01.16
Now, I’m far from the first person to use Twitter for business. On the contrary, there are actually a lot of companies out there using Twitter for more than just news and product promotion.
However, sometimes the uses of Twitter aren’t inherently obvious. The system is just so darn simple that it takes a while for people to “get” it (I’m the first person to admit I laughed at twitter and only started using it about a month ago – 177 tweets later I’m hooked). That’s just it though – the simplicity is why it works.
So anyway, I decided to put my Tweets to work. The epiphany came while I was trying to put together a client management system. My needs were fairly minimal. My clients who are under “contract” buy 24-hour blocks of time from me. My main need was I wanted a simple way to track of how much time left they had in their block. Also, I wanted to keep the details of the work I performed on their account. I didn’t really need a ticketing system – when my clients need help they call or email me.
Another thing – I wanted to keep my clients up to date on the latest in IT and tech, especially security warnings, and following me on Twitter is the best way to do that. However, most of them don’t use twitter at all.
After installing a couple of different ticketing/CRM systems (even one integrated with this WordPress site) and kicking the tires, each one was cumbersome and quite frankly just overkill.
Back to the epiphany – why couldn’t I just use Twitter for this?
The biggest stumbling block initially was how to keep up with a Twitter account for each user. I really didn’t want to have to create fake gmail accounts for every Twitter account. So I googled and discovered a handy gmail trick (this only works with gmail.com accounts) – gmail IGNORES anything after a + sign in an email address. So, for example, email sent to example+work@gmail.com will end up going to example@gmail.com.
Thus, all I had to do was create twitter accounts using myemailaddress+clientname@gmail.com. Of course I set the accounts to be protected. Also, I set each account to follow my twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/gosutotech). Best of all, I could use Seesmic to manage all of these twitter accounts at once.
Only one piece was missing – Twitter is limited to 140 chars. Thus, details of client work couldn’t go there. So, I used my Google Docs and created a Google Doc for each new job. Then, I shared them publicly and created short links which I post with each corresponding tweet. So, for example, a tweet might be:
“01/16/10 – 4 Hours Billed, 16 Hours Remaining – http://bit.ly/stuff” (that’s a fake URL, don’t click on it)
The end result was perfect. Each client gets a twitter account which I send them the login for. When they go to their twitter account, they see their account updates along with my @gosutotech tweets. If they only want to see their account updates (their tweets) they click “Profile”. They are free to use that account to follow others if they want to get into twitter, and since the email assigned to the account goes to me I don’t have to worry about them accidentally allowing someone to follow them (their accounts are protected).
It is insanely simple – just like twitter.
