Pinch. A design office.

Yes. And it has been fulfilling, thus far. For personal use, Twitter has been all that has been billed in other answers that you've received: an excellent link to conversations, ideas, topics and events that were occurring right under my nose. Many, directly related to my business. At the same time, it has proven to be time-consuming and in truth, from time to time, a bit silly. Of course, so are relationships and that's what Twitter is really about.

For many, Twitter is beginning to assume the place of traditional e-mail. Others simplify it as "group IM." It is neither of those in my opinion. As with any new model, there is certainly a learning curve. I sat on my hands for a couple of months and just listened to the tweets. Who was saying what, how they were saying it, and why. And like any relationship, some simple listening paid with great dividends. By then, I felt that I knew who I wanted to hear from. And more importantly, I felt that I could speak with other "tweeps" in a manner that was both appropriate and meaningful. In each attempt, I aimed to contribute.

From the perspective of business, Twitter seems another thing altogether. In business, we work to surround ourselves with people we respect. Naturally, those people become closer to each other on a personal level and the network expands exponentially or contracts depending on the values of that network. As they become closer, conversation tends to become more casual. This is both good and bad (but that's an entirely separate post). That having been said, I don't believe that there is yet a tried-and-true model for Twitter success. But that's part of the beauty of the app; it is becoming exactly what users define.

What did we do? I am a principal in a small design firm. We blog a bit and we attempt to stay in front of the people with whom we wish to work. Within the last week, we "launched" a strategy that appears slightly different from the ways that we have seen Twitter utilized to date. With certain exceptions, it seems that firms using Twitter rarely stay on message. The closest parallel we could draw to our intended strategy was to providers who focus on a specific interest; the Arts section of the New York Times.

Why did we do it? We quickly realized that our general blog posts required significant time and effort. We have much to share and we wish to do it quickly. Yet beyond the creative outlet that blogging provides, one of the primary reasons we invest the time is to demonstrate our approach to our work and to communicate what design means for business. In order to be more efficient with what we share, we've established a simple Twitter strategy for (1) feeding traffic to our site, (2) for building our resource database and (3) for staying in front of interesting people on a daily basis. To do so, we must provide content of value. It is our view that the folks who are using Twitter are the folks most likely to spread the word about any subject, particularly when it is of value. And the approach certainly won't hurt our SEO.

We developed our Twitter strategy on a simple premise: Provide six tweets a day on issues related to brand, sustainability and design. Talk about the things we know and nothing more. No feedback, no lengthy strings supporting our posts. It needed to be manageable; a one-way information source that positions our firm as thought leaders and shares one studio project, announcement, or discussion per day. The remaining five are about our industry as a whole. We intend to keep it focused and consistent. While we have just begun, the feedback has been incredibly positive.