Most of us agree that Twitter is entertaining and fun, 
but is it a useful business tool? In the right hands and with the right strategy, yes, it can be very useful. Take the mystery out of Twitter at our free “Twitter 101″ webinar on Thursday, December 17 from noon to 1:00 p.m. Register today to learn how Twitter can build your business, strengthen customer service, generate publicity and much more.
Going to college has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. However, the real 
value of college hasn’t been limited to what I learn in class. I’m not talking about developing social skills or experiencing life lessons. I’m talking about real, career-specific learning that is taking place online.
Today, I learn more practical, real-life information about my fields of study on Twitter than I do at school. As with any good social technology, the real value isn’t about Twitter – it’s about the people who use it. And many of the people who are using it are leaders in their respective fields.
Let’s say you’re interested in technology companies. Following tech blogger Robert Scoble on Twitter (@Scobleizer) gives you a great view of what topics he thinks are important to read about and what his thoughts are on those topics. Interested in how the CEO of a web company thinks about his work? Try following Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (@Zappos).
Twitter doesn’t magically give you the ability to ask these people anything you want, but it really does provide valuable insight into how they spend their time and the way they think. The wealth of information on the Internet is unquestionable, but finding what you need in an efficient manner is a daunting task. Rather than visiting 50 blogs a day and 20 newspapers, I rely on the people I follow on Twitter to bring those articles to me. If you follow the right people, they essentially become your ultimate RSS feed. I don’t waste time searching for what to read, I let established industry leaders point me to what’s important.
This approach is certainly more valid for some industries (technology, marketing, pr) than others (engineering). Think about leaders in your industry and see if they are active in social media. If they are, try following everything they post for a week, or even a day. I’d love to hear if you found the experience valuable or enlightening in any ways. Who knows, maybe you’ll find that the differences between that industry leader and you are smaller than you thought. And who can’t use a little confidence boost once in a while?
Debbie loves Filtrbox – It’s a online tracking program that allows me to monitor key words on mainstream news outlets, blogs, and social media. Filtrbox also allows me to import my Google Alerts to I can consolidate my monitoring results in one dashboard. Great way to monitor what others are saying about your brand and your clients online. Go to www.filtrbox.com.
Jennifer loves Smittenkitchen.com – If you enjoy cooking or baking, you have got to check out Smittenkitchen.com. Amazing photography just makes the new recipes that much more fun to explore. Plus, if you’re like me, it helps to have a photo of what a recipe should look like when it’s done. Afterwards, if you’d like to share your likes or dislikes, you can post a blog on the website to share with others. I’m going to subscribe to begin receiving Smitten Kitchen posts via email, and plan to try the Zucchini Strand Spaghetti this weekend!
Nathan loves Seesmic Desktop – While TweetDeck for the iPhone is by far the best app available for twittering on the iPhone, for me, Seesmic Desktop is my preferred program to run Twitter while at my computer. It loads faster, gives you more control, and has much better Facebook integration, too. Not to mention its handling of “Columns” (what Seesmic Desktop calls Userlists) is much more efficient and user friendly. Seesmic Desktop also gives you more control over the settings of your software (like if you want to do custom stat tracking with bit.ly) than TweetDeck. If you’re a heavy twitter user and you haven’t tried out Seesmic Desktop, I very much suggest doing so.
Shawn loves interesting factoids – The great thing about these little bits of information is that they tend to just fall in your lap when you are least expecting them. This morning a headline caught my eye and come to find out cats are left or right pawed. This is not earth-shattering information but I found it to be fascinating. Males for the most part are lefties and females are righties.
Susan loves brandsoftheworld.com – This designer-friendly website is dedicated to providing high-quality, vector images of the world’s biggest (and smallest) logos. Companies can upload their logos (or their agencies can do it for them) to give media, designers, etc. easy access to high-quality logos. So instead of bugging the company for a logo, or heaven forbid, saving a poor version from the web, people can go to brandsoftheworld.com and download what they need for marketing materials and the like. It’s also a great place to browse when you’re brainstorming ideas for new logos!
There’s a lot of terms flying around in this new age of “social technology”, where companies like Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter are becoming household names. But what do any of these terms really mean and why should you care? That’s what I’ll be explaining in my weekly Tech Talk.
What is a hashtag?
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional information and context to messages on Twitter. This is accomplished by using a hash sign ‘#’ and having a “tag” immediately after it.
Part of understanding hashtags means understanding tags. People use tags to easily clasify the topics or categories content is related to. The classification of content through the use of tags benefits the individual as they’ll know what to look for when wanting to find the information again, and benefits other internet users who may be looking for similar content by a similar tag. This process also frequently mentioned with taxonomy.
For example: At the bottom of this blog post, you will notice there are a few tags that I have used to classify topics this blog posts relates to.
How are hashtags used?
Hashtags came about with the advent of Twitter. Without users having any formal way of organizing tweets into categories, but wanting to add additional information, the twitter community began adopting the notion of a #hashtag. As such, hashtags have are used in a variety of ways on Twitter.
For those who love LOST, on Wednesday nights, you could frequently follow the hashtag #lost for what people thought about the episode, what they were guessing the next plot twist was, or placing bets on when Sawyer would punch someone in the face.
Conversely, and much more useful, hashtags have been used to follow the elections in Iran, to keep people posted about fires in San Diego, and or to share thoughts on what the latest going on is in the news.
The first time I sent out a cover letter and resume, I was exhilarated and full of optimism about all the possibilities that might result. Over time sending out resumes and cover letters has become much less exciting. I am a phenomenal job candidate, so why aren’t people responding to my resume? It could be sitting in a giant stack of awesome resumes. The state of the economy has made the job market much more competitive. I think it’s time to get fired up again about the job search by finding a new innovative approach.
It’s important to learn from the brave job-seeking innovators that have gone before me; so I want to share some ideas that have landed jobs or at least are very clever.
Chris Kahle scored his dream job at Crispin Porter + Bogusky by asking people to send Tweets to company executives encouraging them to hire him. He was successful because he found a way to show his genuine interest in the company not just in getting a job and he got the attention of decision makers.
I loathe writing cover letters so I am always searching for ways to make the writing process smoother and more enjoyable. I love the video two job seekers created that showcases their creativity and replaces a traditional cover letter.
Mark Leuner substituted a handmade sign for his resume and carried it at a busy intersection in front of his local newspaper. Two weeks after a reporter covered his story, he had a new job.
Job seekers should not get discouraged, instead get inventive. Think about creative ways to showcase your skills and gain the attention of decision makers.
This week, BusinessWeek published a list of 50 Twittering CEOs, featuring who they like to follow and how it helps them run their business. The result is some very sound advice for people on all rungs of the corporate ladder, which made me think of these ten specific ways you can Twitter like a CEO.
1. Follow Back: Founder of Alltop.com @guykawasaki says he follows everyone back as a courtesey so that they can direct message him if need be. While he admittedly doesn’t have time to read the stream for his 100,000-some followers, he should be applauded for opening up and being accessible to his followers.
2. Create relationships with your customers: Build Direct President & CEO @jeffbooth engages with his Twitter followers and tries to be useful, rather than trying to sell them. This giving attitude has helped him to create relationships with customers who he couldn’t ordinarily.
3. Reward your customers: Mike Ferrari, Co-founder of @SmartyPig, a social media online savings site, uses Twitter to run monthly contests to reward customers for reaching their savings goals.
4. Publicity: @CommunispaceCEO Diane Hessan gets the word out about her company through Twitter. She says announcing her company’s new blog to her followers resulted in 1,000 visits that day.
5. Put a face on your company: JibberJobber.com CEO @JasonAlba tweets to put a face to his online company, which offers career resources. He freely uses his personaly to extend a personality to his company.
6. Employee relations: Twitter helps @tombed, CEO of AKQA, the global digital marketing and tech firm, talk to his more than 750 employees spread out over six offices across the world.
7. Listen to customers: @lebrun CEO of social media monitoring company Radian6 uses Twitter to listen to his customers, naturally. He practices “listening to the point of need,” in which he focuses on answering questions, delivering a solution and adding value to his followers.
8. Establish corporate culture: One of the first CEOs to embrace Twitter, Tony Hsieh of @zappos, started using Twitter to build the company culture among employees. Little did he know his customers would also catch on - to the tune of more than half a million followers.
9. Connecting: President of PerkettPR, @missusP uses Twitter to connect her company and its clients with opportunities - particularly media opporunities (like the BusinessWeek article as it turns out)!
10. Staying on the Cutting Edge: Like many companies, CEO of Socialtext @eugenelee uses Twitter to find, translate and rebroadcast interesting news and trends in his industry that helps his company stay current and position him as an authority.
Photo by: sub.site
Because many experts have already addressed this subject in the blogosphere, I won’t waste your time beating around the bush. There are a few, textbook, terrible things that you can do to ensure that influential tweets won’t follow you back. Keep in mind, social networking can be a trial and error type of process but if you want to get people talking about (and not mocking) your brand or message in the Twittervese, do not take on the following nasty habits.
No Profile/no photo
Having no profile or no photo says to me, “I’m pretty guarded. I’ll try this Twitter thing, but I’m not going to put my WHOLE LIFE on there!” That’s pretty over dramatic and says that you’re not interested in getting to know me, or any of your other followers for that matter.
Protected profile
If I don’t know you, I won’t request to follow you. There could be 1,000 reasons you feel the need to protect your lame Twitter updates - you’re on the lam, you’re in the witness protection program, you’re slandering your girlfriend, Samantha Ronson - and I don’t want to get mixed up in any of that.
Sex Pot name/photo
Unless you’re 19 and in a sorority, there is no reason to have the following words in your twitter handle: candy, kitten, hunny or angel. Also, if your photo looks like it could be the profile picture for a website that charges by the minute, you’re not getting followed back.
Cat got your profile?
For the most part, I won’t follow you if you have a photo of a cat as your profile pic. This just really freaks me out. Human photo is better than a pet photo, which is better than a logo.
Banned words
If you use the words: inspirational, goal, dream, leader, winning, guru, make-money-online, addict, expert, audit, network, free report, marketer or extraordinaire, I won’t follow you back.
#tcot
If you use up 5 of the 160 characters permitted in your profile to let me know that you are one of the “Top Conservatives on Twitter,” and you’re not John McCain or Michael Steele, you might be seriously deluded. This applies to other self-important hashtags as well.
Following fanatic
If I can tell from your last few status updates that you’re only interested in getting more followers, you probably won’t have me to add to the pack.
(In need of) Retail therapy
If you use your Twitter page to link to your online store and you have nothing to else to offer, I can’t offer myself as your newest follower.
I’m a celebrity, get me out of here
If you are a celebrity and you have 1,522,398 followers and you’re only following 137 people back it’s terrible twittiquete. I don’t care how interesting you are (Ashton Kutcher) or how many times your promote your tweeting on the Ellen Show (Diddy).
Essentially, you have the best chance of being followed back if you do the opposite of the activities mentioned above - be open, put yourself out there, be cautiously intimate, don’t hard-sell your product or service, be useful and please, please don’t use cat profile pictures. And when in doubt, use some of Talk’s best Twitter resources here, here, here and here.
Photo by: kopp0041
Twitter was built on the concept of simplicity, so that leaves a lot of flexibility and variation in just how you can use Twitter to promote your company, yourself, or just your personal life. We receive a lot of questions on using Twitter, so I thought I would outline the steps we take with Twitter for clients here at Talk, and have taken ourselves in many cases (though you may see some variations as we’re always experimenting with new methods to get the best results).
Step 1. Before you start tweeting, let’s focus on setting up your twitter profile. This means taking the time not only to upload an avatar, but to also create stronger branding on your Twitter profile page via creating an Extended Profile. You should also define your purpose for twittering. What are your objectives?
Step 2. The Twitter Landing Page (TLP) is a unique page you create on your website that greets those users who come specifically from Twitter. Once you’ve created your TLP, you can begin using it by pointing your Homepage URL on your twitter profile to your TLP.
How to build followers on Twitter
I think it’s very important to manage your Tweets (or have someone manage them), especially as you work on building followers. You want to make sure you’ve got a good reply to tweet ratio, meaning if someone were to look at your last 10 tweets that they’re going to see an @reply to someone in there. Think of your Last 10 (L10) the same as it is in sports. It’s your recent activity or track record. Your L10 shows you’re a human, and there to interact, not just add to all the noise that’s already on there.
Step 3. Seeding your new Twitter account is important. I use Twellow as it’s a well organized Twitter Directory. It works great in conjunction with Mr. Tweet if you Twellow users first, then run Mr. Tweet to help you find more followers based on your Twellow results. Twellow is one of my first steps in seeding a new twitter account. Seeding your account helps with social proofing.
Step 4. Finding more relevant followers. Use Mr. Tweet. This is one of my favorite tools, Mr. Tweet gives you suggestions on who you should be following based on your current followers and twitter habits. It also gives you a means of finding followers without past activity which helps for seeding new twitter accounts you can utilize .
Step 5. Relevant auto-following with Twollow. Twollow allows you to auto follow those that tweet a particular keyword you enter (For example: Your company name). This is another resource for building up followers on Twitter. This can be a great tool if you spend some time researching those keywords that most apply to your business or topic on Twitter. The more specific you can be with your keywords, the higher potential you have to make a connection with someone who is interested in what you have to say (which is really what you want).
Experimental Step 6. Pruning your twitter followers. Not all your followers are going to remain active, and Twitoria helps to define those that haven’t been. You can discover what followers haven’t tweeted within the time frame you specify. I say this is experimental because using Twitoria requires a fair deal of account micro-management. As it stands, and I could be wrong, the only reason I see using Twitoria is if there is a drop in the follower or follow-back percentage for people who are above a certain follower threshold (eg: more than 1,000 followers). If there isn’t (and if anyone has done some studies, please let me know!) then there’s not much point in pruning your followers besides personal reasons.
Let’s get tweeting.
Step 7. Scheduling tweets and more. A tool any good Twitterer should be using is TweetLater as it lets you send out messages while you’re away. TweetLater also has other functionality, such as Auto-DM (though I would encourage you to proceed in that area with great caution- we traditionally don’t set this up). TweetLater works well for planning promotional campaigns, or organizing messages across different social media properties.
Step 8. Short urls that count. There are a lot of URL shorteners, but the one that is by far the best is Bit.ly. It provides the proper redirects (301) for SEO, it provides tracking, it’s low on domain character usage (giving me more space to send messages), it doesn’t have a framebar, and it has venture capital funding so it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere. There’s a great article by Danny Sullivan that provides a detailed analysis of all the different URL shorteners and which one is best (Bit.ly).
Step 9. Twittering outside of your browser. The Twitter website is a good way to Twitter, but we like to do things in great ways at Talk, plus we’re not always in our browser, so we use Tweet Deck both to organize and send out our Tweets. Tweet Deck, in my opinion, is the best client for twitter, allowing you to group followers, search, and a lot more. They also recently added in support for Facebook Updates (very cool!).
Step 10. Tracking tweet conversations that matter to you. This is an important part of being part of the conversation and keeping up on trends, so much so that Yahoo! recently released a neat application that does tracking called Sideline. Sideline is like TweetDeck in that it runs off of Adobe’s AIR platform, so you aren’t constricted to your browser. It being new, we’re still integrating it into our process.
Step 11. Keeping on the up and up of Twitter trends with Twist. Twist is a great trend analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with sideline, or to help with the keyword research mentioned before that helps with using Twollow. An example on using it would be observing that “LOST” has a spike every Wednesday night (when the show airs). If you create a follow strategy to start a relationship with some of those individuals, you can create an opportunity to connect, and you also know the best time to market to them. Eg: Maybe you should time your Tweets for after LOST (similar to airing new TV shows after the prime time)?
If you have any tools you think should be a part of the list, let us know!
*For discloser, this is an adapted version of a similar post on my personal blog.
Today Talk is hosting its first webinar entitled Talk Therapy: How the online conversation can grow your business at 12 p.m. EST. You can still sign up from our blog by visiting this link. Our President, Debbie Elliott will explain that business as usual no longer exists. Consumers have taken communications into their own hands and they are talking about your business, products and services online. You can either join the conversation or get left behind. Get started now, and you’ll have a jump on your competitors. Wait too long and you’ll be playing catch-up. Either way our webinar will help put important tools in your hands for how to tackle this new world of social media.
If you’re already registered and you want to follow the conversation and ask questions from Twitter, use the Twitter hashtag #talkinc.
We’re hosting our first webinar tomorrow and in light of that we’re bringing you a short history of our favorite social media posts from TalkIncBlog.com. Enjoy! And in the meantime, be sure to sign up for our free webinar, “Talk Therapy: How the online conversation can grow your business,” by clicking here.
BLOGGING
Ten ways to build your blog readership
Building a blog is only half the battle. You have to keep content fresh and optimize it properly to attract a loyal audience. Here’s 10 simple steps anyone can take to build their blog readership.
How NOT to use a Facebook fan page
Facebook has a lot of priviliges available to businesses and organizations to promote their products, services or events. But everyday we essentially get “spammed,” because of their lack of Facebook fan page ettiquette. We offer a rundown of what not to do.
How to control your privacy on Facebook using Lists
The good news about Facebook’s recent redesign is that we finally have the capability to control which friends see what on our pages. Job hunting college students across the country rejoice! Here we tell you how to set up this vital function.
Principles of business networking applied to social networking
Let’s hope social networking won’t ever replace face-to-face networking, but let’s face it the two aren’t so different. In this post we highlight the key comparisons to help you be a better networker overall.
Can Twitter increase your business?
This simple answer is yes, if you know how to use it. With a little help from CopyBlogger.com, we point out the key ways you can get measurable returns from this social medium.
Five things I learned from my dog on Twitter
One of our most popular posts all year, our President Debbie writes about her experiences setting up Talk’s Top Dog Camden on Twitter and how it helped her to become a better Tweeter in the process!
Ten things every new Twitterer should know
New to Twitter and overwhelmed by what is seemingly a very strange language? We will help get you pointed in the right direction so that you can become an important part of the conversation in the Twittersphere.
PR, MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA
Outsmart your boss if he outlaws social media in the office
Here we outline the ways you can talk your boss into letting you sign into Facebook, Twitter and more in the office. Use our arguments and you will be building your business in the world of social media in no time!
PR pros have leadership role to play in social media
Good PR pros today are integrating social media into everything they do. It’s important to take on this role if they are responsible for the communications and reputation of their clients/company. We explain why you should take this responsiblity out of your IT department and into your marketing or communications department.
Be heard among all the online chatter
There’s no arguing that there’s a lot of noise online today. But, we’ll tell you some key ways that you can Find Your Voice online, and actually be heard by your audience.
An online marketer’s reading list
Need to get up to speed, or even better, get ahead in the world of online marketing? We offer a few of our favorite titles to get you started.
Talk helps businesses in the Carolinas attract new customers, mitigate issues and increase profits.
| Pedigree Hits Another Home Run with Dog Joy in Slow Motion |
| AARP demonstrates how a contest can generate visibility |
| An old cigar company lights up the social media scene |
| June | Use Blogs to Grow Your Business |
| May | Avoid A Crisis by Planning for One |
| April | Get Online or Get Left Behind |
| Sept 24 | Local SEO |
| Oct 22 | Crisis Management |
| November 19 | Facebook 101 |
| Dec 17 | Twitter 101 |
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