Banyan Branch

The Case for Only Using Twitter ~

I met up with Serguei Beloussov and some of his executive team the other night to talk about Parallels, a product I love and a company I think is poised for an amazing next few years.  These guys are brilliant, and know how to execute in mining their category for all the user value and shareholder value they can create.

Like any team worth its salt, these guys are busy and rarely find time to keep up with the blogosphere, let alone participate.  The problem is that there is an important daily conversation going on within the blogosphere of which they should not only be intimately aware but in which they should be participating.  Since they all seem to sleep five hours a night and traverse the world to meet with a distributed team and far-flung clients, it’s difficult for me to recommend that they start reading a broad set of blogs and participating.  It would be great to have their top folks blogging, but I doubt they would find time for 2-3 posts a week, let alone significant participation.

So, here’s my recommendation: Just do Twitter.

There are extensive conversations about Parallels going on within Twitter right now.  Windows 7 on Parallels is having some issues.  There’s direct feedback from bloggers regarding pricing on the new Parallels upgrade.  People who are forming ideas on VMWare vs. Parallels are hashing out early findings on Twitter.  Subscribing to a set of Twitter folks and following searches using TweetDeck for Parallels, VMWare, other competitors, virtualization terms, cloud computing terms, and other product names would be simple, and would give them a finger on the daily pulse of what’s going on in the world.  Then they could respond in 140 characters or less to the blogger.

Twitter is great for a scoped commitment because:

• People: Most of the thought leaders in this space are on Twitter
• Speed: Posts are quick to scan and read
• Software: Twitter software like TweetDeck seems to beat any rss management tool I’ve used regularly
• Response: You only have 140 characters with which to respond, so you won’t take 15 minutes thinking about your reply.  Read before you submit, but 1 minute and you’re done.
• Breadth: You can converse with more people due to the brevity of your response.

So, if you’re feeling left out and don’t know how to jump in, consider this: Don’t have a blog, have a Twitter.  Don’t comment on blogs, comment on Twitter.