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Twitter connects clients with service providers every second. No Web-hosting fees or domain site names to register and maintain. Your message is available to everyone with access to the Internet. As many as 18 million people could be tweeting right now (http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/twitter-2009-stats/). On all the time, it’s a lot of things to a lot of people. It is a 24/7 customer service desk. One example of that is Dell, which made $3 million over a two-year period moving unwanted inventory at discounts. The firm posted its older inventory in short tweets, which were seen by bargain-hunting, tech-savvy followers, earning revenue off otherwise red ink.
And printers know about ink.
Twitter’s search function turns up hundreds of mentions of ink for sale; refine the search by geographical location and you are in business. Short messages you might send by e-mail or postcard can be effectively replaced by targeted tweets. The potential audience goes far beyond your mailing lists to include hundreds, even thousands of people using twitter in your immediate area.
Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most famous printer after Gutenberg. His Broadsides (single-sided sheets of cheap paper featuring short political or satirical messages) helped shift public opinion in the American British Colonies toward independence. Twitter’s short mini-blog service, limited to 140 characters, is a free service whose users guide and reflect large-scale groups’ opinions on important subjects, and is the modern-day version of Franklin’s vision. Any service which reflects large groups of people’s opinion on popular subjects is valuable to printers and can’t be overlooked.
Twitter helps industry professionals share information, connect with customers and gain access to literally thousands of other printers’ knowledge base. Like it or not, social media, is here to stay. Some grumble about Twitter, belittling a supposed superficiality, which is a perfectly understandable response. Printers are a conservative group—not their politics, but their way of doing business. New technologies and equipment are untested, unfamiliar and often expensive. Once-hot technological commodities can cool quickly. So it is natural for established printers to view this social media phenomenon skeptically. However, money, client connections and networking opportunities are all waiting to happen right there on your computer.
Talking the Talk
What is Twitter? It is, essentially, an open e-mail to the world. A billboard visible all over the planet. While an e-mail is a specific message to someone, a tweet is that same message broadcast to everyone following your twitter account.
Everybody goes to a favorite Web site to see what’s new. Twitter’s home page is all your favorite sites rolled into one and compressed into an easily digested shorthand. Call it “aggregating.” The aggregated sum total of messages posted by people you follow add up to potentially rewarding client interactions. Think of following as subscribing to someone’s personal newsletter. Some tweeters share what is in the news—others discuss politics or pop-culture events.
Twitter generates revenue. According to Bloomberg, Twitter made $25 million in revenue in 2009 from search deals it made with Microsoft and Google. I actually got this writing assignment on Twitter, looking at my list of printing “tweeple” (you will soon learn to put a “tw-” prefix to many words). A tweet from the editor of this magazine asked if anyone wanted to write about the service. No Human Resources department, no Craigslist posting. A quick response by yours truly led to an e-mail exchange, and two professionals connected on Twitter to make business happen.
Twitter helps industry professionals share information, advertise specials and gain access to literally thousands of other printers’ knowledge base. Where else can you pick up hundreds of new business contacts, within seconds, for free? I’ve discussed everything from the use of Pantone gradients (the answer: try to avoid them) to RIP software questions with fellow prepress professionals in the no-hassle, collegial environment twitter encourages. While the service is free, costing only the time you put into it, the dividends can quickly turn concrete.
Dos and Don’ts
As much as Twitter can help business-to-business and business-to-customer relationships, there are some things you should avoid tweeting. Tweeting about what you are having for lunch is not appropriate. Unless you are editor of a food magazine, or a food blogger. Similarly, you should definitely avoid what Twitter Cofounder Jack Dorsey calls “bathroom tweets.” Enough said about that.
As hard as it is to manage a transition away from that, work-gripe tweets should also be avoided like the plague. More than one job applicant has had a prospective employer see disparaging tweets and decided against hiring. Current employees have tweeted themselves out of jobs, too.
So target your audience, orient your public relations/sales goals and leverage this piece of new media into your workflow.
Lee Freeman has been in the printing business for more than 10 years. He currently manages the prepress department at Fox Printing in Burlington, Vt.
Twitter Lists
These are just a few of hundreds of lists made by print professionals. Each list contains updates from tech-savvy printers, suppliers and design professionals. Enter these addresses into your Web browser to see lists of like-minded people and businesses using twitter:
http://twitter.com/piagconnect/print
http://twitter.com/Markzware/list-of-printers-prepress
http://twitter.com/sjespers/adobe-platform-evangelist
http://twitter.com/#/list/LT_VT/printing-prepress