There is a serious opportunity that awaits the aspiring rock star, but it is easily missed because it’s easily dismissed.

Please allow me to introduce you to the fine art of “Twitterbitching”

Twitterbitching (verb) The act of complaining via Twitter. See also piss and moan, hemming and hawing, yakkin about and twittum bitcherendi

Now, just to be clear, the opportunity isn’t in the actual twitterbitching, its in the listening for the twitterbitching!

Listening for things like . . .

Someone mentioning a competitor and twitterbitching about a bad experience, lame policy, pricing etc.

How about someone twitterbitching about a challenge they are facing?

I’ve been told that people can become quite the Twitterbitchmeister when there is a service outage.

Quick non related story to illustrate the point: Many years ago I knew someone who while on vacation, threw a snowball off the roof of a small building and hit some dude in the head. The guy got pissed (and rightly so) looked around and had no idea where the snowball came from. That didn’t stop him. He made a snowball and threw it off in some random direction.

So, grasshopper, why did the dude throw it if he didn’t even know what the hell he was throwing it at?

Possible answers:

a)    To practice pitching for the big baseball game back home in a few months

b)    He was revisiting a bad acid trip from 1967 where they listened to Hendrix and threw snowballs in a hippy commune.

c)    Because he needed to blow off some steam.

The answer was obviously “b” because that’s just whacky behavior no matter how you slice it, but I digress!

Seriously . . . He needed to blow off some steam.

I’m not sure why I chose to work that story into twitterbitching but any who . . .

Here are 5 quick tips to help you leverage the fine art of Twitterbitching

1)    Use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and set up keywords that you need to listen for. You might want to start with key competitors, industry keywords etc.

2)    Set up an alert on http://socialmention.com Social Mention is a search engine for social media and searches twitter, facebook, blogs etc. My suggestion would be to avoid the email alert option because it will blast the hell out of your inbox. A better option would be to set up a Sales Listening Station.

3)    When you find someone Twitterbitching I want you to have a Flashback (bad Kung Fu movie style) to something I always say on this blog . . . “Everyone has a story and wants to be heard” That’s your cue to show some empathy and validate their feelings. Doing so, will set you apart from the masses who will be busy dismissing this as a random act of twitterbitchiness.

4)    Don’t even think about launching into an infomercial about how you and your company are the bestest . . . see item #3 again and be sociable (its called “social networking” right?)

5)    Let the event serve as a conversation starter.

Now you have a lead . . . with a prospect who might be a tad more likely to trade up!

Before you go, there is a final reading from the book of Twitterbitcherodomy . . .

Make sure you are listening to make sure no one is Twitterbitching about you or your company. All you have to do is include those two search items in #’s 1 & 2!

Happy hunting!

Paul Castain  works with organizations and individuals to achieve higher levels of performance. He is so good that he was granted permission to talk about himself in the 3rd person. For more information on how Paul can help you and your company click here dude.