As many know, I speak at wide variety of internal and external events.

At many of these events, I have spoken about the power of twitter, and worked backwards and explained how I happened to be there at that particular moment as a result of just one tweet – shown below from 15th January 2011.

Some background to this tweet. I had been in Seattle as part of a Visible Technologies sales team meeting. I was returning to London via San Francisco, as I had decided to spend the weekend there – my first time in SF.

You can also hear me talk about this story from the very start of the video below of my 2014 TEDx London Business School presentation.

After sending the “Arrived San Francisco” tweet, I promptly forgot about it and prepared to explore the city the next morning. Then this tweet popped up from fellow Aussie, Antony McGregor Dey @antonymd who now lives in San Francisco.

Antony and I had never met (we came close a few times – see a tweet when we were both in Sydney in 2010 below), but we had always wanted to meet in person.

We had lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf on Saturday 15th January, and as a result, he agreed to introduce me to Jodee Rich, the founder of PeopleBrowser, and the makers of Kred.

This lead to me meeting Jodee, and agreeing to join his company, where I was the CEO of Kred from 2011 – 2013.

Fast forward from 2013. and I an now with IBM.  I am absolutely positive that my time at Kred helped with IBM’s decision to hire me.

The key lesson that I share at conferences around the world is that by being on twitter, and sharing what I am doing and where I am, opportunities such as Kred and IBM have happened.  When I ask for a show of hands at conferences of who is not on twitter, this story seems to be the trigger for them to join.

As an aside, on the same trip to San Francisco, I scored an upgrade to a suite at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental. You can read about this story here and one of the tweets that secured the upgrade is presented below.

The blog post about the upgrade has been used by Intercontinental Hotels globally to show the power of twitter.

If you are reading this and not on twitter, or know someone who is not yet a member – think of these 2 key reasons to join:

1) Brand protection – I secured @AndrewGrill in 2007 and this has become my online personality

2) Market research – if you are not on twitter then you are missing out on all the great research, tips and news I get direct from my twitter followers