John Jantsch & Chris Brogan Twitter-for-Business Teleseminar on Thursday 11/11

Thanks for the endorsement, Barry.

I trust EVERYTHING you have to say regarding social media, as you have your pulse on it nearly minute-by-minute.

As for Paul's comment, I'm just a little perplexed. :)

Don't know if you were able to attend or not, but it was great! I organized the notes I took; I hope they are helpful.

>>  I've signed up for Twitter.  Now what?

• Find People to "Follow."
  
  Go to www.search.twitter.com and put in the subjects, target markets, and/or people you'd like to learn more about.  Then begin to build relationships.  Engage the conversation with these people.
  
  
• Determine Your Objectives.  For what business reasons are you going to use Twitter?  Before begin tweeting, always go back to your marketing & branding objectives.
  
  Examples include:
• A company's internal communication tool.  Twitter can be used for teams working on projects.  Provides a simple, fast, one-to-many type communication, so that anyone following the stream can have access to the conversation, thought processes, and technical challenges throughout the day.
  

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• Customer Service.  Whole Foods, Tyson Foods, Home Depost, Starbucks Comcast all use Twitter to stay in touch with clients and potential clients.  Gives a sense that they care and can give instant feedback and answers to consumer questions
  

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• Strategic Partnerships & Joint Ventures.  If you're wondering how to get started and who you would like to follow, check out Twellow.com.  It's a service that categorizes people's interested so you can find likeminded individuals to follow and begin to develop relationships.
  

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• To Find Employees.  Recently 1500 people lost their jobs at Yahoo!  Twitter is a great place to recruit and find people.
  

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• Reputation Control and Thought Leadership.  Can promote events, special offers, and first-to-know product launches, etc.
  

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• To pitch stories to journalists.  Journalists (NBC, LA Times, CNN, etc.) are crawling all over Twitter to be on top of the conversation and the latest news.

• Adding content about upcoming events
• Retweeting other people's great tweets (all about sharing the love, building people up, sharing the microphone)
• Add tweets that are questions (great way to survey what people are thinking or get help with something)
• Add tweets that are linkes to web pages you find
• Random thoughts
• Add not about new blog posts, but take care to find ways to create conversation and not simply a sales or marketing pitch.  Seek ways to be "human" and build relationships, i.e., be there for people before the sale.

• The twitter.com site itself
• Via phone
• TweetDeck.com (can reply and follow numerous searches and create groups of people to follow)

• Search.Twitter.com - search for people, content, thoughts, etc. to follow
• Twellow.com -- attempts to categorize people and tweets so can  begin to follow people with similar interests
• Tweetlater.com -- allows creating tweets in advance.  Can auto-follow people, if they follow you
• Wordpress has a new plugin for automatically tweeting when a new blog post is created:  wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools (However, the criticism is that the human, conversational element is lacking with this approach to twittering.)
• Fleck.com/lite -- allows you to point out other people's content
• Twitpic.com -- can upload images and offers autotweeting
• Tweetbeep.com -- similar to Google Alerts.  Allerts to certain key phrases you choose so can tweet around those topics
• Phone Applications:
• Twitterberry:  http://orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry
• http://www.tweetsville.com

Not sure whether this should be a new post or not, but since Twitter is a form of social media -- or at least one of it's tactics -- I thought of Barry Hurd, the Guru of Strategic Social Media Implementation when I read his new blog post on how the benefits of using social media for marketing come with a warning label.

Does everything that falls from Barry Hurd's lips drip pure gold?

In the article, Barry expresses frustration that many are failing in the social media arena because they are separating Customer Engagement from Customer Service when, in fact, the two are really sides of the same coin.

"Since when are customer service and engaging the customer different?," says Hurd.

Since when, indeed.

Speaking of Twitter, famous blogger Darren Rowse offers an article on How to Use Twitter -- Tips for Bloggers.

The tips are really good for any business person, regardless of whether you blog or not.

MUCH THANKS to Biznik Branding Expert, Kelly Hobkirk, for posting the link to the article on his Twitter stream!