Ask an Expert: Twitter for small business ... reconsidered

— -- To say I received a little feedback on my column regarding Twitter and business last week would be a vast understatement. Let's just say I didn't rave about Twitter, and in return, a lot of people did not rave about me.

The Twitteratti were in an uproar.

They were convinced that I am some old-school moron who doesn't get the value of social media in general and Twitter in particular.

So let's get this out of the way up front: I like and very much appreciate social media. I write about it in the latest version of The Small Business Bible, last year, I named it the No. 3 most significant small business trend, and two years ago, it came in at No. 1 on my annual list.

I also have checked out Twitter plenty, like it well enough, but admittedly, I am no Twitter expert. So I get why not a few Twitter users thought I missed the boat. By the same token, I still think that my distance gives me a little perspective that they may not have.

Could we both be right, and wrong?

First, where I was wrong: What really surprised me about the column was just how much play it was getting. I had never had so many people comment on a column. Then one of them explained that it was because the column had been transplanted onto Twitter. Aha!

So I saw firsthand what a powerful tool Twitter can be for spreading a message and creating instant feedback.

Mea culpa. I did not get that before. Score one for the Twitter nation.

I was impressed and wanted to learn more. My friend Rieva Lesonsky uses Twitter plenty, and she offered to hook me up with the charming Gini Dietrich, the CEO of Arment Dietrich, a PR firm in Chicgao. Gini had had great business success with Twitter.

So I called Gini up to see if she would be willing to show the enemy the error of his ways. She was more than happy to oblige.

Gini told me that after the market crash last fall, her business started to tighten up (as it did for everybody) and she became "scared and depressed." But rather than let events run her, she decided to learn more about social media, as a way to prospect for new business.