Orange County Register

Guy Kawasaki had some interesting words for businesses about using Twitter as a marketing tool.

Kawasaki, a well known blogger, venture capitalist and former Apple evangelist, was the keynote speaker at VC in the OC on Thursday in Newport Beach. Check out Jan Norman’s story on some of the companies at VC in the OC. The event is held to try and help connect Orange County startups with the resources they need to succeed.

Kawasaki introduced Twitter as the greatest tool for marketing since the telephone.

“Twitter is a weapon,” he said of the site, which was founded as a new way for friends to connect with each other. It lets people send out a message from any cell phone or computer of up to 140 characters in length that’s visible by anyone in the world instantly.

While Twitter might have been founded to help friends socialize, that’s not exactly the way he uses it.

“Not everybody in the Twitter world agrees with the way I use Twitter. I use it for unintended purposes,” he said.

For the unfamiliar, he described Twitter to the Orange County business people as being like a cell phone that when you turn it on you can hear everyone in the world talking at the same time.

“If you’re thinking that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, congratulations, you passed the IQ test. That absolutely should be your first reaction,” Kawasaki said.

According to Kawasaki, the true potential of Twitter to businesses is realized with Twitter search. Twitter features a search engine that lets you see what people are saying about anything at this exact moment.

“Other than perhaps the NSA, there is no better way to monitor what people are saying in the world,” Kawasaki said.

While a great number of tweets (the word for an individual update a person sends via Twitter) are meaningless if you look at them one at a time, when you search for a product or service you can quickly get a sense of what people are saying about it.

You can even narrow searches by distance from zip codes.

For example, a car salesman in Orange County could search for “Porsche” within say 50 miles of their dealership and identify what people in the area are saying about that kind of car right now. And you can quickly contact that person. That’s what Kawasaki means when he’s talking about Twitter as a marketing weapon.

Kawasaki ran through a pretty extensive demo of Twitter following an outline available here (the site was down at the time of this writing, but I assume it was just temporary). The lesson ranged from the basics of the service, much of which has already been described in this post, to some very advanced tools people can use to maximize the impact of their tweets.

For example, he talked about reposting the same thing multiple times perhaps eight or 12 hours apart because it’s likely not everybody saw it the first time. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of thing some people on Twitter despise. Kawasaki says to ignore them.

“If you aren’t pissing someone off on Twitter,” he said. “You’re not doing it right.”

You can follow me @hmltn. I don’t repost the same things multiple times

Still not getting Twitter? If not, let us know in the comments and we’ll help you out. If you do use Twitter, share your username along with how you use it.

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