I’m sad to report that my Brain 1.0 crashed this morning.

I had crafted a beautiful post about Twitter and the business benefits of participating in it, including witty comparisons, links to all sorts of relevant articles, statistics and images, and even made a few quote-worthy inserts that would allow you to pass on the article to your friends.

Unfortunately, I sat down this morning to paste this article from Brain 1.0 into Worpress and I discovered that this well crafted article had been corrupted (possibly by tiredness or even the half bottle of wine I had last night). I even attempted to reopen the article in my now rather dated Pen-N-Paper interface, and the entire thing seems to have become one wordy, garbled, incoherent and unresearched mess.

Unfortunately it means I’m going to have to start again, and this post is an attempt to re-format those thoughts and find fresh inspiration.

For those of an impatient disposition, the gist of the article was:

Twitter is a worthy additional tool in any business communication plan, but there are several different ways to approach it, and you need to better understand not what twitter IS, but how it is USED before you prepare that plan.

You do not need to participate in it heavily to benefit. You can simply monitor conversations and use it to respond to questions, and most importantly, respond to any issues directly and in a timely way. This is customer service “gold dust” and creates a great opportunity for word of mouth benefits.

However, as with all social media, you can really benefit from the twitter platform by getting involved, interacting with other individuals and communicating your (personal and business) personality. This is something that takes time, honesty, and a degree of openness most businesses find hard at first. However, it could be transforming for the business by creating a truly loyal group of friends, much more than ‘just’ customers.

OK. I’m off to turn that into something a little more useful and rounded, and to see if anyone has yet brought out an upgrade or replacement for my unreliable Brain.