HIRE ME TO SPEAK
HIRE ME TO SPEAK

Stress Free Twitter: Be unrestricted, free, and meaningful

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Twitter  |  Book Reviews  |  Books

Yukari_profile_photo The great headline of this blog post is how you would translate the title of my wife's new book. Stress Free Twitter comes out this week in the Japanese language.

Yes, both Yukari and I write about marketing strategy and real-time online media and we both have new books coming out within several days of each other.

Yukari Watanabe Scott @YukariWatanabe has written three books, contributed to several others, and has written hundreds of magazine articles and countless posts on her several blogs.

"WILL YOU GUYS STOP TALKING ABOUT TWITTER!"

Imagine life for our teenaged daughter. Whenever the subject of Twitter comes up at mealtime, she rolls her eyes. Sometimes she leaves the room. Sometimes she tries to change the subject. But it's tough for us because Yukari and I have been spending the past year researching and writing books about real-time communications. We talk about the similarities (and differences) in the real-time mindsets of people in different parts of the world.

Our daughter would prefer to talk about Neuroscience or music or, well, anything but Twitter.

Yukari book Yukari's book talks about how Twitter should be fun. Nobody should feel compelled to tweet. And, perhaps more importantly, there are no hard and fast rules about the "right" way to use Twitter.

Incidentally, a huge difference that those who use Twitter in Japan enjoy is they can say more in a single tweet. Due to Kanji characters expressing more meaning per character than a letter, a single 140-character tweet in Japanese is nearly a paragraph in English. That alone may mean less stress!

Yukari interviewed people all over the world to find stories for the book. For example, she shares how Rebecca Corliss - @repcor – used Twitter to help connect her to HubSpot where she now works in marketing. (Just an aside, could you imagine being in the marketing department of HubSpot, a company that sells products to marketing people, and where everyone is a marketing expert? I imagine Rebecca's job is like working in the accounting department of an accounting firm. But I digress.)

Yukari learned through her research that those who obsessed to “tweet by the rules” didn’t enjoy Twitter as much as those who just had fun with it and figured out their own style.

One more aside: According to Yukari's Twitter profile, she has tweeted 16,082 times as of this writing. Yikes!

If you have Japanese colleagues who are struggling with Twitter, please consider passing this on to them.