Free Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

You should have seen people scratching their heads over it in 2007 when I first started using and talking about it. Here’s what I know: many people do want to know all the details about what you’re doing and thinking, they just don’t want to admit it. We’ve all got our voyeuristic tendencies; Twitter has just given us permission to cave in to them. But the fact that you can share your dinner preferences with thousands of people instantaneously is not even in the top five reasons Twitter is perhaps the most powerful brand-building tool in your toolbox.
    First, it has incredible endorsement power. When someone re-tweets what you say, they’re saying you’re smart and worth paying attention to. That comes with a lot of value. The re-tweet enables anyone to spread whatever content they find profound or solid or funny or good throughout the world in a very quick and efficient way. Tumblr has the tumble option, which is similar, but Twitter is sizzling hot and mainstream and there are way more eyeballs on it. From the beginning it was developed to bea mobile platform, so even though Facebook has an app you can use from your phone, Twitter has so much brand equity already in place as the on-the-go social network that most people use it first.
    Second, it’s a press release opportunity, allowing companies and businesses to have a closer relationship with their consumer. It closes the six degrees of separation to one degree of separation. It’s also become a basic tool for industry leaders to let the world know what they’re doing and, perhaps more important, what’s on their mind. And it allows companies to respond immediately to their customers’ concerns. For example, as soon as I read somebody’s post that my shipping rates were too expensive, I was immediately able to reach out and address that person’s concern. We’ll be seeing more and more examples of companies reacting to a groundswell of tweets, such as when Motrin got hammered by mom-bloggers for an ad that they perceived as disrespectful of attachment parenting, or when Amazon fended off accusations of censorship via what the New York Times dubbed “tweet-rage” because a “cataloging error” erased thousands of books, many of them gay and lesbian themed, from its sales rankings and main search page. The thing is, though, businesses don’t have to, nor should they, wait until calamity strikes to pay attention to what people are saying. The real beauty of Twitter and Facebook (and all the other social networking sites) is that they offer a massive opportunity for every entrepreneur and business to keep constant tabs on what their customers are thinking about them. This kind of interaction with the consumer should be happening in every business every single day.
    Third, Twitter is a research and development tool that allowsyou to crowdsource. Who needs focus groups or even Nielsen ratings when you can simply tweet out the question “Are you watching Poodles Dancing with the Stars and should it stay on the air?” and get a direct response from your viewers? You can use Twitter to keep abreast of what your competition is up to, and their customers’ reactions, too. Saks recently opened a shoe department in New York and worked with the post office to assign it its own zip code. If I were working at Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf, I would have been all over Search.Twitter (see upcoming information) to see what people were saying about this marketing program.
    Fourth, it allows even your most mundane questions to become opportunities for conversation. Google and YouTube are reliable ways to get information, but they’re one-way streets. You ask, you get your answer, the end. You can send out e-mails, but then you’re limited to the immediate group of people you know. But if you tweet “Is there a PowerPoint expert out there?,” you’re reaching out to thousands of people, and the first thing they’ll want to know when they respond is what you’re