8Leveraging Twitter for Team Communication

It's a conundrum. Twitter relies on tiny little posts and yet the effect is massive. It's certainly been massive for the people who created the site, but it's also huge for relationships between people. For both Joel and Dave, readers of their blogs and followers of their tweets can see what they're doing, where they're going, and what's interesting to them throughout the day. Instead of relying on an occasional blog post, they get brief updates that, because they take only a second to write, come in regularly.

Now we're not a distant friend who sends occasional letters. We're the guys in the next office they pass in the corridor.

That makes a huge difference to the way any online entrepreneur interacts with his or her customers but also is a big change for anyone else involved in his or her business.

Joel has a home office in Denver, Colorado, and employs freelancers scattered around the country and even around the world. It's one of the benefits of the digital age: he can hire the best people for the job wherever they may be. Dave doesn't even have an office: he works out of coffee shops and coworking spaces scattered throughout Boulder, Colorado, because he, too, has an extended staff.

Let's stick with Joel for now because some of those people have been working with him for years, and yet he's never met them. Joel can count on the fingers of half a hand the number of times he's spoken on the phone to some of them. Lots of other entrepreneurs ...

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