Are you better off having 2% of 1,000 people respond to you in Twitter or having 20% of 100?

I just started leaning into Twitter and I just reached 50 followers. Wow, that’s really unimpressive. The thing I really like, though, is that when I Tweet a link, I get a 50% response rate. As I follow people and more people follow me, can I maintain this ratio?

Bragging about how many people are following you seems to be popular. Ok, popular for those who have over 1,000. This seems to be a magical number that sets you on the road to success. But how do you define success? What are you trying to accomplish? If you just want to artificially inflate your numbers with groups of people who never read what you write, then by all means, grab the automated tools and go for it. It can be done rather easily, but I don’t honestly think that it will lead to the brand recognition or positive opinion from your customers that you are looking for.

I’m here to prove that point.

I’m going to pick a very specific niche and use every Twitter tool I can find (feel free to recommend some). I’m going to try and create an artificial Twitter list of 1,000 in 1 week. I call it “artificial”, though, “superficial” is probably a better term. Building a list of people who don’t care about you isn’t a difficult thing to do. There are billions of people out there that literally don’t give a crap about me. All I’m looking for is a list of 1,000 users.

Doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Here’s my plan of action:

No rocket science here, just a straight forward test to see if Twitter can give me the results I am looking for. My expectations (hypothesis?) are :

A. I can get 1,000 people on my twitter list in 1 week

B. Only 2% or less of those people on the list will take action
- 2% will click the link
- 10% of the clickers will sign up for a newsletter

I am going to post good content that is valuable and relevant to the keyword topic. There will be no sales pitches of any kind during the week, just links to good content. The main difference here is that I am going to automate how those tweets get out to the users. Rather than letting people come to me, I’m going to grab the big stick and go Blunt Trauma Marketing on them.

I’ll let you know how that goes ; )

Toff Ward
Open source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using social media.

I just ran across these two accounts on twitter:

The first one only has a single tweet, and its a sales pitch, yet 431 accounts are followers. The second account has 3 tweets.

At first, I felt like I was really missing something. I have 39 followers (oh wait, now its up to 42). I asked @CharlesMcKeever how you would get that many people to follow you without offering anything of value.

His response was, “That’s easy. They’re not worried about creating real value. They’re just accounts, not actual people. There are lots of tools that will automatically follow, unfollow, or tweet for you. It’s not uncommon for someone to automatically follow you if you follow them. Obama auto-followed people during his Presidential campaign. That means you can follow people, have them follow you and then unfollow them later. It’s less common for people to automatically unfollow so your follower numbers grow artificially.”

Wow. Ouch! So this person, scratch that, Account, most likely signed up and immediately started following other people just to get the automatic follow in return. Since managing thousands of followers takes up too much time, and since the tools for Twitter are so prolific, its faster, easier and more efficient, to just let your tools handle the madness. Using Tweetdeck, you can filter who you want to read and the rest of the people just tweet into oblivion. Following you is evidently just a tip of the cap or wink as they continue walking by.

I’m only following 41 people and I feel like I’m always reading (granted, one of the people I’m following is @lizstrauss and she’s probably tweeted the same number per day, that I did all week).

So, which is more valuable, a small number of people who read what you tweet, or a massive number of people who never read anything you tweet (that’s assuming you actually tweet)???

The difference, if you are looking at things from a marketing perspective (which the single tweet person seemed to be trying to do), is like creating a TV commercial and only airing that commercial at 3am on a Sunday, on cable channel 997, in Swahili. A commercial TV ad during the Superbowl 2010 is approximately $3.01 million. The price is high because there are a bazillion people awake and watching (I’m referring to half-time, before the booze kicks in).

During the Superbowl people are watching the screen. At 3am on an obscure channel, is anyone really going to pay attention. The person with 1 tweet is obviously trying to sell their services. Do you really think that this Twitter campaign is going to work for them? I’m honestly curious. I have some clients that still insist spam works.

I’ll admit, I’m new to Twitter. I haven’t figure out what to say or how to say it within 140 characters. But, my gut tells me that you need to offer something of value (good information, links to articles, good recommendations, putting people together whose needs and services match, etc.) or why would that person read what you have to say? I hear the phrase, “content is king” over and over yet, there seems to be a lot of individuals that aren’t hearing this.

Feel free to let me know if I’m totally off base on this one. There are many people who post phrases like “going to dinner, now” or “Just saw Fred”. Obviously, these folks are using Twitter as a conversation tool to connect with friends and have no need to marketing anything. I’ve been using Twitter to learn and share what I learn, so I guess its up to the user as to whether they are getting what they want out of it.

How are you using it?

Toff
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. Someone smarter than me just mentioned that I should probably put my Twitter account at the end of this post. @peddlewin

Is your Twitter name so overweight that it can’t fit into retweets? Do you even have difficulty squeezing the name into a tweet. Does your handle make people cringe to type it?

Face it, Twitter is for dieters. Bit.ly, Tinyurl.com, qwkurl.com have all figured it out. Those 140lbs, um, I mean characters, are a maximum. The scale knows you’re lying to yourself. Those who snack privately can’t hid it openly.

At some point, you really need to put your twitter name on a diet. 40% of all twitter handles can be considered obese. Let’s be honest. You might want to fit into a size 3 characters, but those damn Twitter dieters got to the good names first.

Jiminy Cricket once said, “You buttered your bread. Now sleep in it!”. No truer words were ever spoken by a Disney character with a crunchy exoskeleton.

Then again, in some countries, he’d be just another lunch snack.

So, think about what you really want to do and say on Twitter. Is that extra weight really causing you problems, or do your friends like you for the size 29 characters you really are.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Follow us: @OpenSourceMarketerIsTheBestest

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Is your Twitter name so overweight that it can’t fit into retweets? Do you even have difficulty squeezing the name into a tweet. Does your handle make people cringe to type it?

Face it, Twitter is for dieters. Bit.ly, Tinyurl.com, qwkurl.com have all figured it out. Those 140lbs, um, I mean characters, are a maximum. The scale knows you’re lying to yourself. Those who snack privately can’t hid it openly.

At some point, you really need to put your twitter name on a diet. 40% of all twitter handles can be considered obese. Let’s be honest. You might want to fit into a size 3 characters, but those damn Twitter dieters got to the good names first.

Jiminy Cricket once said, “You buttered your bread. Now sleep in it!”. No truer words were ever spoken by a Disney character with a crunchy exoskeleton.

Then again, in some countries, he’d be just another lunch snack.

So, think about what you really want to do and say on Twitter. Is that extra weight really causing you problems, or do your friends like you for the size 29 characters you really are.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Follow us: @OpenSourceMarketerIsTheBestest

Accelerate your business online using Facebook.

And then there are the cannonballers. They throw caution (and brand equity) to the wind and jump on in, full force, watch out below.

Olympic dreams

As an operations guy, I focus on repeatable, disciplined process-oriented workflows, and the same operational structure that will bring you success in any other business (or sports) endeavor must be applied to social media.

In this post I’ll cover two often-overlooked aspects of social media, elements that George Colony refers to as listening and soliciting feedback, and how you can codify them into a consistent operating process.

Two-way communication

While many are now versed in, or at least comfortable with, the concept of using social media as a marketing tool, I am not sure how many are really using it as a two-way communication mechanism.  The idea of this medium being “social” implies that it is about a way in which people or groups of people interact and behave.

In this way, social media involves more than just your marketing team, but should include anyone who interacts with your customer base…and even their friends. In order to manage this, you must have a process in place to truly leverage the two-way communication benefit.

A process shall lead them

The process, as I see it, resembles an hourglass figure with a fountain effect…information flows in from the top and feeds to the appropriate areas within the organization. From these areas in an organization, information is then fed back into the social media pool.

As the drawing indicates, I envision a central place, or filter, for information to flow through from the top and be dispersed to the appropriate parties to engage with the public or individual customer as appropriate.

This person, group or department (depending on the size and reach of your customer base’s and detractor’s voices) must have the authority and ability to do the following:

• Effectively monitor all social media channels for relevant information
• Determine what needs to be responded to
• Know the most appropriate person, group or department to engage in responding
• Make certain that responses are timely and connected to the audience, as well as conforming to your brand

Proactive reaction

Additionally, each department needs a dedicated individual or group as well that is accountable for addressing corporate interactions that take place on a social media platform.  These individuals should be a primary contact point for the Social Media Manager to forward feedback to and expect an immediate response from.

For example, if a woman tweets, “Just left Kingdom Hotel in Jacksonville. Horrible Service!”  The Social Media Manager in the corporate office, who is monitoring the search phrase “Kingdom Hotel” sees this tweet.

She would first respond to the tweet that she will be contacting the hotel manager to address her concerns and request contact information. She would then forward it to the hotel manager in Jacksonville.

He would subsequently reach out to the woman with the intention of soliciting her feedback to improve their service and to more specifically address and resolve her complaint.

Social media isn’t free

Obviously, as this type of activity could consume resources from other areas within your organization and possibly hurt either or both your top and bottom lines, the Social Media Manager must be adept at determining the impact of a particular social media message and the size of the audience that was exposed to it in order to determine how much of a priority should be placed on responding to the message.

Additionally, the manger should initially respond to the message in the same forum where it was originally placed to allow the audience to know that company is addressing it. After an issue is successfully resolved, where appropriate, it would make sense to post the resolution in the original forum, and ideal if you could get the customer to do it.

Here at MarketingExperiments, we have three primary individuals that are regularly monitoring traffic about us. Also, as part of our corporate culture, if anyone in the organization discovers something on the Internet that references us it is brought to the attention of the individuals monitoring social media or their immediate manager or director.

When it comes to responding, those monitoring the traffic regularly solicit feedback from various parts of our company, even going so far as to solicit a response from one our analysts fluent in Spanish to respond to someone in Spain.

So while I encourage you to listen (not just market), we are listening to you as well. In fact, I hope to hear your feedback about this post (or any others) in comments, tweets and heck, even a YouTube video.

Related resources

Social Media Marketing in Four Steps
Harnessing Social Media
Social Media Measurement
Twitter and Social Media
Antisocial Media

The novelty and uncertainty of the field certainly haven’t stopped the burgeoning cottage industry of self-inaugurated gurus. This combination of ambiguity and hucksterism might scare off the ROI-driven marketer.

Now I am certainly not a social media marketing nay-sayer. Like most marketers, my gut tells me that there’s great opportunity here. However, the scientist in me demands evidence. And in business, evidence is ultimately in the ROI.

Do ROI and Social Media go together?

I was quite perplexed by one author’s argument that while social media marketing creates value, it may not deliver an ROI. I will leave the debate about whether social media marketing should deliver an ROI in the first place to another time. Today, I wanted to turn to a small sliver of a large study that MarketingSherpa published earlier this year in its Social Media Benchmark Guide.

This chart (click on chart to enlarge) displays how frequently various metrics are utilized by marketers as they attempt to quantify the effect of their social media efforts. My immediate impression was that there were broadly two types of metrics listed here:

1. the more traditional website analytics and bottom-line-related measurements and
2. buzzword-laden, social media-specific measurements with intuitive, but likely only anecdotal, relationships with outcomes.

What this chart wasn’t telling me was whether marketers were likely to mix these approaches, or were loyal to either one or the other. I enlisted MarketingExperiments’ experienced research analyst and statistics guru, Arturo Silva, to help get a little deeper into the data.

What Marketers Tend to Do

Using principal component analysis, he was able to paint a different picture from the more flat utilization frequency account. Without getting into the technical details of the loading plot, what this diagram (click on diagram to enlarge) shows us is how likely each of the responses above are to be given in conjunction with one another. In other words, which activities these marketers are likely to measure together.

The vectors indeed bunched up quite nicely. Leads Generated, Search Engine Rankings, Visitors and Sources of Traffic, and Sales Conversions or Other ROI Metrics are grouped together toward the top (by the way, the exact direction of the vectors here is irrelevant—what’s important is their confluence).

Network Size, Competitive Share of Coverage, Engagement with Influentials, and Progress toward Social Media Objectives also were tightly grouped. This means that if a marketer was measuring network size, she was also likely measuring the other three items I just listed, and was less likely to measure the first four.

ROI vs. non-ROI Metrics

Altogether, even though the non-ROI metrics are not all plotted next to each other, they stand in stark contrast to the more traditional and ROI-based ones. That is, marketers are typically looking at either one set or the other.

I am sure that a big part of the reason for this separation has to do with the tools that marketers use. Traditional analytics packages have little or no support for social media measurement, and conversely the new crop of social media management tools lack web analytics components and don’t connect with transactional data. The converse may be true as well—marketers choose their tools based on their interest in either side of the story.

Measure what matters most

What concerned me was how poorly some of the metrics that I would consider critical for marketers, like Leads Generated (for B2B) and Sales Conversion (for everyone) compared with measurements like Network Size and Sentiment, which haven’t proven to be predictors of bottom-line outcomes.

Paris Hilton may be considered a highly trusted influencer according to some unscrupulous Twitter data-crunching tools, but aren’t her Twitter stats just a reflection of the pre-existing celebrity status? Twitter stats (and I am focusing on Twitter because its simplicity makes the new metrics easier to understand, not just because it’s an easy target for pundits) are a measurement of reach, but not of impact. Content analysis tools can measure sentiment of comments, but not their effect on the business.

Intuitively we know that more reach means more impact, and nicer comments mean more satisfied customers (who will influence others). However, measuring the impact of each would require either taking a deep dive into the psyches of a large number of social media participants, or (more realistically) looking at how all the metrics, all the way down to resulting changes in revenues and expenses, fluctuate in response to the changes in the social media end (or rather, top) of the funnel.

So how do you determine the ROI of social media?

In today’s live web clinic, MarketingSherpa’s Research Director, Sergio Balegno, will join me in discussing how the value of social media activities can be derived from bottom-line results, giving business-level meaning to intermediate metrics like Quality of Commentary.

I want your feedback as well. Leave a comment and let me know how you measure your social media efforts. Our favorite comment will win a free seat (a $499 value) at an upcoming stop of the 2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Jon Rognerud, our favorite commenter and winner of the free seat at an upcoming stop of the Tour.

Social media just makes us all feel so darn good, doesn’t it? I mean, look at me, my name and picture is right there in the upper left. Back in my advertising days, I had ads run in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, but no one would ever know, since my name wasn’t attached.

And I’ve got followers on Twitter. And LinkedIn. And…

Sorry, did I just become an egoblogger?

On second thought…don’t look at me

This is why most social media marketing is so, well, outright bad. To go back to that study by Pear Analytics, 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.”

In a discussion last week with Pamela Markey, our Director of Marketing, she came up with the perfect phrase to describe this phenomenon – antisocial media.

Social is defined as “relating to human society and its members.” But, how many social media marketing practitioners are really relating to anything beyond what they are trying to promote?

Automatic for the people

To make matters worse, there are social media “experts” who sell products that offer to automate social media promotion and marketing.

One product I came across allows you to auto follow targeted Twitter profiles, rapidly increase niche Twitter followers, have unlimited Twitter profiles, automate direct messages, and, consequently, spend time on other tasks while the program works for you.

Feature rich but concept poor. This begs the question, what’s the point? (And the second question, can any software automate blog writing so I can spend time on other tasks? Where is HemingwayBlogger v3.0)?

So, what is the point then?

The point of social media is to give the people what they want, which is not necessarily what you want to tell them. That’s why social media marketing success does not lie in you, it lies in them.

Now I am not a social media marketing “expert” (which seems to be defined by having a five-figure following on Twitter), but there are certain discoveries we’ve made at MarketingExperiments that should logically work with these new platforms. Namely, the most important factor to conversion is motivation.

Let me take two real-world examples to show you what I mean.

Not only is Bill Gates richer than you, after only two months on Twitter, he already has more followers – 601,109. Then there’s That Guy (name changed to protect his anonymity). We were first tipped off to That Guy by a comment on this blog. That Guy has 84,466 followers.

Both pretty impressive. Now let’s look at another column on Twitter – “following.” Bill Gates is following 44 people. That Guy – 91,349. So how do you think That Guy got so many followers? Not only did he auto follow his way to “expertise,” he is trying to use that number of followers as a proof point for why you should buy his social media product.

Don’t be That Guy

In stark contrast, how did Bill Gates get so many followers? People likely want to hear what he has to say.

Of course, if you’re not a world-famous tech billionaire and philanthropist, people are likely less motivated to listen to you. But the same principle applies. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What can you tell them through social media that they’ll actually care about? How do they connect with your brand?

For example, I rarely tweet anything that’s not marketing related, but for a free Pearl Jam song I gladly added my 140 characters to the Twitterverse. Pamela is happy when she receives a 30% off coupon from J. Crew. And at MarketingExperiments we try to create valuable, free content that helps you do your job better.

My point is, there is no one right answer for how to use social media to tap into your audience’s motivations, but there is an answer for your brand.

And unless you tap into that motivation with your social media efforts, you’re just wasting your most valuable resource – time – while stroking your own ego at the huge “following” you have.

Am I right? Am I wrong? We’re listening. Use the Topsy button at the top of this post to tweet your opinion or leave a comment on this blog.

“I feel like eating Cheetos with my grilled cheese & turkey sandwich, but I have none ”

This presents a huge challenge to the modern marketer. We all see social media and the real-time web as a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But with these new media awash in so much “pointless babble,” finding success with social media marketing is akin to trying to find that rainbow against a psychedelic sky of endlessly flashing colors.

So before our next free web clinic – Social Media Marketing in 4 Steps: A methodology to move from sporadic to strategic use based on research with 2,317 marketers – on which MarketingSherpa Research Director Sergio Balegno will share actionable insights from research on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging, we thought we’d post this simple (and simply blunt) question to marketers:

How do you use social media to make money?

From the obvious (”cultivate relationships”) to the iconoclastic (”you don’t”), marketers had many interesting takes on this question (what else would you expect from a group that has to think out of the box for a living?). Here are our favorite tips, techniques and insights:

Win real fans
I have a brand called Mocks (socks for mobile phones) which I started to heavily promote on Facebook last year. Basically, over three months I gained 12000 fans and doubled online sales.

I use social media as a way to increase brand awareness and engage customers so that they become fans in the “old” sense of the word. This then means that they buy more and tell their friends.

New way of thinking for a direct response pro
We have really embraced social media in the past year to raise our profile in our own industry (medical marketing). Until recently, because we come from direct response backgrounds, we focused all of our marketing efforts solely on targeted prospects, with little regard for the larger industry.

Our strategy has been to leverage the publication-quality content we were already producing for magazines and our newsletter base. Therefore, we are getting a lot of bang for little additional effort, leading to more and better client inquiries.

Long-term relationships over short-term profits
Social networking isn’t always about an instantaneous transformation into dollars. It is about a long-term continuous relationship with the customer. You stay on their mind even when they aren’t actively seeking your product.

Virtual Tupperware party
Direct selling on a social network is difficult. The best way to sell is to replicate the offline world to a certain extent by signing up online agents. The same people who would host a cosmetics party or a Tupperware party are natural networkers who will have large social networks on all of the primary platforms.

The possibility exists to build a platform that they can invite their friends to at specific times and, in effect, host online sales parties. Obvious inducements include discounts on branded goods and free prizes, but the key may be to create a uniform space for the agents that they can build into a profile for themselves.

Even without a platform, they could simply become discount agents for their friends. Somebody who all their friends know can get good deals on specific products or services.

For the agent, it is not abusing their relationships on the social network platforms. For the most part, their friends already know them as somebody who hosts sales parties and they will either be ignored or valued but are unlikely to be criticized for the entrepreneurial efforts among their friends.

A straightforward sale
E-commerce websites (especially B2C) are the ones who can reap maximum benefits out of social media. The best examples are Dell and Zappos. Dell has reportedly made $3.5 million in 2009 from Twitter promotions.

These retailers post updates about various product offers in Twitter, Facebook and other social media. And they also give additional promotions to followers. Timely promotions to a well-targeted market segment will spur an increase in conversion rates and hence an increase in revenue.

One emerging trend is Facebook and Twitter commerce. Retailers are trying to build applications around Facebook and Twitter to port their entire commerce platform.

Find out what customers want
By gaining a relationship or connecting with your customers and getting feedback, you can take the ideas they offer and put them into practice. For small businesses this is easier because most changes will be simple and not too costly. Larger business might need to run suggestions through a spreadsheet to find the most popular ideas before taking action.

Also, by doing this you pull in your customers and let them know they are being heard and that you’re really looking to make them happy. A great example of this type of mentality is Domino’s. They listened and then took action.

Track lead generation
When it comes to quantifying social media and social networking efforts into an actual dollar value, the best way I’ve discovered is to use a simple tracking system. This consists of a spreadsheet and/or entry into my CRM that shows: lead to customer and what channel they came through, whether this be blog, social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), or referral.

Present real value
Social media must be presented as a value proposition. It’s got nothing to do with befriending people and tweeting, but everything to do with brand value and lead generation.

Lead generation
If you are currently advertising for customers, you can now “advertise” for FREE by posting a sample, giveaway, or contest on Twitter and linking to your website. Ask for pertinent details that are important to qualifying your potential customers…and drive them to your site.

Social media is about awareness, not revenue
We use it to drive business and increase our profile, nothing more. But do we make money from it? No, we make the money from the services that we provide to our clients. Our social media strategy could be the best in the world but if we cannot deliver then it is pointless. So yes, it drives traffic, increases awareness, and generates leads, but it does not make money.

As we confront this brave new world, let’s remember that there is nothing particularly new about it…

Personally, social media has been around forever. We have always had teenage hangouts, chambers of commerce, the restaurant breakfast/coffee club, the local newspaper and specialized magazines. The difference today is that our social media has more two-way interaction, is worldwide, and can be instant.

Social media is not a novel concept, we’ve just thrown a bunch of technology into the mix. And there are great benefits – speed, cost, and reach among them. But don’t get so caught up in the technology that you overlook what is really transpiring – a conversation.

Because, in the end, people don’t buy from social media platforms (or websites or email messages or even companies) – people buy from people.

Note: This post should have been published a week ago, but I’ve been absolutely buried creating video lessons for the membership so this article was overlooked. You should probably read the last post on the topic of Twitter if you haven’t already. So, here we go…

Like donuts, Twitter can make your stomach churn like the cheap glazing that envelopes it.

I jumped into Twitter this week, because I was tired of the beatings I was getting from everyone who told me I needed to be on Twitter. Call it a turn-off, but being an introvert, I have never been comfortable with speed dating, much less telling my life story to potentially millions of people.

What I have discovered, is that people fall into 3 categories in Twitter:

1. Cliques
2. TV personalities
3. Salespeople

Very, very few people manage to be a real person on Twitter. I say that, because in general, once you begin selling things, you tend to lose the interest of your friends. Someone who can be honest yet still sell something, falls in the cracks between the Twitter types. We’ll just refer to them as “Crack Babies” from now on.

The Cool Clique

When you run across the Twitter user who is talking with friends, you get the distinct impression that you are walking up to the “cool” clique in high school wearing last year’s fad clothing (you know, the parachute pants that your mom finally saw on sale a year after they went out of fashion. Thanks, mom). You obviously weren’t meant to know what they are talking about and the only way you will ever find out, is if you follow every single person that they are following (i.e. that creepy guy in the corner who keeps looking at you. I promise, that wasn’t me).

So these friends are successfully using Twitter as another means to communicate. Obviously, email, phone, texting, and chat simply weren’t enough. Now they must take their private conversations into another forum where people can SEE that they are being private. I saw one fellow had 24 tweets in the last week screaming belligerently at people to UNFOLLOW him. Now, you would THINK that he would have just clicked on the checkbox in his settings that doesn’t let people follow him (i.e. “Protect my tweets”), but he sounded like screaming at people was his version of fun.

Heeeeerrrrrrreee’ssssss JOHNNY!!!!

TV people. Yes, there are quite a number of people who are proudly tweeting to the world in their parachute pants and aren’t really talking to anyone in particular. They are there to tweet themselves without regard to social etiquette, making money, or any politically correct needs. This reminds me of what Bloggers began as. They wanted to put their ideas out there and see if anyone else in the world thinks like they do.

These people are fun to follow and read their thoughts, but there really isn’t any communication going on. It is all one-way. They will never follow you back, except as maybe a tip of the hat gesture.

“Where people’s eyes are, the marketing dollars (or marketing people) will follow”

Now my favorite ones. Someone whose sole goal is to profit off of everyone they meet. Here are the tweets from one person I ran across today:

tweet: MAKE TONS OF MONEY ONLINE HERE ====> http://something or other

tweet: GENERATE MASSIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE FOR $$$$$$$

tweet: LEARN HOW TO USE TWITTER FOR MAJOR PROFIT

tweet: help, I can’t make my $2500 payment on my house this month and it is about to foreclose. can anyone do anything?

Yes, these were all from a single person. I admit, I was mesmerized by the all caps and that last tweet of hers gave me a good laugh. Obviously, she wasn’t following her own links since if she had, she wouldn’t be having these mortgage issues

All of this goes back to my original thought of “don’t sell me something, give me something to believe in…..you”. I’m a long term thinker and I tend to hang back and see if what someone is professing is really on the level. Usually, salespeople are long gone by then, so time is a great filter. Twitter is no different. If all I ever see from you is a sales pitch, then I see no reason to continue listening.

It’s not like you can’t spot these people a mile away. They immediately DM you via an automated tool and either try to send you to a website for a sales pitch, sell you something in the DM, or ask you a question ( which you can’t reply to because their automated tool hasn’t automatically followed you yet).

I tend to randomly follow the people who others I like are following. I figured that this would limit the number of followers that I would need to unfollow and it sort of fits into the whole “social objects” theory. This technique doesn’t seem to be working for me all that well.

Crack Babies

There are a handful of people who manage to make a living by just being themselves and recommending items they like and use. When they tweet, they are telling you the good, bad and ugly about whatever they are doing. Being transparent is a key ingredient to trust.

I went to an Affiliate Summit recently and people kept wanting me to recommend odd products that I have never used nor would want to (i.e. colon cleanser, face cream, online faxing, etc.). If I want to clean my colon, I can go to a any local Mexican food buffet for a lot cheaper. I would never tell someone to get a fax. If someone is still using a fax machine, they need some serious technical help, not an affiliate program.

So how do all of these salespeople elevate themselves to the rank of Crack Baby? Simple… BE HONEST.

Toff Ward
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using Facebook.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m new to Twitter. Really, really new. I’m not using any of the automatic tools.

Some of the things I am noticing are not impressive. Twitter isn’t bad itself, but how people are using it begs the question, “are you joking?”.

For instance, today I searched for a topic I was interested in learning about. I saw 3 people with good comments, so I followed them. I have no idea if this is how Twitter intended it to work, but intuitively, it seemed like the thing to do. I want to learn, so I am going to listen to people who are talking about that topic.

I immediately get a Direct message from one of the people telling me “thank you” for following them (seems polite to me) and then asking me a question.

Cool, I see this as someone is really on the ball and using Twitter to really expand their network. I’m psyched and so I click “reply” and immediately type out a response to their question. Lo and behold, when I click on the “send” button I am gifted an error from Twitter that tells me I can’t send a Direct Message back to the person who sent one to me because they are not following me.

WHAT???

Why would someone send a question in a direct message knowing that I can’t answer them?

Ah, third party tools are obviously being used. They also seem to be used incorrectly. I’m betting that this person is using a tool to automagically deliver a response to someone who follows them. I’m betting that they wanted to say someone nice and make sure to interact with whoever is now following them. Interaction is good. Responsiveness is also good. Ending the potential conversation with a slap upside the head doesn’t give me a warm and fuzzy first impression.

How about example number 2:

in the same day as before, I saw someone’s name next to a post that interested me, so I clicked to follow them. I immediately got a direct message that said, “We should connect on Facebook!”.

WHOA!!!!?!!!!!

That’s the social equivalent of asking a girl out for coffee and her response is, “what do you think we should name our first 4 children? Let’s go meet my parents now”.

Hang on a second. I don’t know anything about you other than your obvious psychosis. Again, I clicked on the “reply” button to send a hopefully politically correct response like, “can we just have coffee first?”. And again, I am greeted by an error in Twitter about how this person is not following me so I can’t respond to their direct message.

Ouch. So exactly how do I contact these people in order to tell them that they have completely lost out on a first impression? If I do a Mention, then I embarrass them in front of Twitterville (Twitterland, TwitterWorld, Isle De Twit) and make myself look conceited or snobbish as though I know everything (obviously, I know very little about Twitter).

So, I simply unfollow and continue trying to find people to learn from. Using the automated tools only works for you when you understand how and why you are using them (i.e. focus on the concept, not the tool).

Toff Ward
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using Twitter.