John J. Walters is a freelance associate at Wasabi Ventures and CEO of MeetingCaptain.
I have to admit it: if you had told me last year that my business life would revolve around Twitter, I wouldn’t have believed you. Of course, one year ago I didn’t know how useful a service Twitter could be for marketing and for gathering information. I used to check sites like LifeHacker everyday to get my fill of interesting links and informative articles. Then I discovered that Twitter is basically a more up-to-the-minute version of these conglomerate news sites that users get to build for themselves. And so it climbed into my top-visited sites almost instantly.
When I wanted to take a short break from work, I often found myself on sites like YouTube or Break.com. These sites (and others like them) may be fun diversions, but they do little to move me closer to my goal of becoming a successful entrepreneur. Instead of wasting time, Twitter allows me to find recent articles and blog posts on whatever I feel like learning about at that particular moment. Take, for example, these three articles that I found this morning:
- Richard Branson talking about how to make good use of failure when starting a business.
- Meetup’s founder breaking what he learned during his startup process into five points.
- A professor at Babson College explaining how taking no risks is the greatest risk of all (among other things).
Granted, I use Twitter for more than just my own entertainment and edification. Part of my job entails unearthing interesting content from Wasabi’s vast network of portfolio companies and publishing it to the Wasabi Ventures feed. In fact, I do the same thing for my other job, except the MD Policy feed is all about local politics. It’s actually a great type of marketing: it gets the companies out there in the public sphere on a regular basis at almost no cost. It’s advertising, true, but as long as you’re giving people something worth clicking and not just hustling them with slogans it doesn’t really feel like it.
Grassroots marketers discovered long ago that the best marketing is marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing. Things like viral videos and funny stories that generate buzz for an organization outside of the normal channels easily fall into this category. People are wary of advertisements, but they are more likely to trust an idea that they feel is their own. When a company constantly tells people that their products are the best, people feel the need to investigate. If, on the other hand, a person’s interest in a company’s products stems from his own fascination with the company (for example, through following their Twitter feed), it’s easy to think positively about that company without reservation.
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