I only recently took the time to experiment with Twitter. "The question has always been, how do I get value from Twitter ?"

The reason it has taken me so long is I WILL NOT TWEET MY EVERY MOVE / THOUGHT / DIATRIBE / etc. Further, I really don’t what to listen to others’ every move / thought / diatribe / etc.  And on the surface, *that* is exactly what Twitter seems to be.

So what is Twitter ? It’s nothing more and nothing less than a short messaging service.

What makes Twitter interesting is *how* people use Twitter. Yes, there are those that tweet (the act of sending a short message through Twitter) verbal diarrhea. There are also those who use Twitter as self promotion (where ‘self’ is either the individual or the company). There are also those who use it an an intelligent pub/sub infrastructure. The unique bit is that Twitter itself has almost none of the intelligence – it is how people use Twitter and how they have developed clients and tools that leverage Twitter that is interesting. One of the most powerful of this is the ‘hashtag" …

Once you’ve started using Twitter, it won’t take long before you come across what’s known as a hash tag. That’s when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.)

For example, if you’ve seen tweets related to the recent U.S. government stimulus bill, you may have noticed some of them had #stimulus in them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what the purpose of this thing was but, once I “got it,” I realized it’s not as complicated as it seems.

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it’s not case-sensitive), you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “I lost my wallet yesterday” because “lost” isn’t preceded by the hash tag.

It is the "search" aspect of hashtags that is so powerful. You do not need to "follow" every user and you do not need to read every tweet. You find (or create) a hashtag that relates to a topic of interest and you "subscribe" to it. Most Twitter clients let you create persistent searches. In this way, you do not need to know all of the user who are discussing a topic, you just need to know the hashtag for that topic.

… hash tags are NOT any kind of official Twitter function. The company has not created a list of topics that we can browse through to see if there’s one that interests us … any user can create one simply by adding it to their own tweet.

For example, when the plane went down in the Hudson River some Twitter user wrote a post and added #flight1549 to it … somebody else read it and when he posted something about the incident, added #flight1549 to *HIS* tweet. it didn’t take long for this hash tag to go viral … it’s a very organic process.

[Before creating a new hashtag] The first thing I would do is a basic Twitter search on the term itself so I can see if someone’s already created a related hash tag. Before you create your own tag, you might want to search on a few variations to make sure they don’t already exist.

Source: The Twitter Hash Tag: What Is It and How Do You Use It?

I only follow a small number of people but I have hashtag searches on a number of topics and it is the tweets on those specific topics that provide the value. Not only can I learn about the topic, I can also ask questions to "the community" (regardless of who that may be). In my first few examples of asking questions I had multiple good answers in a matter of seconds! The power of a huge network of people, connected by a simple messaging service.

The farmhouse project was outfitted with a Jenn Air 48" range with dual ovens. The gas cooking is great but the oven has a dark side. The bottom of the main oven door and kick plate get hot – very hot – burn your skin hot. A service call discovered the oven "pans" were incorrectly installed allowing for some heat to escape forward rather than draft correctly toward the back of the oven and up out the rear vents. The pan was replaced under warranty  but the technician was not completely satisfied so he assured me he’d be calling the manufacturer for some additional information. He did and here is what he learned …

This is John with ***** service. I wanted to let you know what’s the technical people there at Jenn Air were saying about your range leave a message at they sent me back pertaining to that door is that the regulation on that is 170 degrees above room temperature. They are saying that that that door could get as much as 170 degrees above room temperature while in operation. So according to them, it is working within spec’s.

Yeah, like *THAT* makes a lot of sense. The front of the oven door can be 240 degrees and the manufacturer is OK with that. Of course, when I called for the initial service, complaining that I had burned myself, they were all about Q&A to avoid litigation !

In leadership training, they will introduce "The 4 D’s". The irony is that only a few of these seminars put them in the right order. They are:

1. Dump – Do you really need to do the task and should you have been asked in the first place ? If no, then say so.
2. Delegate – If you can’t "return to sender" but are not the right person for the job, "own it" but delegate to a better resource.
3. Delay – Few if any tasks are "a one man show" so if you know you will need input from others, send out those requests right away and focus on other tasks until you have received the information you need to do the work.
4. Do – When all else fails, "just do it".

None if this is new and none of it is my own brilliant thinking.

I find #3 to be the most powerful for most of my work. The longer I procrastinate on a task, the closer the deadline looms and the more work that falls to me to complete in "extra hours". I can get perhaps 75% or more of a task off my plate if I take just a few minutes to look over what is needed and either fire off an email to the requester for details or send out the sub-tasks (delegate). I let the responses trickle in over a couple of days and then do the assembly in one sitting.

University of California – Davis has a guide for students that really applies to business as well.

I’m curious, independent of the economic situation, for the gifts you are planning, how will you go about the process ? Will you mostly be giving �

• hand made gifts
• shop at departments stores and malls
• buy direct from on-line stores
• Amazon
• eBay
• Woot

I won’t have too many hand crafted gifts this season but I will be making a few. Currently there is only one gift I plan to suffer the "bustling crowds" for. As much as possible I will shop on-line and watching for the best bargains.

I am reminded far too often that you must be very careful how you incent people. You may not always get the outcome you want. Here is an example from a leadership program I attended almost 10 years ago.

You work for a company that sells “red marbles”. Unfortunately, the only supplier of marbles ships mixed boxes of red and white marbles. So, your company created a special paddle to catch marbles from the mixed boxes. the paddle has twenty holes in it, each one just a bit smaller than a marble. This allows a marble to settle in the hole. the paddle can not distinguish a red marble from a white marble so your company created an incentive plan for workers.

We only sell red marbles. We don’t want any white marbles. You are to use these paddles to fetch marbles out of the mixed boxes. The fewer white marbles you have on your paddle, the better. The person with the fewest total count of white marbles over the course of each shift will get a bonus.

You and the rest of your shift proceed to plunge the paddle into the boxes and lift out the marbles, one sitting in each of the holes. The “quality control staff” count the number of white marbles and keep tally for each worker. You feel pretty good when, of the 20 holes, you have only 5 white marbles. Some times you have 10 or more but for most of the shift, you keep a pretty low count. At the end of your shift, you have filled and sealed 12 boxes with red marbles. You notice that you have the most boxes ready to go off to shipping. You are guaranteed the bonus only to discover, a worker who didn’t fill a single box for shipping, gets the bonus. The next day you and your colleagues all watch yesterday’s winner to see what they did differently. You watch with amazement as the person plunges the paddle into the mixed box and then carefully tips it sideways as they pull it out, dumping all the marbles back into the box. The quality control staff mark down “zero” for the number of white marbles on the paddle.

Obviously, wanting “red marbles” but scoring “white marbles” is a bad idea. If you reward for behavior other than what you want, you are likely to get what you reward and not what you expect; but this is exactly what many companies do !

This is so obvious that it appears to be completely beyond the comprehension of many employers.

I read a recent example on the internet. The company wanted to improve customer satisfaction with new sales. They realized that often the customer needed help after the sale. The support team was forever going in and helping customers use their newest purchases. The support costs were high and customer satisfaction with the sale was low.

The company created a bunch of new sales tools to help sell products in predefined bundles. So, the sales people went out and sold the bundles. It was great because the sales people were making bigger sales with the bundles than before with the individual products. Customer satisfaction did not improve and the support team still had to go in and help the customers with their new sales.

The incentive to the sales people was still to sell as much as possible. There was no incentive (or penalty) for all the needed support or the customer satisfaction rating.

OpEd: To be honest, it’s hard to incent “sales people” to do anything other than sell because “sales people” in general are motivated by money and sales make the quarterly reports look good which makes analysts happy and makes stockholders happy. So, if the company is all about selling, then that is what they incent and that is what they get. The “savings” side of the equation is much tougher. It’s easy to tighten the belt but eventually all the “easy” blood has run out of the turnip. Eventually, there is no more “efficiency” to be gained. This is where attributes like customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and repeat business improve the bottom line. Just don’t try to get that from “sales people”. … (Note: “sales people” is in quotes for a reason!)