Today, Twitter goes public and lots of people will become very rich. We are happy for them.

 

And we are happy that on Twitter, we are @SmallBusiness.

@smallbusiness

Even though we and other small businesses didn’t get to invest in the company before its IPO, we think Twitter has increased the value of lots of small businesses who have learned to use it since it started in 2006.

We are happy for the guys who started Twitter, no matter what version of the founding myth you believe.

We are happy for the early investors, and the late ones too. We’ll even be happy for anyone who purchases stock if they are fortunate and the stock goes up.

We are happy for the small businesses that have figured out how to develop a conversational relationship with their customers through Twitter.

We are happy that an entire small business niche, the food truck, has flourished for the past few years due, in part, to the way in which food truck owners and customers use Twitter to keep up with one another.

We are happy that 3rd-generation family businesses like Bates Nursery (@BatesNursery) in Nashville, Tenn., figured out early how to use Twitter and today has 81,000+ followers.

bates nursery

We are happy because we love seeing things succeed that no one understands, despite it having a perceived value of $18 billion.

We love the Twitter story because it involves a huge failure. And, here at SmallBusiness.com, we love stories that start with huge failures and end up with what’s happening at Twitter today.

odeo

Not only was it a failure, it was a bonafide Harvard Business School Case Study failure in which Evan Williams ended up giving back the money to people who had invested in the failure.

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But then, there was this tiny feature in the failure. A feature that sent out a text message to people who used the product that failed.

That feature would become Twitter and the rest is history. (Or, various histories, depending on who you ask.)

But it was never a history that was guaranteed to be the success it has become. We remember many, many Fail Whales along the way. And it’s still not guaranteed.

We can remember too many amazingly awesome web IPOs that were followed by something other than success.

If Twitter is going to be successful for its investors who aren’t venture capitalists or others who were able to invest before it went public today, it must prove to small businesses that Twitter is worth learning how to use. Not just for getting followers, but for driving sales.

It must convince us all that we can use it to grow our businesses like food trucks and @BatesNursery have used it to grow theirs.

We believe Twitter can.

And we’ll be right here at SmallBusiness.com and @smallbusiness and on the SmallBusiness.com/WIKI doing what we can to help small businesses understand and use it so that they, too, can share in the wealth that 140 characters can create.

We are happy for all those who are getting richer today because they invested early in Twitter.

And we’ll be even more happy when we see Twitter help small businesses realize their dreams and aspirations, too.

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