As my grandmother told me often, we have two ears and one mouth, so by design we should listen more than we talk.  I used twitter for a while without ever tweeting anything.  I listened to what my competitors had to say and what people were saying about me.  Then I slowly started tweeting.  The important thing is to decide how you are going to use twitter.

When I was at Banker at Chase Bank , they were pretty early adopters of this type of social media.  I believe they used it primarily to monitor their brand and then started using it  as a more swift customer service tool.  They say that every complaint is a possible opportunity, and Twitter allows you to exploit this.  They started seeing better customer service scores and while bonuses were always based solely on checking accounts open (campaign), they started realize Twitter played a part push branch bonuses more toward service. Every single bank I talk to says that it is their service that makes them stand apart, yet so few are using the ONE tool that can exponentially make this a reality.

Still don’t believe me?  Well, at Chase,  I tested to see if they were paying attention (which previously they were not).  I made a facetious comment about getting moving walkways into branches so it would force the confused customer into more efficiently ‘get in and get out’ strategy.  I was later written up by my boss for inappropriate use of technology because this made it all the way up to Jamie Dimon, the Chase CEO. It was like watching a blooper reel as my boss sat me down to “write me up”; he couldn’t stop laughing.  He was also in disbelief.  I just sat back, smiled and exclaimed, “Wow, they really ARE paying attention now!”

So…if this type of medium can get the attention of the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, how do you think it will work on your current and potential customers.  Give it some thought and stop being a twit and start with reading a tweet.