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

Accelerate your business online using social media.

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 social media.

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 social media.

Is social media all about connecting online or can it be used to keep people connected to what’s happening in their local community? I say it can do both, and here’s my story to back it up.

Our small East Texas town of Sulphur Springs is running a campaign to revitalize our historic downtown area. Last year our Main Street was been repaved with beautiful red brick and black ornate street lamps were installed. The sidewalks were all redone and the landscaping has been wonderfully carved out for everyone to enjoy. At night, music is piped into the air and local businesses put out their open signs. It has become a social event to gather and eat downtown.

Last year our city manager, Marc Maxwell, started a farmers market on Main Street to attract people to the downtown area. Vendors were invited to participate and the street filled with produce and all sorts of locally grown foods. It didn’t take long for my food blogging wife to get involved and soon after we decided the farmers market needed a blog to help feature all the great vendors and produce that were being featured at the market. We also wanted to cover other events like live music and family events that would be of interest to the local community.

Once the site had a few months worth of content established, Jill (my food blogging wife) decided to add a Facebook fan page to the farmers market blog. Each Saturday morning she would walk the market, talking with the vendors and take pictures with her iPhone. As she moved through the crowd she would live blog using Facebook to update the Farmers Market fan page status.

She did this every Saturday for several months and before long several hundred fans had joined the fan page. People were inviting their friends and family to join the fan page. Now as Jill updated the page status, people would chime in that they would stop by later in the day or they would comment on the photos that were being posted. Some would ask if specific foods were available or if they could get a vendor to hold something for them. Most of the time, a full blown conversation about the market would be in full swing before Jill even left Main Street.

So, can you use social media to keep people connected to their local community? Absolutely. You can meet them where they are and communicate with them on an extremely personal level that encourages interest, participation and overal community. It’s all in the way the tool is used.

I was recently interviewed by Texas A&M University Commerce about our success with social media. Here is a clip from the radio program. The interviewer mispronounced my last name, but then so did my English teacher in high school, so I guess she’s not alone. I give several useful tips in the interview that you should find helpful.

Download MP3

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

I’d like to thank Texas A&M University Commerce and Katie London for providing air time to this story.

Accelerate your business online using social media.

If social media has become the driving force behind the people driven economy, then how exactly does that make a difference in the world? To answer that question, you have to look around and see what people are doing with their time to benefit others. Take for example what Stacey Monk is doing with TweetsGiving, a movement to improve the lives of children in Tanzania by giving them access to the Internet.

Last year TweetsGiving raised over ten thousand dollars to build a computer lab in Tanzania so that the kids would have access to the Internet and all the information that it provides. This year they are on the march again with Tweetsgiving 2009 and they have already raised over thirteen thousand dollars as of the writing of this article.

Consider for just a moment that this money has been raised without a marketing budget, without an ad campaign, without billboards, radio spots, or television ads. The money has been raised solely using one “word of mouth” transmission at a time and the dollars raised continue to grow each day as that word of mouth marketing passes from one personal social network to another.

How do these things pass from one person to the next? Well, last year when I was asked to help out with TweetLuck, another social fund raising event, I said yes because a friend asked me to help someone they knew. I didn’t know that this year I would be asked to help build the TweetsGiving.org community website from the ground up or that I would have the awesome opportunity to work with an incredible team of social entrepreneurs that span the globe. I didn’t know that I’d get to work with a project manager from California, an East Coast User Interface developer, a Harvard graduate, a Georgia based graphic designer, or a Dallas based web developer. All I knew was I was being asked to help kids in Tanzania and it sounded like something worth doing. Someone I knew ask and I said yes.

That’s exactly how social media works. Someone asks you to do something and you say yes because their social capital is deposited in your social bank account and as they ask for something, they either add to the balance of that account or withdraw from it. This is the same online as it is offline. We are all motivated to action by something. Social media simply provides the communication channels we need to get things done fast. It’s not the technology itself, but the fundamental social psychology that drives things forward.

So how does social media make a difference to a school in Africa? That depends on you and what you do after you read this article. Tweetsgiving has already raised thirteen thousand dollars, but you can help them reach even higher. Help them spread the word about Tweetsgiving and contribute financially to the great things that are going on with this grass roots movement right now. That’s what social media is all about.

What will you do next with social media?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Accelerate your business online using social media.

Giovanni Gallucci spoke at WordCamp Dallas 2009 on using social media for online promotion. As with most multi-speaker events, there was not enough time for Giovanni to finish his presentation at WordCamp. So, Tony Cecala offered up the Dallas WordPress Meetup group as a space to finish his talk. This months meeting was held at the Art Institute of Dallas on the 8th floor, complete with free wifi, good food, and a nice sound system.

Here are a few notes from his presentation.

What to consider when getting into social media:

• Read and understand the terms of service for social media sites so you know what you can’t do and what you can do
• Traditional PR people are scared to engage audiences by bending the rules
• Do testing in the social media space before you drop your entire traditional media campaigns
• Personal opinion is not the same thing as terms of service

What is social media about?

• Social media is about influencing people, not selling to them
• Social media is about long term relationships and not one time sales
• Spend time online helping people, even if you don’t directly financially benefit from doing so
• People want to deal with other people, so be a real people to others

Is social media cheaper?

• Advertisers are interested in getting their products and services in front of eyeballs
• Advertisers will gladly spend their money with non-celebrities who attract the same number of eyeballs

Should you use automated Twitter tools?

• Don’t abuse automated Twitter tools to spam people
• Do use automated tools to be more efficient with your time

Automated Twitter Tools

• Use TwitterHawk to automatically post on Twitter based on keywords
• Use TwitterFeed to tweet updates to RSS feeds
• Use TweetLater to schedule tweets
• Use search.twitter.com to narrow tweets by geographic area
• Use TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Use Tweet Adder to automatically grow your Twitter followers
• Use Huitter to bulk unfollow Twitter Followers

Giovanni openly advocates “blue hat” promotional hacks. I recommend you take the advice of focusing on building on long term relationships over trying to game social media sites. Do keep in mind though that sometimes black and white isn’t that easy to define and use your best judgement.

UPDATE

Thank you JohnP for shooting and posting this video of Giovanni’s presentation.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

What Mr. Collier discusses is fascinating not only from a real world stand point, but his ideas also have some interesting implications in the online social networking world as well.

If you are unclear how to best use social networking sites or unsure of the direction of these sites, then watch this short video about the great need for social interaction among real world groups and you will begin to get a sense of how these systems might effect change on society and business online.

“Paul Collier studies the political and economic problems of the very poorest countries: 50 societies, many in sub-Saharan Africa, that are stagnating or in decline, and taking a billion people down with them. His book The Bottom Billion identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape, with a mix of direct aid and external support for internal change.

From 1998 to 2003, Collier was the director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group; he now directs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, where he continues to advise policymakers.”

Source: Paul Collier’s Profile on Ted.com

Leave me a comment after you watch this video and tell me how you think his ideas apply to social media and online social networking in general.

Speak soon,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

I’m looking forward to exploring BrightKite and reporting back what I find. One thing I can already see is the use of Placemarks, which are like bookmarks for the common places that you go to all the time. You can text @work to a special number and that will let people know you’re at work. This is like a short hand way of relating information.

I especially like that I can connect my Twitter account to my BrightKite profile. The advantage to me is that I can post to one source and have it distributed to multiple places. I have my Twitter account connected to several other social networking sites, so when I update Twitter I am also updating these places around the web. With the explosion of social networking sites and the maturing social market, I think it’s extremely important to automate your connection points as much as possible. It’s not practical to think that someone can go around to every social site and update their friends on what their doing. But if all those sites are plugged together, then it becomes fast and easy to let people know what you’re up to.

Eventually I can see this format expanding into the OpenSocial platform to provide you with one centralized social profile, but that’s another post all together.

So thank you to whoever sent me the invite and oh, and I have three invites of my own to give away. So, if you’re looking for BrightKite invites, leave me a comment about how you plan to use BrightKite (include a real email address in the address field) and I’ll send you an invite. Comment spammers need not apply.

Sharing the love,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com