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Small Biz Abuzz About Tuesday Twitter Chats

Posted by Gayle Kesten Friday, May 8, 2009, 02:05 PM ET

When you need small-business advice -- which blogging tool to choose, how to market on a shoestring budget, or where to get the best deal on the latest laptop -- who better to reach out to than someone who has already walked the walk?

Good news: A whole community of those "someones" have banded together on Twitter and meet weekly to chat about how they're leveraging technology to manage and grow their small businesses.

The Small Business Buzz (@sbbuzz) community convenes two hours every Tuesday starting at 8 p.m. EDT -- hopefully after you've closed the proverbial shop or could use an inspiring break. No need to be a Twitter pro; instructions for participating are as hand-holding as they come, and probably the biggest rule is not to use the chat as a forum to pitch your product or service.

"We work hard to make the site neutral," says BatchBlue president Pamela O'Hara (@pmohara), who co-founded SBBuzz with her communications director, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, roughly three months ago and serves as moderator. Every other week SBBuzz features a guest "speaker" who answers specialty-type questions -- the most previous one was angel investor Tim Berry (summary here) -- while the alternating weeks cycle through a series of questions that encourage dialogue among participants.

"We try to focus on technology tools. Being on Twitter, of course there's a lot of talk about social media marketing," she says. "This most recent time we talked about what people are doing with their blogs, if anyone is doing podcasting or Webinars. We get into some of the nitty-gritty, 'What software are you using? Does it work? What special tips and tricks have you found?' Sometimes we'll go back to the basics. We had a whole session on business planning and funding. We'll talk about HR, how you're finding your employees, and who's using social media more in their recruiting and screening."

SBBuzz comprises 50 or so "regulars" (who are linked to from the site), and then typically another 50 people pop in, as well. "We get a slew of new people each week," O'Hara says. "A lot of people will just jump in with one answer, or will introduce themselves at the beginning and then just watch the rest of the conversation."

That conversation, of course, is simply text that scrolls onto your Web page, with the same 140-character limit you get for an ordinary tweet. O'Hara says she kicks off each session with a welcome, and then give participants about 10 minutes to introduce themselves in one tweet. Then she'll put out the first question and let replies come in for another 10 minutes before moving to another question. Many of those questions come from the participants, who send them to O'Hara as a direct message, and she decides what to post to the group. "One person asked for ideas about how to do a product launch on Twitter," she says. "The ideas that came back were so interesting. That happens with almost every question."

At the end of each session, O'Hara invites everyone to go ahead and pitch their offerings. "Our first priority is to provide value to the community," she says. "Then you can go ahead and say, 'This is what I sell.'"

O'Hara says she'll be stepping down from her moderator role for the May 12 chat, which will be about social CRM -- the same space BatchBlue focuses its SaaS business. Integrity noted, and the kind of person I'd trust for advice.

[5/12 add: To coincide with next week's National Small Business Week, BatchBlue is now accepting nominations for its Small Business Super Heroes contest. Prizes include a JetBlue gift card. Entries are being accepted through May 22.]

• Guy Kawasaki's 10 Twitter Tips
• 10+ Business Uses For Twitter
• Wondering About Twitter? So Was I
• Slideshow: Putting Public Social Networks To Work For Business
• Social Networking: Evolution Before Your Very Eyes

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