Twitter Marketing; Do You Have A Plan?
Posted by Mitch on Mar 13, 2010
I just finished reading the book below, Twitter Marketing, and found that I had some things I wanted to talk about as it concerns using Twitter as a marketing tool as opposed to just a conversation piece. This isn’t a book review as much as it is a look at the ethics and possibilities of using Twitter to market oneself and their business.
The book pointed out some very interesting things, some I knew, some I didn’t. One, it seems that the majority of people using Twitter are between 35 and 44. that’s somewhat surprising because I’d have thought more young people would be using the technology because my mindset has always been that it’s younger people who are drawn to it. What I hadn’t taken into account is that this is the age group that was really the first group that grew up with the technology as close to the technology of today. In my very early 20’s, we had Space Invaders and Asteroids, which were relatively simple (I was my college’s Asteroids champ in 1980), and only 5 years later there was this more interactive game of the guy who dressed like a knight and had his adventures (Dragon’s Lair), and my mind couldn’t deal with it, yet the younger kids took to it like walking.
The second thing I knew was that, overall, less than 10% of everyone who signs up for Twitter could be considered an active user. What I didn’t know was that around 37% of those who are considered active users are actually bot accounts, which means that no actual person is ever tweeting a single thing. I’ve always wondered about that one, and now we have a figure.
The third thing I knew, but didn’t have any figures for, was just how fast bad customer service might bring you down, and some of the lingering effects. The writer, Hollis Thomases, pointed out the big Motrin fiasco, which I’d heard about but never knew what it was, and a potential Crocs episode that was nipped in the bud, but had the CEO so rattled by this weird attempt at extortion that he went to his blog, then to Twitter, to state his case before this woman, who apparently ended up with great fear that something bad could happen to her, followed through on a threat that was unwarranted.
All that said, it brings back these interesting questions about marketing on Twitter; is it ethical, and just how does one decide to do it.
On the first one, I believe it is ethical to market on Twitter, as long as it’s done properly. I don’t know a single person who enjoys immediately receiving an automated private message about buying something or signing up for something once you’ve decided to follow someone. Even the messages offering me something for free irk me because I don’t trust them. I immediately stop following those people, figuring I haven’t invested anything in them, and they really haven’t invested anything in getting to know me first.
But what about other marketing? If I have all my blog posts immediately go to Twitter, that’s marketing, and I believe it’s ethical, but is it? I think so because I’m really advertising my opinions and rarely advertising a product. I’m looking for readers for my blog; if money ends up coming in some fashion later on, I won’t be depressed by that.
The how of this question is a different matter. The only other marketing I ever do, which is rare, is when I announce my office hours. It’s rare that I do it because I’ve only ever had one person take me up on it, which tells me it’s probably a major waste of time, but I still pop it out there from time to time.
But other marketing? Truthfully, even though I see how some people do it, I can’t figure out if it really works for them or not. Yeah, they might get clicks, but are they irritating people? For instance, if you see a headline that looks intriguing enough to click the link, and you’re taken to one of those pages where you have to put in your name and email address to get any information about it, how do you feel? Or if the topic looks like you’re going to get information, and instead it takes you to a product; how do you feel?
I guess overall I don’t have a problem with marketing if two things occur. One, I know it’s a marketing message instead of a set up. Two, if that’s not the only thing a person’s doing with Twitter. Because when all is said and done, at least in my mind, they call it “social media” for a reason. It might not be everyone’s primary motivation, but they should at least try. Am I wrong?
By the way, not a bad book; check it out.
Are You Missing The “Social” Part Of Social Media?
Posted by Mitch on Mar 1, 2010
Okay, I get it. Twitter and Facebook can be used for business purposes. I know; I use them for business as well. Not that often, but obviously I do. Every blog post I write shows up on Twitter. One of my blogs shows up on Facebook every time I post. When I’m holding office hours I announce it on Twitter; never done it on Facebook, but I guess I should.
Yes, money can potentially be made from both Twitter and Facebook. But is that the only thing people can think of to do with it?
Remember when I wrote about Twit Cleaner a week ago? Man, that thing took off by storm. Not from my post, but from a lot of people who discovered it and decided to check things out. There were a lot of Twitter folks who suddenly saw their numbers drop drastically. I’m betting some of them have no idea why it happened, and think Twitter penalized them for something. Truthfully, all any of those people had to do was to look at their Twitter account every once in awhile and they’d have seen that many of their followers were talking about it, and looking through their accounts to see who was talking to them and who wasn’t.
Is it too much to ask for people to try to be social at least some of the time while they’re either on Twitter or Facebook? Do I have to keep repeating myself often enough on Twitter about not being selfish? Do I have to write my posts here and there about why Facebook seems to be lame as a social media entity?
I was reading another blog earlier today where a commenter wrote that people have no right to tell others how to use social media, and that if all he wants to do is use it to market his services and products that it’s his right. I don’t dispute that, though I hate it. What’s also people’s right is to be able to find a balance between being able to just talk to people and occasionally seeing something that they might be interested in that might also be an ad.
For instance, I’d have to say that I’ve gotten stricter in determining who I’m following when it comes to internet marketing or SEO topics. I don’t want to have to visit a site, then put my name and email address in to find out what something is about. Nope, not falling for that anymore; been on the internet way too long. These people are irksome enough to begin with, but on Twitter, since everything changes to a tiny URL, you never know where you’re going to end up.
Maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly; what are your thoughts on the social aspects of social media? Am I asking for too much?
Twit Cleaner
Posted by Mitch on Feb 21, 2010
What, another Twitter related thing? Yes indeed, but man, this is another great one.
The Twit Cleaner is an online program that will analyze every person you’re following and tell you things about them that you may not have been paying attention to. For instance, when it ran through mine, it told me who sends out only links and never engages with anyone, who sends mainly spam messages, who hasn’t been around for awhile, who’s not following you, and a couple other things.
Once you’re done, you have the chance to go through the list, determine who you want to keep following, and then, if you’re following fewer than 2,000 people, you can click the button and it will start unfollowing people. It’s careful not to unfollow everyone at once, as I guess it worries about triggering a Twitter reaction of some kind, but eventually it will eliminate all the folks you tell it to.
In my case, it highlighted 378 people I was following as actionable, and I decided to save fewer than 10 of those folks. So, at some point my follow number will be reduced by 368 folks, people who won’t even know I’ve dropped them since Twit Cleaner basically said they don’t interact with me anyway.
This is crucial, and it’s great. A major lament has been that social media hasn’t proven to be all that social, and you’ve seen me gripe about it often enough. The way Twitter had it set up, it would have taken me hours to go through my list and weed out many of these people. This is great, and I’m happy to share it with y’all.
Four Square
Posted by Mitch on Feb 20, 2010
Man, I feel so old!
There’s a new site that seemed perfectly suited to today’s “tell all” social media crowd. This one is called Four Square, and it’s basic purpose is to let people know where you are. You can link it into Twitter so folks can follow you around to see where you’re going or where you’ve been during the day. People can then visit to see exactly where you are, and they can comment on it if they so choose.
The principles seem to be twofold. One, it allows people to share with their friends where they are in case they want to stop by. Two, it gives a little bit of advertisement to the places where folks are. Here’s an example of how it works. Someone posted on Twitter that they were in Clinton Square, here in the Syracuse area. Here’s the link to what comes up. As you can see, it looks like a miniature Google Map, and there’s one person who’s commented on it, though a week ago so she obviously didn’t see who the person was who posted the link. However, I saw the link on Twitter, so I know who posted it and at what time they posted it as well.
Here’s the part about feeling old. I can’t imagine posting where I am at any point during the day, unless it was a major get together. For instance, if I were at a tweetup with a lot of other Twitter people and we wanted more people to come, I might post that. But if I were going to a meeting, I wouldn’t tell anyone because it’s not their business. Today I saw people who sent their Four Square message when they went downtown, to the special outdoor hockey game, to Winterfest (something I’ve never gone to in all the years I’ve lived here), to get their nails done, to a couple of different restaurants… that’s as far as I’ve reached thus far, though I figure as I get through a few more messages I’ll see more. Maybe this is tied again into this thing I have about being tracked, but I just can’t imagine it.
Still, it’s something to share for those of you who might feel inclined to want people to know where you are all the time. Frankly, I’m thinking you could just save time and implant a tracking device under your arm. lol
New Facebook Changes; This Is Better?
Posted by Mitch on Feb 6, 2010
Yesterday evening I signed onto Facebook to notice that there have been changes to the format once again. Please, someone tell me why they keep changing things there that don’t need changing.
The most immediate change I noticed was moving the options for doing things at the top of the site to the right rather than keeping them to the left. Since we here in America read left to right, I can’t say I was happy with that.
Next I noticed that the little image thing we used to see at the bottom left that took us to applications we wanted is now gone. It hasn’t been replaced, which is irritating as well. Now, to get into any applications, you always have to go back to the home page, where you have a menu to the left that I haven’t quite figured out yet how to modify so I can see the apps that I go to the most often.
Also, I tried to tag a couple of photos last night, which used to be a very easy process, and had problems doing that as well. First it wanted me to add a new application, which I turned down. Then when I was finally in the images section, I would select the tag tool, but whenever I clicked on the picture it would leave. Man, stuff just didn’t want to work with me last night.
All in all, I’m drastically not impressed with any of the new changes, and can’t wait until someone figures out how to change things through UserScripts.org, which allows you to change things up on the Firefox browser, which I’ve talked about before. I’m never against change, but one hopes it makes things easier and better, not more convoluted.
What are your thoughts about it? By the way, you’re probably going to see Valentines Day products up until the day before Valentines Day, unless I write about something that has a specific product. I hope no one forgets about it; next Sunday folks!
TweepSearch
Posted by Mitch on Feb 2, 2010
Y’all know I talk about Twitter all the time; I think way too much, although I guess for my output not nearly as much as I think.
Anyway, one of the issues I’ve always had with Twitter is that it’s hard to find people in your own area, or other areas of the country. Sure, you can go to their search function (if you can find it; I’m always forgetting where it is) and type in something you’re interested in, such as “internet marketing” or “chocolate” and you’ll get a number of people who pop up. But they could be almost anywhere.
I decided to put the question out to the Twitterverse, as it likes to be called, and someone came back to me, Amy Walker is her name, with a site called TweepSearch. It’s a new site, still in beta, but what you can do is put in pretty much anything and it will find it for you. For instance, I put in Syracuse, NY, kind of my hometown (the big city to the suburb I actually live in) and almost every person it pulled up lived in the Syracuse area. It did pull up some people who said they were from here but lived elsewhere, but that’s okay as well.
Why did I want to find those people? In mid-January I attended my 3rd tweetup which my buddy Josh wrote about. A tweetup is where local people gather to meet the people they talk to or have followed in some capacity on Twitter. And then you meet other people you didn’t know previously, and if y’all get along you can add them to your Twitter stream as well.
Anyway, I wanted to see if there were people I might know locally that I wanted to hook up with so that I could make sure they knew about the next big tweetup. I did find a couple of people to add locally, which was pretty neat. However, you can use this search for more than cities. You can pretty much put in anything and it will be found. It’s a great way to network and meet new friends; networking is my life sometimes.
The only gripe I had with it is that at times it moves kind of slow. One would expect that if it’s going through everyone who lives in a large city. But in small areas, where you know the number of people on Twitter can’t be all that high, it should move faster. Then again, I did say it was in beta.
I hope you enjoy this little tool; it’s neat.
Will Social Media Change In 2010?
Posted by Mitch on Jan 7, 2010
I came across an article that was actually a guest post on a blog called . The article was titled 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010. I thought that since the post already have 50 comments and the writer hasn’t responded to any of them that I would comment on what she wrote here and let them have the trackback, if they’re predisposed to accept them. By the way, going unprofessional for a quick moment, I think she’s hot. 
Anyway, you can read the same article on her site, and it’s pretty good; pick your poison.
Anyway, here are her top 10 predictions:
Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies – This is a very good prediction, and I think it’s right on. I think we saw a lot of this already in 2009, and I think it’s even going to be bigger. Facebook is actually trying to go that way by finding a lot of different platforms and integrate with, so obviously they see that as the future themselves.
Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology – I’m not so sure that this one will be able to take place in 2010, but I think it could be very close to happening. Everyone doesn’t have to wait for new technology to do things these days, and I think that’s been evidenced by how many sites seem to crop up trying to copy something that’s already out there.
Mobile Will Take Center Stage – I think this is a bold prediction, but one that will probably take at least another 3 years or so to really get there. Right now, we still have issues with access, dropped calls, and overall costs. Are you one of those folks already paying $150 a month for your iPhone?
Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content – I think this battle has been going on for years, but it all ready started to change up in 2009 with news organizations such as Rupert Murdoch’s companies (which I’ll call “faux news”) griping at Google for linking to their content. I think that’s a stupid move because Murdoch seems to believe that people will just go to his site without first finding the link on Google; ain’t gonna happen. Of course, another minor controversy on this front concerns who actually owns comments on blogs. Stay tuned.
Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We’ve Called “Social Media” – I had to think about this a little bit before figuring out what side of the fence I was on. The truth is that many large companies are now hiring people with the title of “director of search” or “vice president of search”, which would’ve been unheard of even going back to 2008. Also, more large companies are hiring internal people to not only write their blogs, but to write posts for them on Twitter and also to check streams for any time their company names are mentioned. So, I think she’s on point with this one.
ROI Will Be Measured — and It Will Matter – I don’t know that this is anything new across the board, as companies, especially in 2009, have been taking crucial looks at the bottom line. ROI has always been a buzzword in business, so I’m not sure exactly what supposed to change.
Finally: Real, Cool and Very Bizarre Online-Offline Integration – She paints a very interesting picture with this one, but somewhere in my mind I’m still not sure we have the technology to do this efficiently yet, or cost effectively yet. That plus I tend to think that we just don’t have enough people even now who are computer savvy enough to even manage the Internet, let alone some of these other things.
Many “Old” Skills Will Be Needed Again – Man, am I hoping she’s right on this one. How many people are there who can still add up a string of numbers in their head without needing a calculator to do it? For that matter, what if we let people write it down on paper and figured out? And isn’t it a shame that when you go to a fast food restaurant everything is now in pictures rather than numbers on a cash register?
Women Will Rule Social Media – The funny thing about this one is that when blogging first started, it was mainly women who were doing it. Men passed women when they figured out they could make money from blogging. Now social media takes into account so many things that it’s hard to determine who is really running what. So, it’s possible women are already ruling social media; I’m not sure where to find any real answers on this one, but I don’t have any real opinion either way.
Social Media Will Move Into New Domains – This is another bold prediction that possibly may have already occurred, at least in some fashion. I have to admit that I’m amazed at some of the people and some of the businesses that have finally figured out what social media is and what it can do for them, but there’s so many more people and companies to go. Personally, I think my main business would profit greatly if more of them were into social media, especially since I rank so well for those main search terms. Once again, I really hope she’s right on this one.
There is my commentary; what are your thoughts?
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy! ;)
