A lot has been said in about Twitter regarding its personal or corporate usage. Two of the most common complaints are ‘I do not have time’ or ‘some people have too much time on there hands’. Are you sure?

Remember the shampoo commercial where the voice over would say, if I tell two people and they tell two people, and so on, then many people would start using that shampoo? Twitter is very similar in that you start following people; and also others follow you. You tweet information, you can add a link, photo or other media, your followers pick it up and their followers may also look as well. You may even be RT’d (retweeted) adding an even larger audience. A perfect example is to look at what is happening today in Iran. While not wanting to get into the particulars of the political realm, a tweet regarding a massive rally or guards opening fire at a rally is being picked up, and RT’d with the #iranelection, spreading the information throughout the electronic world today. Many tweeters are from Iran using cell phones as SMS feeds (there are API’s like Twitterberry as well); while the government cracks down on the press, and internet in general. Our government even asked Twitter if a scheduled maintenance window be postponed in order to allow the word to come out. Atlantic Magazine reported recently that it was getting a million page views a day in part to the live tweeting that has been going on. I wonder if this had been available in 1979 whether we would have had the hostage situation that we had or if it could have been avoided?

Just recently, we announced our new product, Acuity. We used the traditional methods of marketing, but we also tweeted our announcement. So far, our metrics have shown an increase to our website, in part to our ability to tweet about Acuity, with followers RT’ing our announcement. By the way, thanks to those retweeters out there! I would think again whether or not you are ‘too busy’, or think others 'have ‘too much time on their hands’. You may miss that big opportunity that may come your way.