Twitter, it seems is everywhere at the moment. You can’t listen to a radio show or turn on the TV without hearing something about it – and you’d be forgiven for believing that everyone is using it at the moment. 

But in the world of small businesses, it seems that people are falling into three camps – those that are using Twitter and other social networking sites to promote their business; those that have heard about Twitter, haven’t used it yet, but feel under pressure to do so and those who haven’t heard of it, have no intention of using it and think it’s a waste of time.

So, just what is Twitter and should you be using it to promote your business?

Let’s start with the “what is it?” question which is hard enough in itself to answer. Twitter is a new social networking site (like Facebook, Myspace etc) that was launched a while ago. However, in the last three months or so, it has really picked up in popularity to the extent that celebrities have a Twitter page as do most radio stations etc. The press are also now monitoring Twitter to pick up interesting trends and news stories – it seems that the media has gone Twitter mad.

You can set up an account for free at www.twitter.com and the aim of it is to quickly update people on what you’re up to. So, you could tell them you’ve just visited an interesting site; been out to lunch with friends; are involved in a new project and so on. The space you get is very short – just 140 characters, so it really will be a quick post. Someone recently for instance used Twitter to tell everyone he was in Paris and asked where the best places to eat were – he got over 100 replies in 10 minutes telling him where to go.

OK, you are forgiven for asking “what’s the point of that?” and “does anyone really want to know what I had for lunch today?” And, yes these are really good questions.

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Many managers and supervisors struggle to get the best out of their employees. Do you have difficulty understanding why your workers behave the way they do? Sometimes this is because managers mistakenly assume that everyone is like them: “I like a lot of detail, so everyone else must as well”. And when an employee turns in a report that looks like an executive summary, this type of manager stresses to find out what went “wrong” with the employee.

In other cases, the manager works on the assumption that their employees’ preferences are the opposite of their own. This type of manager, for example, believes that employees are motivated primarily by their paycheck whilst they themselves are motivated by a stiff challenge.

What both these types of managers share is that they are both one-dimensional; seeking to explain all or most of their employees’ behaviors by a single cause. People are much more complex than this. Being able to appreciate some of this complexity will help make otherwise unintelligible behaviors understandable. Using this knowledge to then shape employee behavior will not only take some of the stress out of managing people, it will lead to greater rewards as employees begin to work with you and not against you.

Without wading through a lot of theory, let me illustrate the power of psychology with a real-life example. In one computer production facility, the production manager wanted to lift production levels. To do this, she implemented a new incentive scheme in which production workers would receive a 5% increase in their take home wage if they increased the number of units produced by 30%. This did require some effort on the part of the employees as the productivity gains could only eventuate if each of them learned how to use the new microprocessor-controlled cutting machine.

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