples.

But too many businesses simply use it as a lame spam marketing tool.

As far as my business goes, I use it mainly for announcements, which come from the same place as news in my RSS feed. I use a custom script, though, not twitterfeed or anything like that.

Not all of it is automated, though. I’ve posted things that don’t come from the site announcement feed, and there is the occasional two-way conversation.