AdamCovati.com

A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.

• Just hooking something up to your rss feed
• Pretending to be a company, instead of yourself
• Following everyone you can
• Only posting once a week
• Posting every hour
• Not replying to people

I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.

It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.

Kipp Bodnar (@kbodnar32) over at DigitalCapitalism.com, links to a very inspiring and frank talk from Gary Vaynerchuck in a recent blog post. Let’s watch it here, it’s worth the 15 minutes…

Kipp calls out what I also feel is the most important part of that talk: Be Yourself. Well Kipp actually goes a bit beyond that, his point is that if you are yourself and are not hyper-concerned with pleasing everyone then you will piss a few people off - and that’s good.

I’m not sure you have to piss people off, but I agree that you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Part of being yourself is being passionate about something. Being passionate lends to having very strong opinions and being able to stand up to others with differing strong opinions. And that’s where you provide value.

So where are you providing value? Who are you arguing with?

I’d ask you to forgive the lack of gusto exhibited here lately, but that’s something that blogs just can’t ask you to do. But I can at least explain why I haven’t been posting lately. There’s a simple explanation for this, Bronto has it’s Fall 2008 Release this weekend.

Is it a product manager’s job to test furiously? to write help docs? to give webcasts? to do a little coding? Well, it all depends on your level of dedication, and maybe a bit on your company too. But that’s one things I really like about Bronto, our dev team gets everyone involved in the process. We all work very hard to get a release out the door.

Being a product manager is about dedication and devotion to your product. You have to be excited about it, and you have to not just want, but ensure, that it is as good as it can be. Of course this isn’t just for PMs, it’s for anyone who can really get into their company. It’s for anyone that has passion for their work.

So for probably another week, I’ll still be hard at work, because I know this release will be a huge step forward for Bronto.