Yes Virginia, this is a post about Twitter.

If you don’t care about Twitter, see you next week. It seems like every Twitter blog post I come across is immediately barraged with anti-Twitter sentiment so if that’s what you’re planning on doing, save your keystrokes. I promise I won’t write about it often. That’s what Twitter is for.

Twitter is still relatively new and as such there isn’t a lot of precedent for good and bad behavior, especially for businesses. I have some recent experiences about the right way to use Twitter for your company, and the wrong way.

First the wrong way. If you’re a Mac enthusiast you’re probably familiar with MacHeist. They bundle a bunch of software together, sell it for a big discount and then give a portion of it to charity. The more people buy, the more software that’s included in the bundle. Neat system. For the recent MacHeist 3 there was an additional software package you could get if you sent out a tweet to your followers promoting MacHeist. I had probably a dozen of those come through my Twitter stream before I added a filter in TweetDeck to hide any more of them.

There’s a lot wrong with this situation. Those tweets were essentially paid advertisements that MacHeist was extorting out of people in exchange for a popular piece of software. This is tantamount to spam. Imagine Twitter didn’t exist and you got an email from a half dozen of your friends from an automated system with a standard message provided by MacHeist. There is no doubt you would consider this spam. Why is it different on Twitter?

This is the problem with how many companies are approaching Twitter. They see it as another broadcast medium when in actuality, it’s a distributed conversation platform. So if you’re a business you should use Twitter to engage in conversations with your current or potential customers.

So here’s the right way. A few months ago I complained about Telerik controls ruining my day. Shortly there after I received an email from one of the cofounders of Telerik asking me if I would care to elaborate and that he was sorry his product has ruined my day. I wrote back outlining my issues with the r.a.d. controls and after a little back and forth we were able to work out the issues we were having. The latest version is really not so bad and is markedly better than the version we had.

Ideally, the Telerik conversation would have taken place out in the open on Twitter, but despite that not being the case, there was a happy ending.

So if you’re a company looking to use Twitter to your advantage you have two options. You can become a slimy spammer and get the resulting negative PR, or you can directly converse with your customers and leave them with a favorable view of you (so much so I was compelled to blog about the experience). Which would you prefer?