twitter

The End of Networking as We Know It!

I loathe business networking.

The Chamber of Commerce meetings. Networking “speed dating.”  Trade shows.  Business Networking International.

But when I started my own business, this seemed to be the only alternative.  My last “corporate job” was global in nature. For years I had been leading teams in China, Russia, Brazil, Australia — almost every corner of the world — and really had no significant business connections — no business leads — in my own region of the country!  So I had to get out and press the flesh.

I dutifully began the circuit of lunch and breakfast meetings, hoping beyond hope that a connection would lead to a connection and conversations would turn into customers.  It was an endless loop of meeting the same insurance salespeople, bug exterminators and realtors over and over again.

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The Interest Graph on Twitter is Alive: Studying Starbucks Top Followers

Social media is maturing as are the people embracing its most engaging tools and networks. Perhaps most notably, is the maturation of relationships and how we are expanding our horizons when it comes to connecting to one another. What started as the social graph, the network of people we knew and connected to in social networks, is now spawning new branches that resemble how we interact in real life.

This is the era of the interest graph – the expansion and contraction of social networks around common interests and events. Interest graphs represent a potential goldmine for brands seeking insight and inspiration to design more meaningful products and services as well as new marketing campaigns that better target potential stakeholders.

While many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors, many are simply documenting activity and mentions as a reporting function and in some cases, as part of conversational workflow. However, there’s more to Twitter intelligence than tracking conversations.

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The Fallacy of Social Media Reciprocation

You are not entitled to attention.

You are not entitled to a follow-back on Twitter simply because you follow someone. You are not entitled to blog subscribers or comments simply because you publish stuff. You are not entitled to clicks to your junk or signups for your newsletter or any thing of the sort.

In fact, you are not entitled to anything.

The web is not a democracy, nor is this an egalitarian society. Giving of attention when it’s such a precious commodity is not something to be done in some empty gesture of validation, and as the attention giver, I and only I will decide how I’ll approach my connections online. My reasons aren’t yours, nor should they be. You don’t decide the value in paying attention to you, I do. This black-white, good-bad, hard-and-fast-rules of engagement stuff is ridiculous at best, and pathetic at worst.

If you honestly need someone to follow you or friend you on a social network to find self worth or acceptance, it’s really time to re-evaluate your priorities.

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2011 Social Marketing Predictions

I think 2011 is going to be a very interesting year in the social media world. Generally speaking I believe the marketing world is going to start understanding better the value of, and how better to assign value to, deep consumer relationships.

Right now everyone is trying to assign a dollar value to a Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of addressing the fact that the engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums are incredibly important to a brand.

Building a relationship with existing and future customers is the true value and strength of social media/marketing and what will and has allowed brands to survive and flourish for the long-term.

ROI (return on investment) is incredibly important whenever investing, but companies will start looking to ROR: Return on Relationship, when planning, strategizing and most importantly evaluating social marketing … especially smaller competitors who can more easily drive and control Relationship Marketing.

As far as specific predictions go I have a couple… Google will acquire Twitter, and pay whatever it takes to grab a valuable piece of the social marketing landscape. FourSquare, et al will disappear as geotargeting will become more of a proactive medium controlled by those who really know where you are and what you are doing… the credit card companies and others who you tell where you are and what you are doing simple by being there and not having to make a notification.

Ted Rubin

“Google’s Groupon Bid Rejected” BIG mistake?

Groupon is getting way ahead of themselves and I think their rejection of Google’s bid is a Big mistake. My 2011 prediction… Google buys Twitter!

Richard Bashara says: Ted I’m going to agree with a “but,” look at Facebook. Zuck’s had how many chances to sell FB? You can’t deny that Groupon has set a trend. Perhaps trying to stay on top of the wave could pay off.

And if Google doesn’t buy Twitter, I’d be quite surprised. Who knows, maybe Twitter will try to stay independent though. As a publishing tool, it’s clearly becoming more active than Digg or Reddit.

Ted Rubin replies: Twitter is incredibly concerned, as they should be, about how to sustain and monetize what they have. Google is incredibly worried about Facebook and how to penetrate and participate in Social Media/Marketing. Solves a critical problem for both.

As far as comparing Groupon to Facebook, I think the projectory of their growth is where it ends. Facebook competitors have many more barriers to entry than competitors to Groupon, and they control the hearts and minds of their members. Groupon exists only as long as they can provide such unsustainable discounts. With Google… the value of their local search and local relationships/workforce came in to play and made them much more valuable than as a stand-alone. IMHO

Ted Rubin

How to add Twitter to your PR mix in 9 easy steps

On December 6, 2010, I was privileged to be a guest on #MMChat (Marketer Monday Chat), hosted and created by @JeffAshcroft of @TheSocialCMO fame. My esteemed PR colleague, Amy Howell, owner of @HowellMarketing Strategies, was featured with me and our topic was The Impact and Value of Social Media in PR. You can find the transcript here and glean some amazing insight from practitioners around the world. Not only was it a fun and exhilarating online experience, it also prompted this post on Twitter and its PR potential.

The digital channels can be consuming, and it’s important for those of us in business—whose first goal is to run a profitable company to sustain our employees and our clients—to stay abreast of communication trends. To make sure that we achieve optimum PR health for ourselves and our clients, here’s a quick Twitter primer. No more excuses for PR colleagues who say “I don’t get Twitter.” If the government is using social media for PR, and the business community is not, there’s a disconnect.

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Seven Reasons I Won’t Follow You on Twitter

In the past few weeks, the blogosphere has been abuzz about various philosophies for choosing whom to follow on Twitter. Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer recently dueled on their opposing approaches – be selective in who you follow or follow (mostly) everyone. Gini Dietrich also weighed into the debate.

Although people are quick to point out that there are no “rules” in social media, there are certainly best practices. Determining how to use the tools to your benefit is certainly up to you and what best aligns with your social media goals.

Because I use social media to develop relationships and to build business, I follow most people who follow me. However, I don’t use an automated system to follow people back. I look through every person who follows me. That’s right, I take a minute or two to look through the profile of every person who decides to follow me. I think it’s important to get to know the people who care what I have to say online. And most times, I will follow people back.

But there are also some reasons I absolutely will not follow someone. For instance, I will not follow you if:

  1. You don’t have an avatar. An avatar is the picture or image associated with your account. If you have the Twitter goose egg there instead, I won’t follow you. I want to see the person or business behind the account.
  2. Your bio is incomplete. The bio is only 140 characters. Take a few minutes to say a little bit about yourself. If you leave this blank, why should I get to know you?
  3. Your avatar is a picture of money. I avoid get rich quick Tweeters like the plague. If you are all about “making money online” (the spammy way), I won’t come near you. Sorry.
  4. Your avatar is something even less savory. Twitter has cleaned up the spam quite a bit, but for a while, it was common to get followers with some inappropriate photos. Those followers, I block…and fast.
  5. You’ve never tweeted. It’s amazing to me how many people open up an account and let it sit. Don’t let analysis paralysis keep you from tweeting. Put yourself out there and say hello. If you don’t say anything, why should I follow?
  6. You’ve never replied to your followers. For me, the point of twitter is to build relationships. If you’ve never @replied to your followers, it shows me you don’t care about a two-way conversation. There are some exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, I want to connect with people who are going to talk back.
  7. You only promote yourself. Plenty of people simply use Twitter to promote their own stuff non-stop. It almost turns into a 24/7 RSS feed of their blog. If that’s your thing, that’s fine, but I’m not tuning in.

One sure-fire way to guarantee I’ll follow you back? Engage with me. One of the main reasons I’m on Twitter is to build relationships. It’s amazing how many wonderful people I have made in-person relationships with all because we struck up a conversation online.

So, if you want to connect with me or anyone else on Twitter, say hello. Chances are, the person will talk right back.

What are the reasons you choose not to follow someone? Is there anything we should add to the list?

Laura Click

How to do Twitter in 15 minutes a day

“Twitter users are the most influential consumers online,” concludes Exact Target in the research report Subscribers, Fans, and Followers. When I was with Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, recently in Indianapolis, he told me there were over 160 million registered Twitter accounts. It’s safe to say, Twitter is growing in importance as a part of one’s marketing mix. The challenge is, how to find the time to “do” Twitter. Here’s how you can do Twitter in 15 minutes a day or less.

Growing your network

  • Use search.twitter.com or Google to find 5 leaders in your industry and follow them on Twitter
  • Follow back every real person who follows you
  • Follow 5 people who participated in a tweet chat discussing your topic. Here’s a mega list of Twitter tweet chats.

Growing your relationships

  • Scan your @mentions and reply to every human who addresses a tweet to you
  • Scan your direct messages and reply to any that don’t look like auto-generated messages. Nearly 99% of all my incoming direct messages are auto-generated. Many people call them “junk mail,” and nearly everyone calls them spam. No doubt you’ll come up with your own vocabulary to describe them.

Growing your influence

  • Scan your “home” stream of tweets posted by people you follow to find relevant content for your followers and retweet it.
  • Share 4-5 links to other relevant content around the web (blog posts, news articles, research, polls, surveys, etc.). You can use your RSS aggregator (I’m using Google Reader at the moment) to “harvest” relevant content to share via Twitter.
  • If you write a blog, share a link to a recent post. Twitter readers may give you grief if all you do is share your own content, but if they know you’re also sharing other valuable, relevant content with them, they’ll be glad to see your content, too.

While’s there’s much, much more to leveraging the power of Twitter, if you’ll follow the outline above, you can get started in Twitter right away without it consuming too much time. Over the next few days, I’ll share more ideas to help you use Twitter to expand your online presence, and yes, to add Twitter as a meaningful part of your sales system.

Trey Pennington

Introducing #Link4Lunch ~ A New Way of Sharing!

Always thinking about methods of encouraging and improving the productive sharing of quality information on Twitter, this week I have come up with the #Link4Lunch Hashtag.

It seems that many folks around the world are now are foregoing reading a paper at lunch and instead are looking at what others are posting on Twitter on a relatively random basis while scarfing down their sandwich or tofu & avocado salad.

So the concept is quite simple and aims to improve this user experience of casual lunchtime Twitterowsing through utilizing #Link4Lunch. What I am suggesting is that each tweep interested in participating in #Link4Lunch select what they think is the BEST and MOST INTERESTING link they have come across in the last 24 hours and post it between the hours of 12:00 noon and 1:00 pm using the hashtag #Link4Lunch.

I would suggest that each person only select and tweet one link each day and ensure that it is of GREAT quality to be their #Link4Lunch tweet. And honestly if you don’t have something you think is a great post, article, pic, comic, news story or something else then DON’T tweet a #Link4Lunch that day.

So here was the very first #Link4Lunch tweet I made today at 12:20pm and I plan to do the same everyday with the BEST link I find to share with all of you in the Twittersphere who follow @TheSocialCMO

To make it easy to follow everyone’s #Link4Lunch contribution each day I have already established a page on WhatTheHashtag http://wthashtag.com/link4lunch so that you can easily watch the #Link4Lunch stream without getting any mustard on you!

So I hope you all will give #Link4Lunch a go tomorrow between 12:00 noon & 1:00pm and we’ll all see where this one goes!

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Why so much research about Twitter is flat-out wrong

Every week it seems there is some fresh research establishing that Twitter is irrelevant to businesses and/or brands. Bloggers gnaw endlessly on reports dismissing the marketing possibilities of micro-blogging, calling for the death of Twitter.

I’d like to suggest these debates are largely meaningless because so many of these reports are hopelessly flawed. I’ll demonstrate this point by asking you a simple question:

If you took a survey asking you to name the brands you follow on Twitter, would you name me?

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t, because you relate to me as a person and possibly even a friend, and yet I am certainly also a personification of my company and its “brand” on Twitter. I would be overlooked in any research report looking for how people relate to “brands” on Twitter, wouldn’t I? And lots of other companies would be missed, too.

For example, Amy Howell is the personification of Howell Marketing of Memphis, but I am following Amy because I like Amy. Megan Parker is paid to be a voice of GE on Twitter. I love her irreverent spins on corporate news and sometimes don’t even connect that in fact, I am following one of the largest companies in the world. Everyone knows how fun and effective Chris Brogan is on Twitter yet make no mistake that he is the personification of his growing new media fiefdom. When you follow Chris, do you even think about him as a B2B company?

Here’s the deal. If research focuses on the benefits of Twitter for “business-to-business” or “business-to-consumer” it’s doomed because this channel is ultimately about P2P — person to person. In fact I would suggest that with few exceptions, ONLY “personal” brands thrive on this platform. I can’t imagine following a bottle of beer or a restaurant chain on Twitter yet I would eagerly follow real marketing professionals from those companies who can enlighten, teach, and entertain me.

And that’s why so many of these research reports are missing the point. They’re asking the WRONG QUESTION. In fact I think it would be very difficult to measure the complete business value of Twitter across the social web quantitatively — many of the successes are “stories” of connection or qualitative data points. But I’m sure companies will keep trying to reduce Twitter to a list of survey questions because it’s easy to do, it’s a hot topic, and it’s a way to get their name at the top of the wave for a moment. And so many of these reports are being rushed to a data-hungry blogosphere without regard for statistical validity!

So, how many of the individuals I follow on Twitter represent brands or companies? Just about every one of them! And THAT’S the point!

Does this make sense to you?

Mark Schaefer