Twitter :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

This is kind of a fun post, with a hopefully useful angle in terms of using Twitter for business.

In the video here I explain how:

last week, as the annual Quiksilver Pro surfing championships were drawing to a close at nearby Snapper Rocks, I tweeted that I was trying to decide whether to go to the beach or keep working
the Quiksilver Pro folks picked up on that and told me I’d won a pair of the leading brand Diamond Dobby board shorts.

Now I’m trying to think up ways others of us could use the power of Twitter to acknowledge and reward people who give our brand some coverage – especially if our business is more on the professional services side and we don’t have boardies or other such tangible goodies to hand out.

Maybe we should get some tangible goodies to do the rewarding. Although I do wonder whether the planet needs more notepads and ball point pens with various firms’ logos.

Ideas? Something you have done in this line and it worked, that you’d care to share?

Mack Collier’s Sunday night #blogchat discussion on Twitter wins fans

One of the neat things that has happened on the social networking platform Twitter is the emergence of “hashtag chats”, where the use of a # hashtag in a tweet lines that tweet up in a discoverable stream of tweets using the same hashtag.

Anyone can make a hashtag. Not all of them attract attention.

One that has is #blogchat, set up by blogger Mack Collier – @MackCollier – on Sunday nights 8-9PM Central Time, for discussion about blogging.

That works out as late Monday morning for me and although I had other plans for what I was going to do today I found the discussion on #blogchat so engaging that some of those plans experienced some slippage.

From some of the tweets, today as on other days, I saw that I am not alone in thinking #blogchat well worth the time spent in following the discussion. There is also the fact that I got to connect with a number of bloggers I might not otherwise have discovered.

Blogging raises questions

A paradox I have learned from years of blogging and talking about blogging is that while blogging is basically a simple process it seems also to have an inexhaustible capacity to generate questions.

It is simple because with the right advice and guidance it doesn’t take much to set up a blog and get started blogging.

But once you get serious about blogging, there are marvellous possibilities for variation and relative complexity, especially when you start to delve into such aspects as the mysteries of search engine optimization (SEO).

Not to mention the scope for quite basic questions to arise, such as the hardy perennial of which blogging platform to use.

So where does the work from home professional go with questions about blogging?

From what I’ve seen to date, the Twitter #blogchat stream would be a good place to start. The tweets reflect quite a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience of blogging, from people just starting out to quite seasoned practitioners.

As one might expect, there is no shortage of opinions delivered with supreme confidence as the *only* answer to some questions and if you tried to follow all the advice given on #blogchat you would go totally barmy. But there is plenty of useful information being shared.

So, as long as you maintain some objectivity and think about what you want to achieve rather than what someone else thinks you should do, you should be able to get some valuable information and some good tips – “tricks of the trade” so to speak – as I do each week on #blogchat.

Would love to know how you go if you try it.