Ever bogged down on a project and wished for a friendly professional to lend you a hand? Twitter is burgeoning with highly-caffeinated pros eager to share their knowledge in 140 characters or less. Follow these five simple steps to get free help from genuine pros in real time.

1. Clarify Your Need -

When you’re frustrated and need help with something, your first instinct will be to express your struggle in very general terms. Having trouble with a Wordpress plug-in? Your immediate response will be, “I need help with Wordpress!” when your real need is not with Wordpress, but with a specific plug-in. If you Tweet “Can anybody help me with Wordpress?” most of the professionals will ignore you because they don’t have time to clarify your need for you.  That’s what clients pay for. Step away from the frustration-induced generalities and find focus by describing your problem in specific terms.

You need to move from, “I suck at Wordpress.” to “I’m having trouble getting the Sociable plug-in to display buttons correctly.” There isn’t a single perfect way to find clarity in a crisis situation. However, a few tried-and-true methods are physical activity, laughter, or talking to a friend who takes absolutely no interest in your predicament. Everybody needs a friend who thinks the internet is stupid. If you don’t have one, do what you can to find one. They’re great for reality checks.

2. Create Your Question -

Once you’ve defined your problem, it’s often a simple matter to create a question. Continuing the plug-in example, your question might look something like, “How can I get Sociable buttons to display correctly in Wordpress?” That’s not bad for a basic question, but you can do better. Remember, the more concrete and particular your question is, the more likely you’ll be to get a useful response. “How can I get Sociable buttons to display only on the home page?” is a good question because it requires a single answer, not a conversation.

Once you’ve clarified your need and crafted a very specific question, it’s time to move toward finding a solution.

3. Leverage Existing Resources -

“Existing resources” are the answers already available to you online. If you have your question crafted and ready to ask, there’s something very, very important you must do before sending it as a Tweet.

Type your question into a search engine and check the first few pages of results for a solution to your problem.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are just a few search tools that will allow you to look for an answer before asking your Twitter followers for help.

There are many free tutorials online that provide step-by-step solutions to many of life’s persistent questions. If you can’t seem to find an answer, go ahead and tweet your question. Now that you’ve already seen some search engine results, you’ll be able to quickly see through the users on Twitter who delight in providing friendly answers remarkably like those on the front page of Google.

Serendipity? I think not. If you don’t believe me, try asking your followers, “Where can I buy spotted prawns online?” Most of the responses will point you to “great-alaska-seafood.com”…the top result from a Google search. It’s in poor taste to ask another to do something you might have already done for yourself. Don’t be lazy.

4. Tweet For A Solution -

If search engines fail to provide you with a satisfactory answer, it’s time to leverage your Twitter community for a solution. For best results, do this with two tweets.

1. Let your followers know you’re going to tweet a question. “I need help! If you know a Wordpress plug-in pro, would you mind forwarding my next Tweet to him?” Is a great opening Tweet because it primes your followers for the upcoming question.
2. “Do you know how to make Sociable display buttons on a specific page? Thanks for the help!” Is concise, friendly, and an easy question for a knowledgeable user to answer.

If you don’t get an immediate response, don’t worry. It can take awhile for your question to find a professional with time to answer. Just wait a few hours and ask again. Patience is a good thing. Remember the three P’s of information procurement and be precise, pleasant, and persistent until you find a solution.

5. Promote Your Savior -

We all know to thank people who help us. It’s simply the polite thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get sucked back into a project as soon as we find a solution. Make a point to say thanks before going back to work. When you’ve received help on Twitter, it’s important to go beyond a simple “Thank You” and take a moment to recognize the person who gave you help. Thank everybody who made an effort and give special attention to the person who provided the final solution. You don’t have to gush and insist that everybody follow that person. (Although that might be nice.) Just make a point to be pleasant and thankful.

Use these five steps whenever you run into trouble and you’ll discover that Twitter isn’t just another search engine. It’s a group of wildly different people willing to offer insight and wisdom on more topics than you’ll ever think to struggle with. If you take the time to be clear in your requests, thoughtful in your actions, and grateful in your responses,  Twitter has an excellent track record of returning surprising value.

Do you have any additional thoughts or a story about a project saved by a Twitter follower? I’d appreciate your input!

Share this post on Twitter

photo: normairiz

There’s something sinister creeping about that I’d like to get your thoughts on. 

It’s called imitation and is responsible for the destruction of unique talent around the world. Imitators look for a success story with an ending they like and attempt to recreate success for themselves by reenacting that story to the letter. It’s very contagious.

You can usually spot them from a distance. Imitators want to know about the tool, not the inspiration. The platform, not the technique. The metrics, not the intangibles. 

They talk a lot about hustle and tend to know all the buzzwords. But if you back imitators into a corner and ask them about how they hope to leverage their unique talents into personal success, you’ll get melty-smelty looks and no response. 

I can’t be entirely down on the imitators though. They’re very serious about hustling and tend to be good about following through on their plans. 

Here’s a perfect example of the sort of content an imitator comes up with: I call it, “The Jazz Pianist Imitator Follows MC Hammer’s Guide To Taking YouTube By Storm“. 

Read the rest of this entry »