eROI Days Email Agency

Last Thursday, I (@ryanbuch) attended an all-day, online marketing conference in Portland called Inverge (#inverge). I gained a ton of insights from conference speakers from Wieden + Kennedy (@rgleeson), Nokia (@karllong), TechWeb (@TonyUphoff), and Vidoop (@kveton) and from freelance social media freelancers, friends, and business associates alike. I even have 6 pages of handwritten notes (pen + paper, not digital) to prove it.  However, I managed to get in over 30 tweets (Twitter posts of 140 characters or less) that day which doubled my usage of Twitter for the past four months.  I’ve always been open to admitting that, in the past, I have only used Twitter at long conferences and airports when I tell myself that it’s okay to fuel my often-controlled Attention Deficit Disorder. 

I used to think Twitter was primarily a distraction with no practical business purpose, but now my latest Binge Tweeting session has provided some epiphanies from first-hand experience.  I tweeted about Zappos as a great case study in creating employee evangelists and within an hour, Tony Hsieh (@zappos), CEO of Zappos, began following me on Twitter (which is a good thing for all you non-tweeters).  We struck up a conversation on twitter and now I’m an even bigger fan of Zappos. I also realized that over 60% of our eROI employees use Twitter, which is awesome.  We can benefit from knowledge sharing, internal quick communication, and even help in some customer service scenarios.  The next step is to create a Group within TweetDeck, a sweet Twitter application, with the Twitter handles of as many of our customer contacts as possible to engage in those daily conversations as well and continue to be a resource to them.

To check out other CEOs who use Twitter, read the rest of the blog post.

According to this BusinessWeek article, which has incredible imagery for an article on folks typing on their computers, the following CEOs are major Twitter users:

 Kevin Rose from Digg
Tony Hsieh from Zapppos
Jasaon Calacanis from Mahalo (former Netscape no?)
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch
Loic LeMeur from Seesmic
Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media
Jack Dorsey from Twitter
David Sifry from Technorati
Christine Perkett from PerkettPR
Michael Hyatt from Thomas Nelson
Jeff Bonforte from Xobni
Mike Troiano from Matchmine
Jonathan Schwartz from Sun Microsystems
Shafqat Islam from NewsCred
Barry Libert from Mzinga
Eugene Lee from SocialText
Kel Kelly from Kel and Partners
Lois Paul from Lois Paul and Partners