How to Make Money with Social Media: An Insider’s Guide to Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business, Second Edition

1. In the Beginning

Not long after the South by Southwest conference, Ricardo Guerrero had an idea that would change social media forever.

The date was Sunday, April 22, 2007 and Guerrero was relaxing with the latest edition of The New York Times. He was reading an article about Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, the two inventors of a new social media platform called Twitter.

Guerrero had first learned about Twitter the previous month at South by Southwest, where it won the “Best of the Web” award. At the time, Twitter only had 100,000 users, and the future of the platform was still very much in doubt, so Guerrero was viewing it as a possible fad. But there was something about the platform that intrigued him, which is why he began trying to wrap his ...