Twitter is the sound birds make when they communicate. It's also the sound I make on my iPhone in the back of a cab as I type posts. Tap, tap, tap, tweet.
The company I co-founded, Gilt Groupe, would not exist without the Internet, we sell coveted designer fashions at deep discounts to our members. So as a modern executive, would I exist without Twitter? Sure, I would still be here, and no, I'm not about to have an existential crisis. It's just that Twitter makes me feel more alive to the possibilities of work and life.
Here are my Twitter stats as of this morning: I (@giltfounder) follow 368 fellow twitterers, I myself have 460 followers, and I have so far typed 101 tweets between meetings, in airline lounges and on photo shoots. I follow Justin Timberlake, Charlie Rose and Stephen Colbert. I love that Marc Jacobs, a designer who we can't get enough of at Gilt, is on Twitter, where he talks about watching The Hills and rat-a-tat-tats with reality star Kim Kardashian about her new hair color. Among my followers I count fashion blogger the Choosy Beggar, as well as tarte cosmetics (who we sell on the site) and his holiness the Dalai Lama. And I love hearing from all of them.
In a knowledge-based economy, Twitter is just one more byte to help keep me on top of everything that is happening. Did you know that the Australian swimwear label Zimmermann, whose sales we host on Gilt, just reopened their glitzy Bondi store? I do, because I follow them. I also track former stock analyst Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider (@ hblodget and @ alleyinsider) -- he gets the best scoops. (Full disclosure: Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider shares a board member with Gilt.) But I follow the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and my other guilty pleasure, Gawker, too.
As an entrepreneur, the question is, how can you harness Twitter for business? For Gilt, Twitter gives us unfiltered access to our members. They let us know when they're having shipping problems, and at noon, when sales start at Gilt, we hear them explode into a hundred whispers that build into lengthy discussions about the Fendi Spy Bag. When we had Fendi on the site for the first time ever in July, we were all very excited. So it makes sense that our customers would be chattering about that, too.
But it's the small tweets that matter. When I didn't know what to wear to a premier party we co-hosted at Sunshine Cinema for Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, I posted my quandary and immediately heard back from my Twitter pals. Where else can an executive get instant advice on a hippie hairdo?