Essential Business Twitter Case Studies in Twitterville

Every day another Twitter book comes to market — Twitter books are being released like loaves and fishes these days — and most of them have been written quickly in attempt to meet market demand, and they’re mostly carbon copies of each other. Not so with the Shel Israel’s (@shelisrael) new book, Twitterville: How Business Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.

Twitterville is a compendium of Twitter case studies as crowd-sourced from hundreds of “tweeters” from around the world, organized and interpreted by Shel Israel, and published in a book that prides itself on “lethal generosity.”  While most Twitter books these days lead with both how-to and why to Twitter, Shel offers these as just an afterthought. What interests him is the who, what, when and where of Twitter, from its inception history right through to the date the book went to press.

If you’re looking for a book to teach you how to tweet or the finer points of Twitter services, dashboards, tools, or who to follow and what to say, you can check out the comprehensive and opinionated All a Twitter by Tee Morris (@TeeMonster), the pedigreed Twitter for Dummies by Laura Fitton (@pistachio) Michael Gruen (@gruen), Leslie Poston (@GeeChee_girl), or even the short-but-complete O’Reilly The Twitter Book (@Sarahm) — you’ll get everything you need, with the who, what, when, where thrown in as an afterthought.

If you’re looking for a book that will catch you up on the story of Twitter, including wins, losses, personalities, every success and every #fail — from a business perspective — you need to pick up a copy of Twitterville, released on September 3. And by business, I don’t mean that this book is Twitter for Business because it isn’t.  This book is highly influenced by The Cluetrain Manifesto and by Shel’s previous book about blogging in a corporate environment, co-authored with Robert Scoble (@scobleizer), Naked Conversations.

These two books reminds me a lot of Twitterville because Cluetrain, Naked, and Twitterville all acknowledge that “markets are conversation” and that “the end of business as usual” has been going on for over a decade even if most companies are just sorting all of this stuff out as we speak.

Ten years ago, there were message boards, forums, and nascent blogs; in June 2006, blogs were changing the world, from elections to the perceptions of multinational companies; now, in 2009, Twitter is heralding the age of the real-time web, a time when the barrier to entry into the global conversation is even lower than blogging, a time when smart-mobs are a “secondly” worldwide occurrence and angry villagers with torches have a powerful new platform for their grievances.

Ten years ago there was a dawn of blogging, an empowering place where citizens could now “talk back” to companies, brands, journalists, and politicians — and companies were rightfully scared. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a very good method for corporations to speak back.  While markets are conversations, there were not very many ways that companies, products, and services could engage back on equal footing. Queue Twitter.

If I read Twitterville correctly, Twitter is the first platform that can finally empower companies to get their footing back.  The first opportunity offered since social media 1.0 pantsed “corporate” that corporate can finally engage past, present, and future customers where they live, powerfully and in real-time.

I know, this all sounds like hyperbole. Don’t take it from me. Twitterville was crowd-sourced across hundreds of Shel’s Twitter followers and they shared with him all of the experiences they have had and all of the stories they have heard.  This isn’t about theory, this is about real world mistakes and real-world successes; this is about the real influencials and real engagements; this is about real threats and real opportunities; and this is about buying and reading one of the best insights into what is really going on in Twitterville and the twittersphere — the real poop and not just a marketing, business, and how-to pie-in-the-sky collection of hype.

If you’re looking for a panacea in Twitterville, look elsewhere — there isn’t any; if you want to really make Twitter sing, however, Twitterville is your best bet to learn what you can and can’t do and especially what you should and shouldn’t do in twitterville.  My favorite concept in the book — and the concept I share with all of the folks I speak to on the phone every day as I evangelize this book — is the concept of “lethal generosity:” “a concept used by the smartest of companies. In social media the greatest influence invariably goes to the most generous participants, not the loudest. So if you join a community where a competitor exists, or is free to join, and you give more to that community than the competitor, the other player is forced either to follow you or abstain from participating in a place where customers spend time.”