It's no secret Twitter has reached the tipping point in a big way. It's February 2009 and I can't surf three links without running into yet another blog post or article with the phrases 'Social Media' and 'Twitter' appearing at least 32.56 times on the same page. Twitter's spreading like an algal bloom on phosphorous!

Oh, by the way, before we get down to business can I interest you in a 'How Twitter will Transform your Business into a Super Powerful <martial art of choice> Flying Pigeon' article? Here's a blogroll:

Everybody's getting on the Twitter bandwagon and partying like it's 1999. There's no possible way I can ignore or resist the wave of hype so I'm going to join the other 1652 social media marketers out there and serve my addition to the Twitter soup on the web with this manifesto:

4 Easy Ways To Integrate Twitter with GoodBarry

1) 'Tweet This' Button On Your Content (Articles, Blog Posts, Announcements)

Thanks to free Twitter tools like TwitThis.com we don't have to learn how to become web designers or learn the Twitter API to be able to add a TwitThis button. Encourage your visitors to tweet your new content just by copying and pasting these few lines of Javascript to your WYSIWYG editor in HTML mode.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.scripts/twitthis.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write('<a href="javascript:;" onclick="TwitThis.pop();"><img src="http://s3.chuug.com/chuug.twitthis.resources/twitthis_grey_72x22.gif" alt="TwitThis" style="border:none;" /></a>');
</script>

2) 'Follow Me' Button on your Site Pages or Template

Did you know a "Follow Me" button is nothing more than a fancy button that you can download for free from sites like Limeshot (181 more buttons at TwiTip) that links back to your Twitter homepage. On your Twitter page, visitors can click on 'Follow Me' if they like your site and what you stand for in your tweets.

To add one of these to your GoodBarry site download a button and upload it to the /images folder of your site. On your page or template WYSIWYG editor copy and paste these lines of code substituting your image file name and twitter username for parts highlighted in red.

<a href="http://twitter.com/your_twitter_name"><img src="/Images/twitter-image-name.png" alt="Follow @your_twitter_name" style="float:left; padding-right:10px;" width="80" height="60" border="0"/></a>

3) Adding the Twitter Widget (Really Easy)

Twitter has its own widget which you can add to your site - just go to http://twitter.com/widgets/profile_flash_widget. It acts like a peephole from your website to your Twitter account displaying your most recent tweets and allowing people to follow. Again it's just a matter of copying and pasting the code provided by Twitter and pasting it into your GoodBarry editor then saving and publishing.

4) Connecting Your RSS Feeds To Twitter

If you're using RSS on your GoodBarry site you can connect it to your Twitter by using Twitterfeed.com. You'll need to create a new twitter feed as shown below and copy and paste the RSS Feed URL from your GoodBarry site to Twitter Feed.

Getting the GoodBarry RSS URL - Go to Website->RSS Channels, click on a channel and you'll see this action box:

Twitter Apps and Plugins Galore!

There must be 100s if not 1000s of 3rd party Twitter apps and widgets out on the web. We've only scratched the surface with what you can do with GoodBarry and Twitter. However, the general principle will be the same - the application or widget you're using will provide you with some code that you can copy and paste into your site and GoodBarry makes that easy. Just one warning - be wary of Twitter apps that require you to enter your username and password, some of these are phishing for your password. Do your research first.

Why Isn't There a GoodBarry Twitter Account?

We haven't set up a corporate GoodBarry Twitter account (that's not to say we won't in the future) because we believe Twitter is about personal conversations between groups of individuals.

The problem with corporate Twitter accounts is that they make it difficult to foster conversations and build a real community. Once you use a company logo for an avatar and only post on topics related to the business, you've ejected the personable out of Twitter and replaced it with the faceless corporate you were trying to get away from in the first place by using Social Media.

What we do at GoodBarry is empower our employees to tweet and that's how Twitter should work for any business. You need individual personalities from the CEO down to the janitor representing the business that other tweeps can connect with. Given a set of loose guidelines:

• Your tweets need to pass the newspaper test
• Don't shamelessly plug your own company, tout your products. In a nutshell don't spam!
• Don't tweet contrary to your company if you're explicitly affiliated by employment.

Each of your tweeting employees can build their own personal Twitter community for whom they are providing value (retweeting, posting funny, helpful links, answering questions etc) and developing personal connections with. Every so often you'll be able to weave in work related tweets which is now much more palatable because the connection is personal.

If you'd like to follow, here's the 4 Tweeps working at GoodBarry and 3 friends of GoodBarry who tweet regularly:

Over the past few months, we've been experiencing a tremendous period of growth here at GoodBarry. It has been exciting to see so many business owners and web designers discover and use our software; we appreciate your attention and time. You make our business tick - thank you.

We believe very much in what we do: enabling you to build and run Online Businesses, Not Websites. It's great to see that others believe in it too, and have come to join our movement to make ecommerce and online business so much more effective and customer focused.

That's also why it's so heartbreaking when we let you down. Recently there have been occasions when we've slipped on our service level agreements and have taken longer than promised to reply to support requests. We know you're running a business; we know you need our help from time to time; we know your customers are important to you, too. We are here to help and by and large we're succeeding in doing so; generally we're still responding within our advertised timeframes. But still, we know we've slipped. To those affected, we're truly sorry.

The good thing is that we're learning and we're listening. I'm talking to customers each day, as is Bardia and the rest of the team. Thankfully we're already making great strides. There's exciting things on the horizon.

More Support Engineers On The Way!

We're on the lookout now for 2 more Support Engineers to join us in our San Francisco office. We've already started interviews and seen some good candidates, so we're hoping to bolster the team really soon so we can get back to you faster than ever. I'll post again when we finalize those hires.

More Video Training

We're embarking on a comprehensive plan to provide a series of videos explaining some of the features you're asking the most questions about. This will mean that you can get answers in your own time, in a quick and easy to understand way.

Tuning and Performance

The GoodBarry system architecture is getting better every day. As load increases our challenges change, but our system engineers and developers are working around the clock in Sydney and San Francisco, identifying areas of improvement and rolling them out. We've already seen some significant wins in this area, and that will continue.

That's just a quick-sketch picture of what's going on behind the scenes here at GB. We're gearing up so that we can continue to provide the same great level of service you expect - from both our software and our support team.

If you have any feedback for us, or ideas to improve - we love to hear from you. Just drop me a line at brett (at) goodbarry.com, or find me on twitter.