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Last week James Taylor played duets with the commander of the International Space Station.  One might assume that this came about because of some some high level government contact, but no, the real story– as documented in The Berkshire Eagle— was more like this:

The video teleconference was arranged after Taylor’s personal assistant Ellyn Kusmin spotted an e-mail from NASA scientist Dan Cook, head of Behavioral Health and Performance Space Medicine sent to Taylor’s website, like any fan.

“We get at least 1,000 e-mails a month,” said Kusmin, “and I read as many as I can but I have to say I am very glad that I read this one. At first I thought it was a hoax. But it wasn’t.”

What’s this got to do with Twitter, you ask?  A Twitter message that references your organization is the same as the random email described above. You simply don’t know who is out there, but if you reply, good things can happen.

At the last NAMP conference Scott Stratten, the author of Unmarketing, who has over 100,000 followers on Twitter and 80,000 tweets, revealed that the majority of his tweets were replies. After the conference I tested this, and needless to say, he Tweeted back.

The bottom line is that people who take the time to publicly talk about you on Twitter are people worth responding to, just as if they had written you an email. I hear folks saying that replying to Twitter  seems like one of those “I don’t have time for yet another to-do item” kind of things, but my advice is that you need to recalibrate and figure out how to make it part of your marketing operation. Steal time from something else, because this is becoming increasingly important.

And the same goes for Facebook.

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