Twitter for Business:

A 60 minute presentation by Sarah Milstein from Oreilly

I agree that you can’t build a community just because technology makes it easy to do so, that it is actually useful to your market and to your business. I wanted to point out to small business owners and start ups that a better hook into getting a loyalty within your market is by fostering contributions.

It’s like asking do you have many friends that you can see on the weekends. Then asking how many people would you call at 3 am to help you through a crisis? It’s about the quality of the relationship.

You want your business to cultivate the 3am kind of friends.

The three reasons Decker listed as weighing contribution greater are:

Contribution creates volume.

Lower the barriers to getting into your space –web or offline. Let people interact without having to commit to your projects. Let people do something and be involved in whatever you’re talking about. Don’t make them log in to contribute. Don’t make them go through hoops just to write or voice their opinion on what your work.

Contribution means a commitment to your business

The value of a contribution is in the time and attention someone gave you. That time is valuable. It’s one step closer to building a relationship. It’s one step closer to having a sense of belonging.  Even a small action takes a commitment to move out of an observer to a higher level of interaction. Your business will grow to the extent that people in your market commit to you.

Contribution means authentic marketing assets.

This is something that I’ve seen work directly. One of the fundamental principles of marketing is building credibility not from yourself but from others. A contribution is someone publicly saying something about your company, product or service that you can take and put into your marketing campaigns as a credibility booster. A conversation doesn’t turn into a sale automatically but each contribution can increase the likelihood of others to believe in you.

A great visual explanation of the difference is from Marty Neumeier, author of Zag.

Let your market take ownership of part of your message, let them contribute. Its a long term growth strategy for your business not a new shiny technology that will help your business.

The Small Business Take-Aways on Social Technology

Embrace your customers.

Turn negative customer experiences around.

If you have negative comments out there, find a good will advocate or find people to answer on your behalf that align with your company.

If people are complaining about your product and service, ask them directly how they could do to improve it.

Take the influencers of your market inside your company and give them a sense of belonging.

If your market is ignoring your messages. Give up control and let the market make its own meaning. GoDaddy did this by just giving talking points then free reign on the creative aspect and their company stood behind the finished work. They are now getting better results than their lagging ads.

Thanks to Simon Stapleton for the find!

Jason called it “Follow the Chefs”. The celebrity chefs have done something extremely well. And no, its not being a great chef. There are many, many great chefs out there. The difference between the famous chefs like Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse and their unknown and equally great counterparts is that the famous ones out-share, out-teach and out-contribute.

Famous Chefs Build Brands by Sharing

That’s right, they are giving away more valuable information and content than any of their competitors in a crowded industry. Famous chefs have cookbooks, cooking shows on local networks, cable channels or youtube clips. Famous chefs teach regular people at home how to use the same recipes and make the same foods that they serve at their restaurants and in their homes. They passionately want their audience to follow along and create the same dishes because they are lifting the curtain on how to cook delicious foods and giving away their secrets and styles on cooking.

A famous chef puts their name or brand on a product, and as a consumer you’ll carry that association over of what that famous chef has given you before. You have more faith that their product will be better that the next generic cookware set because of what you’ve experienced with them before.

If a small business can take the same model that has successfully worked for a crowded industry full of greatness and use the same principles. The next question is…

What’s going in your cookbook?

What are you going to tell people that you do that can work for them  about that will get them excited about what you’re doing? This cookbook idea doesn’t have to lead to a purchase right away. It can be a primer in your sales funnel, it can get your name out there along the lines of your biggest competitor. Having your eagerly sought for market pay attention to your business and receive the value you’re giving away puts you a powerful advantage over your competitors, regardless of how crowded your industry is.

You can out-spend or out-teach your competition. –Kathy Sierra.

If you’re a small business without a lot of money, don’t try and compete with your better funded competitors on their turf. Make your own playing field by giving away value to your market. Out teach them. You’ll be on the same level as they are and you’ll have a first mover advantage and build momentum that they’ll be trying to catch up to.

Share your knowledge. Let your market of future clients know what makes your company, products and services so special, and why you are so passionate about it. The means to share is available to you right now using blogs, youtube, social networks, and more. Your market is hungry for this kind of value.

If you’d like to see Jason’s talk the Follow The Chefs portion is from 20:05 to 22:12

Choose Your Branding, Business or Personal

You’ll want a business brand if you want to use Twitter for your marketing, event announcements, new blog/website content. A personal brand would centered around your life and want a place to discuss your business, your passions, the interesting happenings in your life, pictures things you like. Some small businesses have no separation between the owner’s personal brand and reputation from the businesses. If that’s your case, you’d be better off building your personal brand with Twitter until you grow into a need for a separate Twitter account. Now that you know the direction of your twitter account you can go sign up.

Customize Your Profile

Make it unique to you. Add a picture of yourself, your name and a layout that represents you. Twitter is only a means of connecting with an other person, not a company face. Make your twitter profile have the same kind of personality that you have and a good representation of interacting with you.

Build Your Network: Find People to Follow

See who you already know by doing an address book import.

Hit the search. Find thought leaders in your industry, peers, and competitors. Try familiar names to your business. Follow them and some of their followers

Still searching. This time your going to be looking for keywords related to your business. This will give you selection of people who are talking about your products or competitors right now and you can jump in and reply to their tweets. Go to some of the profiles and get involved in the conversations.

Building a network on Twitter is a lot like like a network event. Get over the awkwardness. Jump in and make a useful contribution to the conversation. Give people a reason to follow you by having something interesting to say.

Use the favorites to save the golden nugget tweets that showcase your brand. These could be great feedback used to improve service or your product, or testimonials from your clients that you want to organize and archive. Favorites as testimonials helps build your credibility since a trusted and reachable third party publicly said something good about you.

Find and communicate with your customers. Build a relationship with as many clients as you can on Twitter to build you brand and be that much closer to your market. It’s a great competitive advantage to be immediately available on Twitter.

Tweet helpful content. Finding value in 140 characters is less time consuming than writing a newsletter or blog post so you can do it without taking much time in your day. Add value to your followers by giving something good.

Twitter has carved itself the functionality similar other internet applications you are already familiar with but offers enough differences to be a unique platform.

Twitter is like…

1. Blogging, but limited to 140 character chunks of text
2. Text messages/SMS but available on web/desktop/mobile
3. Chat rooms but you get to choose who you’re having a public conversation with
4. IM‘ing but all tweets are archived and viewable on the web
5. Status updates on Facebook and Myspace but no other functionality

Anatomy of Twitter

Tweet: the 140 character blurb to answer “what are you doing now?”

@reply: the way to respond back to a tweet. enter the at sign then the username in your tweet for them to know you speaking directly to them

Your Network is built from Followers and Following

Followers are people who choose to follow or subscribe to your stream of tweets. Your followers are your distribution reach.

Following are people whose tweets you want to follow or subscribe to.  These will show up on your home page and update immediately on a dashboard like homepage.

Direct Messages A way to privately send a tweet to someone else on Twitter. You do this by typing in d + username + message or using the reply icon on your direct message.

Hashtags/pound sign A way to aggregate an event or group that gives people a place to go to talk about the same thing. For example, #debate was a way to make any tweet about the debates as they were happening show up as a focused chat room discussion with other people on Twitter.

How Twitter can Help Grow A Small Business

• Build your personal or company brand
• Open doors to attention and engaging people on a 30 second attention span
• Have an immediate conversation with someone relevant within your market, your peers and your clients
• Increase Sales funnel and leads for your product and service line
• Consistently deliver chunk sized value to your market through your twitter followers
• Easy to get, store and respond to testimonials and feedback from your clients
• Network with your market

Next post we’ll look at how to build momentum and get Twitter off the ground for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

After you’ve checked out the research on the shift to using social media as a way of better connecting and engaging your clients, leave a comment on what has meaning to your business.

The highlights of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study came out recently. The results of the study point to a growing trend in how consumers want to be reached by businesses. The study found that 60% of American consumers use social media and of those more than half interact with businesses on social media websites.  93% of American consumers who use social media expect companies to have a social media presence and 85% of them believe those companies should be interacting with consumers through social media.

Cone Researchers say that the results mean that “Americans are eager to deepen their brand relationships through social media,” explains Mike Hollywood, director of new media for Cone, “it isn’t an intrusion into their lives, but rather a welcome channel for discussion.”

Use Social Media to Engage “Hard to Reach” Consumers

The 60% of the research who do use social media are the same markets many companies have a hard time marketing to with traditional advertising means. The consumers who use social media include men, the 18-34 year old market and affluent households (HHI of 75k and up).

“All of this is great news for marketers,” Hollywood explains. “Men and younger consumers are traditionally the most challenging to reach, while the highest income households are typically very desirable; here they are saying ‘Come market to us and interact with us online.’ This is really a license to put more energy and resources into this medium and do it effectively.”