Ed Russell

Twitter. There seems to be loads of talk about how to use it in business and all that jazz, but it wasn’t until recently that I found it a truly useful tool outside of chatting rubbish at/with people, and gathering some useful web links about green issues or something similar.

It all started with us needing a new developer to help out with our webSNAPS product. Usually this would involve us going to an agency or posting an advert on job site. Most agencies are money grabbing evil companies, we’ve spent ages using a number of them before we found our current favourite called “Big Red” who are generally nice people and actually do some work for the money. They still cost money though, as do most job sites, which in the current climate spending money is something that everyone is worried about.

So I tried a different approach. I created an advert on our site, and then twittered the link to people who follow me on the site. This was then sent on (retweeted) by a number of these people so spread to a wider range of people. We didn’t get a huge response which is understandable as it is still a smallish pool of people and we were needing a very specific skill set. But the people who did come back were all within circles of friends who we trusted so the quality was much higher than I’ve been used to when recruiting. We met with a few of these and hired Dan Squire – someone who we had previously worked in the pandaNET days.

All in all a fairly painless process which cost nowt and got us a developer we know we can trust. My first “real” commercial use of Twitter.

Posted by Ed Russell