Twitter – Page 3

Using Social Media to Enhance Face-to-Face Meetings

How to Use Twitter, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training

For the past couple of years, I’ve been helping others to market effectively online, having done this for my own businesses since 1996. One of the interesting trends I’ve noted is the fact that some people (and companies) spend a lot of time and effort working on their online presence, at the expense of “real world” interaction.

Social media (or “new media”, if you prefer) tools and platforms aren’t intended to supplant face-to-face interaction and networking, but to ENHANCE them.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. Perhaps you really don’t want to meet and engage in a personal manner. The only valid example I can think of is if you are a full-time eBay seller and you never meet customers or you happen to provide a product that doesn’t require much trust or a relationship to sell (not sure what that might be – perhaps paper clips or straws?).

However, for the rest of us, those of us who want to make an impact, or to have a wide network of friends and resources, you need to get out and press the flesh when you can. Sorry – I guess “press the flesh” sounds a little vulgar or old-fashioned these days. It’s best to make an effort to meet and speak with real, live people. Better?

I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past, especially since we have a large family and it’s not always easy to make time for travel and/or events. That being said, I thrive on working a crowd at an event, especially when I know a good number of people already. It energizes me.

My son thinks I’m already pretty famous. Of course, I don’t want to dispel this notion too much, but I am clearly not Ashton Kutcher or even Clint Howard (Google that one if you like). I once saw Chris Brogan speak to a crowd of about 300 people, and it put things in perspective for me when he asked, “How many people here know me personally?” There were a few hands that went up. Then he asked, “How many people here FEEL like you know me?” Almost every hand in the room went up. To me, this is a good way to gauge if you’re doing things right with your online efforts. It’s one thing to build a tremendous number of followers, but it’s quite another for them to actually care about you as a human being or about your company.

I joked a few days ago on Twitter that I think there should be an award given for “Most Followers with the Least Engaged Audience”. There are many hundreds of accounts vying for this title. I like to equate this type of “blind broadcast” to having the chance to speak at halftime during the Super Bowl while the entire audience puts on blindfolds and those fancy noise-cancellation headphones. What a waste! If you want to actually grow a business, or make valuable connections, or basically build any real influence at all, face-to-face goes a long way, especially when combined with an engaging online presence.

Can you build a solid audience without meeting everyone in person? Of course you can, but it will grow faster and bond more quickly when you’re out and about, shaking real hands and giving real hugs. Even politicians do that. You want to be more trusted than a politician, right?

Just some food for thought…

Image credit: Jerry (found on Flickr.com)

Increasing Blog Traffic Through Comments

How To Blog, How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, SEO, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Tutorials

We all know that one great way to increase traffic into your site is to visit other people’s sites and leave valuable comments on specific topics. Leaving those comments shows that you care about whatever the topic might be, or you are able to share your knowledge answering a question that someone posed in a blog post. The other benefit is that some will allow you to get a backlink to your site which can help with the SEO end of things on your site.

So how can you find new blogs that are sharing information that will be helpful to your business or be great to connect with? One way I like is using Google Blog Search. I can quickly type in any subject I care to read about & find some of the most recent posts on that topic. Here is a brief video that will show you just how easy it is to find plenty of great blog content to read as well as some really awesome bloggers to connect with:

So get searching for other blogs and start connecting today. The power of these types of connections can be great for your business while also being a wonderful source of knowledge. The best part of this technique is that it only costs a little bit of time and energy to accomplish which is wonderful if you are optimizing a blog on a budget. I know when I started into social media a few years back I would start each morning by reading anywhere from 1-2 hours other people’s content. I would make a dedicated effort to leave valuable comments that would encourage the writer to want to connect with me.

After doing this for just over 6 months I had over 400 people subscribed into my old blog with great amounts of traffic coming daily from those subscribers. In addition, the posts were averaging around 20-30 comments. These people were not just finding me in the search engines, but they were mainly coming from the comments I left on their site.

Engaging the writer and other commenters

This part can be rather difficult at times. You have to be creative in thinking of ways to get the original writer of the blog as well as those who are commenting on the post to want to first read your comment and then secondly want to either reply to you or visit your site. This is a very delicate line to walk. If you go overboard in your comment, you might offend the originator of the post. One thing I would never do is leave a link in a comment, unless the writer asks specifically for that. If you think you have something that could help, send them a quick email with the link. Adding a link is widely recognized by most bloggers as a non accepted practice as well as highly discouraged. The writer has worked hard to get a reader to their site and they don’t appreciate someone trying to push them away to another site.

You also want to keep from sounding like a giant sales pitch. The minute someone feels that, they will automatically categorize you as a spammer which could result in being banned from a site completely. The final thing you want to skip are canned generic responses like: “Great post I really enjoyed it and look forward to future posts of yours.” This shows lack of interest and that you are only there to hopefully get exposure for you and your blog.

So what should you do? Start by adding value to the conversation. This might mean that you need to spend some time reading through all the comments before posting yours. If you can either answer a question, or supply additional information on a topic the commenters and writer will pay attention to you. The most effective thing you can do when commenting is to leave a genuine caring response that shows a level of interest on the subject. When you read about someone’s question about what is the best Twitter Application for a Blackberry and you can share what app you are using, they are more likely to come over to your blog and read your post on Twitter Applications.

So give Google Blog Search a try and start connecting with great blog posts on just about any subject you wish! And let me know in the comments below what you are searching for!

Are You a Social Media Loser?

How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

I work daily with clients assisting them with using social media for their business successfully. One of the first things I try to do is teach that while it is important to use the mediums properly to reach out, it is even more important to have systems set up in place to monitor your business online.

Monitoring your business online? Yes, you need to know what consumers are saying about you, your company, products, & services. You can really impress your customers when you are paying attention to what they are saying and responding appropriately.

So how do you go about this? Well, there are actually a few very simple ways to accomplish your monitoring. The first, is through Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows you a quick and simple way to set up automatic notifications whenever the search engine picks up that term.

So, you would want to set up alerts for your personal name, your brand name, business name and any other ways that people may refer to those things your either produce or provide. This way you know whenever consumers reference your product or service, you know what is going on.

This is important for a plethora of reasons. First, say a customer writes a blog post about how wonderful your product is. If you took 30 seconds after receiving that blog post to go visit the post and leave a simple comment thanking them, you have instantly taken that person from being a happy client to a fan for life!

Or, on the other hand, you had a client that wasn’t very happy with your product and decided to blast your company publicly in a blog post. When you see the post hit your inbox you can quickly begin the resolution process to correct whatever issue they may have.

A story that recently comes to mind is about a friend of mine who had some issues with a mobile phone company. They were completely untruthful with him and promised things that they would not deliver then. After several calls ending in pure frustrations, he finally turned to his blog and wrote about his experience. Within 48 hours he had people from this company contacting him and working on fixing the issues.

How did this company know about it? I am sure they had some sort of an alert in place to notify them whenever someone wrote about them.

Other than blogging, another way people enjoy voicing their opinions is through Twitter. They will send out tweets that their friends will then see and start discussions about how this company was terrible or really great with helping them with whatever they needed.

As a business, you MUST have someone monitoring Twitter and keeping track of what others are saying. While there several ways to do this, one of the ways I like to do this is to set up certain searches inside my twitter application of choice, Tweetdeck. I used to do community management for a large real estate corporation called ActiveRain. At the time they had well over 150,000 members from around the world. So, one of the things I did daily was monitor what our members were saying on Twitter. You would think the typical term I would put in would be ActiveRain. But, the company had created a feature that thousands of it’s members use to automatically post their content into twitter as soon as they hit publish. I didn’t need to have 2,000+ updates showing up in my stream. SO, what I had to do was be a little more specific with my search setup. The phrase that attached to the auto post was “Just Posted on ActiveRain” so to build a real time search that would monitor the company name without the automated feed, I created a Twitter search that was Activerain -“just posted”. This meant the search would look for ActiveRain but would ignore any that had the term with just posted in the phrase.

By monitoring the term I was able to provide a great level of service for new members who had just signed up and were completely lost. Or just being able to give an added level of support by saying “Hi, I am Jeremy the community builder, let me know if I can help out. These members that just joined and tweeted 2 minutes ago were already receiving customer support from the top level available in the organization and were blown away.

The reason this post today came about due to a recent experience I had with Target. My wife who is now 8+ months pregnant asked on her Facebook profile:

Explain to me this… Our local Target has over 13 handicap parking spaces ( I lost count at 13), and even on the busiest day I have not even seen half of them full. Yet EVERY time I am there there are a ton of pregnant ladies or moms with small babies. So why don’t they make some of the parking spaces close to the doors into “New or Expectant Moms” spaces?!?!?

See, my wife is now 8+ months pregnant and had visited the local Target to make some changes to our baby registry. She had my 2 year old daughter in hand and 107 degree heat index that had to walk from the farthest point of the parking lot over to the entrance. When I saw her post this, I left a comment saying I knew they were on Twitter and would send them something to find the reason why they set things up this way. When I sent my tweet, I watched several of my friends start a conversation around it wondering the same thing. I know there were at least 15-20 tweets all targeted to them all revolving around this subject. 10 days later and still no response from Target.

Granted, maybe the company is huge in size. But there still needs to be some sort of monitoring of this. Corporations like ComCast & Best Buy do this phenomally. When their clients ask a question or place a complaint, their team is quick to respond and assist in any way possible. Normally within a few hours. By doing this, consumer satisfaction goes through the roof, customer support calls go way down and business production increases.

So, take the time and set up ways to monitor your online business. Besides, who wouldn’t want to know what people think of you? 🙂

Optimizing Twitter Chats Through Tweetgrid

How to Use Twitter, Twitter Applications

Most of my friends on Twitter know by now that I am somewhat of an addict. (Remember, I took 2 full days & found over 125 different Twitter Applications!) I find myself at times spending multiple hour blocks of time on the site talking to new & old friends. One of the ways I love to feed this addiction is by participating in Twitter chats throughout the week. If you didn’t know, there are chats that take place each & every day out on the web. You can see a pretty good list of those chats in this list.

One of my favorite chats is on a Sunday night hosted by Mack Collier called #blogchat. I will give you a fair warning, this chat is not for faint at heart. Normally there are several hundreds of people participating with thousands of tweets screaming by at the speed of light. I have several who have asked me in the past how in the world I can keep up with such a wild ride. I normally just give the standard answer of “I use Tweetgrid.” But I figured today I would share in more detail with a video of how to set it up for the best experience.

I made this quick video last Sunday evening while participating in #blogchat with Chris Brogan. I knew with someone as well known as Chris that this was going to be quite the wild ride. Without this setup, I never would have made it through the chat. While I know I missed a bunch, I know that I was able to participate and see much more by using this setup than if I had just tried using my standard Twitter plaftorm, Tweetdeck. Take a few minutes and watch to learn what I think is the easiest way to participate in a Twitter Chat:

So, if you have never participated in a Twitter chat, take a look at the schedule & find one that looks appealing to you. Set up Tweetgrid and enjoy the ride! And keep an eye out for me in those chats, I’m @jb140.

How to Use Twitter (Part 3) – The Johnny Carson Principle

How to Use Twitter

This is the third post in a series about how to use Twitter to form relationships for business and personal connections (which could lead to business, too, right?).

One of the quickest ways for me to explain how to properly use this platform is to use a real-life analogy. Pretty much everything you can do in person while networking can be done online now, with the notable exception of a handshake or hug. Video conferencing even allows you to make eye contact with the person you’re getting to know.

If you’ve read Dale Carnegie’s classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, you may recall that the first of his “Six Ways to Make People Like You” is this one:

Be Genuinely Interested in Other People

In fact, if you spend your time asking questions of others at a networking event rather than talking about yourself, they will later describe you as one of the most interesting people they met that day. Simply put, being interested makes you more interesting.

When I’m working with real estate clients or interacting at a networking event, I have used a “talk show host” mindset for years. I ask questions and sincerely listen, in an effort to learn more about them and their needs. If you want to see a true master of this craft, watch Johnny Carson via DVD or online sometime. Here’s a link if you would like to see a good example of his skills in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu9cSMy-k4Q (interviewing a then-22-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer).

One of the other reasons Johnny Carson had such a long career was because he was a tireless promoter of others. His show provided a stage for comics who were virtual unknowns and he could instantly put them on the map. Over the years, he met pretty much everyone who was worth knowing in entertainment.

With that in mind, when you’re using Twitter or any social media platform, think about ways to help promote other people and their work. If you retweet interesting and entertaining stuff, those whom you’re helping will take notice. DON’T overdo it, however, because you want your efforts here to be authentic, not forced.

I tweet more than average. Okay, I tweet a lot more than average. I have over 29,000 tweets at this point. That being said, I ALWAYS notice when someone takes the time to retweet what I have shared. I try to remember to thank them each time, too, although I don’t always remember to do so. Consequently, I would be more willing to help someone that I already “know”. Become a known entity.

As I mentioned before, this is the type of thing that will come in handy for you and your business in general, not just online.

In a nutshell, if you take the time to help others get noticed for their work, blog, event, or cause, and you will be noticed, too. Don’t focus on the superstars exclusively – they have ample support. Don’t forget to help the people that seem worthy of attention who don’t have a huge following already. That being said, doing both will help in the long run.

Thanks for reading!

Here are the first two posts in this series if you’re interested:

Optimizing Twitter Chats Through Tweetgrid

How to Use Twitter (Part 3) – The Johnny Carson Principle

How to Use Twitter – Tip #1 – Start or Join a Conversation

How to Use Twitter – Tip #2 – Panning for Gold Nuggets