Twitter Lessons from the Week

Lesson #1 – Read all of the FAQ’s page and don’t assume

For one of our clients, the Christmas SPIRIT Foundation, part of our strategy this year has been to learn what special things people do to celebrate Christmas. In order to gather and share these stories, Steve had the idea of posting a request on HARO (Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out) to ask people to leave stories on our new blog. We submitted the request and received a response from a HARO employees (we’ll call her Jane) saying that our request did not meet the criteria for posting to the HARO Web site and referred us to the HARO FAQ’s page for more information.

After looking through the FAQ’s page I discovered that if you do not have a lot of blog posts and are not ranked high on Google and Alexa rankings then they may not allow you to post a request on their site. Since the CSF blog is new and only had a few posts I just “assumed” that that was the reason Jane was referring to.

Steve emailed Jane with a request to reconsider our submission based on all of the forms of media we use only to find out that we were not accepted because we were asking people to respond by posting something on our Web site rather than by sending an e-mail! Here we were trying to prove our legitimacy as a blog and all we needed to do was provide an e-mail address! So my lesson learned from this was to read all of the FAQ’s page and don’t assume. You get what you inspect, not what you expect!

Lesson #2 – Twitter can help build a rapport

After e-mailing Jane, Steve remembered he had Tweeted with her previously in the week. He looked at her profile again and saw she was a VA Tech alumn. He e-mailed her after realizing this and asked her how the game had been. Steve’s quick recollection of who she was allowed him to add a personal touch while working with Jane on a business-related issue. Twitter can be a good tool for getting to know more about a person you may be working with in a business setting.