Twitter Plugin Changes Coming
Posted by Mitch on Aug 20, 2010
Well, it seems the gravy train is over, or at least temporarily derailed. I’m not as tekkie as people think I am, so I didn’t know this until I tried to update Twitter Tools the other day, and learned that you now have to go through some interesting steps in trying to get it to work with Twitter; I still haven’t figured it out.
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What’s going on? Twitter announced in April that they were going away with what’s called basic authentication because of all the spam and other ways that people were connecting to and abusing Twitter. They’re going to something they call OAuth, which will require all kinds of registration steps, special keys, etc. In other words, this is now a big deal. It’s a big deal because, based on what I’ve read, on August 31st all those things we presently use will be inoperable, unless the folks who developed those things decide to get the information needed to continue their usage.
What does it mean for us? It means that we don’t know if any of the things we presently use will be working after the 31st. Actually, the only one I think we know will be working is TweetMeme, and that’s only because Twitter just bought it. So, we’ll be wondering if any of the other things we use to post to Twitter, have others retweet our stuff to Twitter, use to check out Twitter followers or comments or posts or whatever else, will work the way they do now without more information from us. Twitter wants to move away from people only having to put in a username or password to get information; isn’t that interesting overall? They’re going the route of protecting their interests while Facebook goes the route of finding new ways to erode our privacy.
Actually, I did come across one plugin, but you then have to sign up for an account online that they charge you for, so I’m not even mentioning them. However, this might be the wave of the future, having to pay for access to Twitter through options that aren’t truly associated with Twitter. That also will prove to be interesting.
Either way, I guess we’re all in the same boat if we have Twitter accounts; let’s see what’s in store, and which white knight will ride to the rescue.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Restricting Your Influence?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 19, 2010
I know you didn’t think I was done talking about influence, did you?
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Last week, Kristi retweeted an article someone else put together titled The 100 Most Powerful Women On Twitter. It was an interesting list for two reasons. One, I knew very few of the names on the list. Two, it was amazing seeing the high number of followers some of those people had that weren’t celebrities. The woman at #1 is super young, though super cute I must admit, and a singer whose music I’d never heard.
The list was compiled using Twitter Grader, which I’d written about back in September 2008. I hadn’t been to that site for awhile, so I decided to go over and check my rating. Out of 100, it says my rating is 99.3; I love that figure, and I decided to pop the badge onto the blog, which you can see there to the right just above the bird. However, it also said that out of around 7.6 million people, I rank around 49,500.
I thought about it a little bit, and then I realized that I have gone to some lengths to limit my opportunities for growth without realizing it. And I don’t just mean Twitter. But let’s start with Twitter.
I’m very strict with who I follow on Twitter. I’ve talked about some people who are twitter selfish, which irks the heck out of me. I’ve talked about people who only work on grabbing more twitter followers as if it’s only supposed to be a number’s game. And I talked about why I don’t follow some twitter folks. And I asked if people were being social with social media.
But I also talked about having a twitter marketing plan. One thing I never talked about in that post was how you might have to lower your standards a little bit to gain more followers without compromising all of your standards. For instance, something I could do is to start following more people with bonafides that aren’t quite as social as I like people to be because many of those folks retweet stuff they see, and maybe those folks would see some things I write and retweet them to their audiences. That would alter one of my standards, but it would be better than my going out and just following everyone I see, hoping they’ll follow me.
That sounds like an odd strategy, but I know it’s a working strategy a lot of people have, following someone with a lot of followers to hopefully get into their stream of consciousness. Frankly that seems like pandering to me, but people have done much worse to get noticed.
Then I thought about Facebook. With all the changes they’ve made, and my deciding I wanted to protect more of my privacy, I have my account set up so that if you’re not connected to someone who I’m connected with you can’t find me on Facebook. I don’t know too many people who’ve done that. Somehow, I still have almost 475 friends, but I don’t get those random former friends from my past finding me anymore; I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but I’m also not sure it’s a bad thing. Sure, there are some people who have more than 5,000 friends (it seems Facebook is always changing its rules on how many “friends” one is allowed to have), and I have a feeling I could have way more friends, but at what cost to some of my privacy, though we’ve talked here about there really being no privacy anymore?
Can you have influence online if you’re not Seth Godin and don’t make yourself more accessible? I think you can, but it takes a bit more work in other ways. You have to reach out to people you know in different ways. You have to find a way to have people thinking of you as an authority in some fashion. And you have to be as engaging as you can be and be ready to take advantage of opportunities when they come your way.
Hey, no one ever said working on being influential was easy!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Do I Know Social Media Marketing?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 10, 2010
You know, often we think we know something but we’re never really sure. I did that workshop on social media marketing in July, and I have another one in 9 days. Still, I acknowledge that I have a shortcoming or two.
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Actually, my main shortcoming is that I don’t know about all the technologies that are out there. For instance, there’s probably 50 different applications that can access Twitter, yet I found one that I liked and I’ve stuck with that one. There are many websites that one can sign up for that can access all your social media accounts, but that type of thing isn’t quite my style so I haven’t kept up with them. In other words, some of my technological knowledge is lacking.
Last Tuesday I found myself at a business meeting with an organization that I’m putting together a website for. Actually, it wasn’t quite confirmed that I was doing it, but I went to the meeting thinking that we were going to be talking about something else. Instead, the website and I turned out to be the topic of the entire meeting, especially talking about social media marketing. For 90 minutes I held court, giving advice and answering every question that came my way, and finally the guy who’d invited me told everyone there that they had just gotten a large amount of free advice that I could probably have charged big bucks for. One other guy there said that I had given him more information in 90 minutes than he’d been able to learn in 3 years. I also got some other platitudes later on; I just wish businesses realized that not everyone drinks coffee, so I need to remember to bring my own drinks.
So what did I tell them? Wouldn’t you like to know? lol I’ll give away a couple of things. One, I told them that trying to do a social media marketing plan takes time, no matter what type of plan they go for, and as a consortium of independent business people, they were going to have to agree on a plan and who would be doing what.
I talked to them about blogging and how it’s kind of a community, but that there are many ways to build your community. In their model, they’ll be sending out a once a month newsletter and a once a week email, so they can put links to blog posts there. I also told them how they could post their own article via the “pages” option within the blog, and that I would take that link and add it to their articles page. The blog will be put into a subdomain on their website. I recommended at least one post a week, and when asked what would happen if all of them wrote articles on the same day, not only did I say I didn’t see it happening, but that when they went to write actual blog posts that they’d see the previous blog articles with date and time, and could postdate articles so they’d post at another time.
And of course we talked about LinkedIn, Twitter, webinars, forums, etc. I don’t see them doing much of any of these things, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I felt good about myself as I left; it seems that I do know some of this stuff, and I’m happy about that.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media And SEO
Posted by Mitch on Jul 29, 2010
At the workshop I put on last week with my friend Renée, one of the interesting questions that came up was how social media marketing impacted a business website’s SEO (search engine optimization). I thought I’d answer that here as I did last week because if I was asked there, then someone else might want to know that answer as well.
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One of the things you often hear about what helps you rank higher on Google, and I’m not talking page rank here, is getting one directional (I’m debating as to whether it’s “directional” or “direction”; have to think about that more) inbound links. By that, it means you’re getting a free link from someone without necessarily giving one back. Supposedly, search engines love that, because it shows that outside people are giving you love without your asking for it. By the way, that’s also why they hate paid links, even if you use the “rel=nofollow” attribute, because they think those advertisers are trying to game the system, if you will.
So, let’s look at a few of the social media sites where you might do some marketing to see how it all works. If you use Twitter, you have to create a profile, and if you’re smart you’ll put your business link in there. Mine has my business link instead of the link to this blog. Now, the only link I have back to Twitter is to my name on Twitter so people can follow me. I have nothing on my business site that goes to Twitter except for the same thing. Now, every blog post I make pops up on Twitter, which means all of my blogs get immediate link love. If someone clicks on the links, they’ll go to my sites. Even if they don’t, I still get link love, and I get more if someone decides to retweet it. Not a bad deal for a quick post.
LinkedIn and Facebook work in a similar way. When you create your profile, if you pop in a link to your business website, you’ll get the benefit of an inbound link. Both of those websites are pretty prominent, so that benefits your site. But then you go further. On both sites, posts from my business blog show up like they do on Twitter. This means I’m generating one directional links to my blog, which is attached to my website, and thus I’m helping to increase my SEO. Even with my creating a business page on Twitter and linking it to my blogs, like you see there to the right, my SEO is intact because every time I write something on that page, or anyone else does, it gets shared with everyone who’s decided they “like” my page, and if they’re commenting on a link I left, that gets spread around as well. By the way, on Facebook I’ve included links to all of my sites, whereas on LinkedIn I’ve only added links to my two main business sites and my blog.
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The concept pretty much works with all the social media marketing areas you might try. If you create a YouTube account and set it up properly, you’ll get an inbound link. Every email you send where you have a link in your profile you get a little bit of that, but you get more if it goes to a place where someone has to log in online to see their email. If you participate in forums, you should make sure you have a signature file with your link in it.
Now, I have to say this one thing, and it’s important. Just getting links means nothing. If your website isn’t optimized correctly, those links aren’t going to help you one bit. If you don’t have any real content, the search engines still won’t know what you do, and neither will people who eventually might come to your site. So, you have to have a well rounded SEO program going for any of this to help your site and your business.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Why Businesses Should Be On Twitter
Posted by Mitch on Jul 23, 2010
In deference to my online buddy Mike CJ, he wrote a post earlier in the week which he titled Why Businesses Shouldn’t Be On Twitter. His main point was that instead of businesses being on Twitter, they should have individuals representing the business on Twitter so that they can show some personality and communicate directly with people.
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Whereas I agree with the last point, I disagree with the initial statement. In my opinion, businesses definitely need to be on Twitter, and for multiple reasons. Let’s take a look at some of these.
1. Branding. Businesses having a Twitter account get to make sure their logo is out there front and center whenever something is being written for the company. One should never overlook the importance of branding.
2. Customer Service. Last week I had an issue with one of my affiliates not paying me so I kind of called that company out by name on Twitter. Within 5 minutes I was being contacted by the company, or whomever was representing the company account on that day, and we got my issue resolved. I’ve talked in the past about other companies responding to the same type of thing, and last week my friend Josh Shear brought it home again.
3. Protection of name. If a company doesn’t sign up for their name, you can bet that at some point someone else will sign up and start using it, and unless they abuse it there will be nothing the company can do about it.
4. Marketing. Yeah, we all say we hate seeing marketing on Twitter, but what we really mean is we hate seeing someone pounding marketing message after message. If Sony had a Twitter account and suddenly announced that they were having a special one day sale where their 50″ HD TV’s were going on sale for $200, who wouldn’t want to know about that? Okay, I’ll admit that’s one of my special pipe dreams. 
I agree with Mike that Twitter users should have personality. I’ve written about that often enough as well, how I’m looking for more “social” than “selling”. But I think any major business that doesn’t have a Twitter account is allowing their competition to get the leg up on them, and allowing those few people who might complain about them to get the message out without having the chance to offer any assistance and hopefully stem a bad situation.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
SMM Workshop D-Day – The Outline
Posted by Mitch on Jul 22, 2010
By the time you see this post I should have been delivering information on social media marketing for about 2 hours. If you’re on Twitter early this afternoon, you might even see me throwing out a general hello to show the people there how it all works, and hopefully you’ll say hello to the group so they can be royally impressed by how friendly people who I’m connected with there can be.
 by A. G. Conrad |
Since you’re reading this, it means you’re not at the event. I thought, therefore, that I would just throw out some of the highlights I’m talking about based on my outline. No big details here; that’s because I’m still doing the next workshop in August. But this is the direction I’m going in today.
I’m starting out talking about general concepts of social media marketing; what it is, how it can help one’s business, etc. I’m going to talk about social media in general, the past and the present, not so much the future because there’s things that show up on a weekly basis that just amaze me. I will be talking about the concept of social media 3.0, however, which I have to admit is somewhat scary to me in many ways, being a distrusting baby boomer. I’m going to throw in some statistics that I hope will blow people’s minds, such as YouTube averaging 123 million views a day.
Then I’m going to talk about some components of social media marketing, of which I came up with 9, though if someone else was doing this I’m sure they’d come up with more. My components are: publicity; outreach; branding; cause marketing; marketing & sales; public relations; search engine optimization; reputation management and communicating with customers. I will give an example for each of these to help highlight my points. Then I’m going to talk about the positives and negatives of social media marketing; trust me, there are plenty of each.
Finally I’m going to get into more meat on specific things, starting with LinkedIn, which, as you know from a couple of days ago, I feel is the most important thing for business people to get into. I’ll follow that up with email marketing, Twitter, blogging, audio and visual media, which was yesterday’s topic, YouTube and finally Facebook. Then I’ll have some closing comments on it all.
If all goes well, this presentation will go between 5 and 5 1/2 hours, and everyone will have a good idea of how to begin setting up their own social media marketing system. Some people, if they remember to bring their laptops, will end the day with accounts set up in at least half of the things I’m going to talk about; after all, why set someone up on YouTube if they don’t have a video to upload, right? And I hope to make it fun while making it educational. I was going to throw my parrot pictures into the mix and tell jokes, but Renée asked me not to do it, so I won’t. Okay, that’s a lie; she didn’t ask me not do, and I figure if I need ice breakers along the way I’ll just toss them in there.
Now you know what you’re missing, and if you’re local, hopefully you’ll be able to make the August 22nd workshop. If not, well, maybe one of these days we’ll record some aspects of this, or we’ll put it down in a book and sell it somewhere. I can’t see me doing 5 hours online; I think I’d go nuts. Wish me luck; oh yeah, too late for that.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
SMM Countdown – Audio And Visual Options
Posted by Mitch on Jul 21, 2010
Tomorrow I’ll be doing my workshop on social media marketing locally with my friend Renée Scherer of Presentations Plus. Once again, instead of talking about it, I’m going to link to yesterday’s post on LinkedIn, which will link to the previous day’s post, and I’m also going to link to my post from last week talking about the third phase of my social media marketing methods for this workshop, since something that’s there is something I’m going to talk about here.
 by Morgan Howarth |
Something that’s generally easier to do today is to create a social media marketing strategy using audio and visual media options to help get your message across. Just six years ago visual media didn’t really exist for the masses, and even when it went live in February 2005, I doubt anyone expected that YouTube could be used for the types of things it’s used for now. Back in 2004 we could create MP3 files as sound files that we could then somehow get to other people, but they were large files and we didn’t have the download speeds we do today, so it took awhile before people could listen to your media.
These days, getting a video online takes creating an account on YouTube or Vimeo or one of the other sites, uploading the video from your computer or flash drive, which will only take a few minutes depending on the speed of your connection, and not only are you set with your video being online but it creates both a link to the video and code for your video that can be embedded into yours or anyone else’s site that takes a liking to it. That’s what I did last week with the above link to Phase III, where I posted a video of Renée talking about both our event and the place it was being held. It literally took her a couple of hours to film the video (multiple takes), get it to someone who cleaned it up in a couple of hours, then get it to me and have me take about 20 minutes to create the account and get the video uploaded. Then the next day it took me a minute to embed the video into the post; just amazing stuff.
With audio, there are many options, free and paid. Free options include popping an MP3 file online, which I’ve done with the numerous times I’ve been interviewed on both this blog and my business blog. Because download speeds are faster now and MP3 files are more compressed, this isn’t as bad a deal as it was in the past. There are also ways to create podcasts, such as hooking up with a site like Blog Talk Radio or a podcasting service that lets you record a file and convert it to something where people can listen to it easily enough without worrying about the time or having to deal with large files. A great example of that is my friend Tim Dodge’s site where he uploads podcasts of books he’s written one chapter at a time, since he’s also reading them. You should check out one of his books, Acts of Desperation, which I actually got to read and critique before he recorded it. If you look at the page, you’ll see multiple ways you can listen to it. Start at the bottom then move up, then go to the first page to listen to the rest of it.
No matter which way you go, it’s good to know that there are these social media marketing options, whether you decide to create them yourself or have someone else do it for you. One of these days, I’m going to finally purchase a camera, and then watch me go!
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Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
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