Problem
I want to be able to use btn group for twitter bootstrap and have the buttons show to the left of some text. Not sure if this is already a
Put pull-left on the buttons div: http://jsfiddle.net/dbTqC/653/
pull-left
I think this just sets float: left, so you'll need to clear things below it. There's a clearfix class for this.
float: left
clearfix
It's worth having a look at some CSS resources so that you understand what's happening here.