Twitter has been talking about offering special paid services for businesses for quite a while. On Thursday night, the start-up took one step closer. Twitter unveiled Twitter 101, a series of Web pages and a downloadable slide show that explain what Twitter is and how businesses can use it, along with case studies of a few companies that use Twitter. These are the case studies that Anamitra Banerji, manager of commercial products at Twitter, discussed in our story earlier this week about how mom-and-pop shops use Twitter. When Mr. Banerji joined Twitter from Yahoo in March, he said, he expected to begin rolling out a set of commercial products for the businesses on Twitter right away. Instead, he said, he discovered that “yes, many companies are on Twitter, but many have questions about how and why to use it, and many are still not on Twitter. It’s a lot easier to ask people for money if they understand how it could be useful to them without paying anything.” Twitter 101 is the first step toward doing that. “If you intrinsically see some value in Twitter, you will want to pay more to get more,” he added. The case studies cover well-known companies like JetBlue and Dell (which we have written about before) and small businesses like Teusner Wines and CoffeeGroundz. Twitter will likely introduce a bundle of paid services later this year for businesses to use to do things like verify their accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles, Mr. Banerji said. Twitter 101 also reveals what Twitter thinks is most important about the service. Some people think of Twitter as a broadcast platform. But Twitter says that instead, the service is for building relationships and listening to and responding to comments about your company. It is also a way to ask questions and float ideas in real time, the company says. Watching how small businesses use Twitter is particularly interesting, Mr. Banerji said, because they “are able to take more risks, try out things on Twitter that it will take a little more time for big businesses to do.” Source: NYTIMES/US