Twitter is Something Else You Should Know About

What do Dell, Panasonic, Hormel, H&R Block and Zappos.com have in common? They are all actively monitoring what’s being said about them on Twitter, the micro-blogging site where people post very short bursts of opinion, information and other marginalia.

If these companies have figured out Twitter, it’s time for your company to understand it too. For a primer on Twitter, here’s a new BusinessWeek article on it. There’s also a very helpful companion slide show.

Twitter is the latest in short-attention-span uses of the Internet — it’s like Instant Messaging except you post it publicly instead of just sending it to one person or a small group. You don’t post to the whole world, though — you build a community of people who are “following” your posts, and whose posts you are “following.” But you don’t have to ask permission to follow someone’s posts — you just add them to your feed.

In addition to companies monitoring Twitter, journalists are using it too, to get story ideas and to take pitches from PR people.

You don’t have to become a Twitterer yourself. I keep trying to get into it and so far, I can’t — I just don’t want to share my thoughts with the world every few minutes, or even in short bursts. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like I should have a handle on it, and you should too — if only to avoid embarrassment when your boss says something like, “What’s Twitter, and should we be using it?”

PS — Robert Scoble passes along this helpful post, 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter.