Another great example of networking and self promotion via Twitter

Earlier this month I lis­ted 5 reas­ons why your boss will let you use Twit­ter at work, and here’s an excel­lent example of item one — Networking.

Heidi Miller, Pod­cast­ing Prin­cess — host of the pod­cast Diary of a Shame­less Self-Promoter, is one of my friends on Twit­ter.

I fol­low her, and a num­ber of other com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­fes­sion­als to see what they’re up to, what they’re think­ing and what’s new in their world — odds are it may enter my world someday soon so a heads-up is a good thing.

Earlier this week, she ‘tweeted’ that she was attend­ing a present­a­tion by mar­ket­ing guru Seth Godin on his new book, The Dip.

Return­ing from the event, she pos­ted her thoughts (which I haven’t read yet — my cur­rent con­nec­tion is heav­ily fire­walled), and also announced she was giv­ing away four cop­ies of The Dip — via Twitter.

Nat­ur­ally, I piped up and said ‘Hey Heidi — over here’, and now I’ve got a copy of the book com­ing in the mail (Thanks Heidi!)

So, what really happened here that we can learn from? What did Twit­ter enable that a reg­u­lar blog or pod­cast couldn’t?

1. Redu­cing the activ­ity time­frame. Heidi made the announce­ment and con­cluded her ‘give away’ within minutes. The same kind of pro­cess would have taken a day or two to con­clude with a blog.

2. Increased atten­tion. Twit­ter is the new kid on the block, so to speak. By util­iz­ing this com­mu­nic­a­tions chan­nel, she drew atten­tion to this offer within this new channel.
3. Increased aware­ness. Heidi increased aware­ness of her brand, her offer­ings (pod­casts, con­sulta­tion, etc) and posi­tioned her­self as a cool, cut­ting edge prac­ti­tioner who under­stands how to use this new media. Quite effectively.

Now this got me think­ing, what else can Twit­ter do for you? How else can we use this micro-format to cre­ate and grow con­ver­sa­tions? What do you think? Inter­ested in what I’m doing? Fol­low me on Twit­ter or Jaiku (a Twit­ter competitor).

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Social Media, Book, The Dip, Heidi Miller, Net­work­ing, Twit­ter, Jaiku, PR, Com­mu­nic­a­tion