Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Image from Failbook.com

Despite the multi millions on twitter, there is a huge percentage of that number who have no idea what they are doing – add in those who have never tried twitter, and there is a large chunk of the population that has never sent a tweet, typed the @ symbol before a twitter handle, used a hashtag or RT’ed something.

Twitter is still in its infancy, and has a lot of room to grow, change and develop. Businesses are still trying to discover why (or if) it is beneficial for them to use, and how to use it if it is. Unfortunately, many of them feel that social media can be a solve all – that adding in facebook, twitter and a blog will skyrocket sales and change the face of their business. Reality: it won’t. It may open new doors, create conversation and down the road, increase sales, but it is not something that works over night. Or even over a couple weeks.

Most of you reading this probably have a twitter account, may have came here through a tweet and follow me on twitter. You know everything I said above to be true. You may use twitter for your business, yourself or a combination of the two. You have gotten involved with the community and have learned to appreciate what twitter can and can’t do. You understand its value but also understand that it is not a super power. You are the ones that are doing it right. But, at one point, you were the person in red in this situation. You had no idea what you were doing, how to start the conversation, or how to benefit from using social media.  You struggled to think of things to tweet, who to follow and what links to share. Twitter was a wild jungle and you were ill-prepared to take it on. Luckily, you had help from other friends in the twitter world who gave you advice and helped you along the way. Maybe you even hired someone to come in and talk with you about how to set up lists, what to talk about and how to use tweetdeck and twellow. Either way, you had support and you learned how to survive in the jungle. Because of your struggles and accomplishments, you are part of the twitter “we”.

“We” are of the group that is active in the web world – connected in many ways to our audience and are on the forefront of the newest technology. “We” lead the way, sharing conversations, having tweetups and building yet another way to create more conversation. “We” know the news before anyone else and “we” are the proud who share it, brag about it and love it. “We” are unique in the fact that “we” have serious contacts and friends spanning the globe, all created through a simple tool and a lot of work and effort. “We” are the people that the news talks about when social media is a trend, and “we” are the victims of the social media scammers.

And now, “we” need to take a moment and think about what we are involved in – and how what “we” know can help the rest.

So now…yes, right now…I want you to share something about twitter – anything you think a first time user needs to know. Let’s make this list awesome, and then let’s share it.

Let’s open the “we” to everyone else…

We’ve all been here…

Created by Alberto Montt

This past Saturday, 15 of the top women in Orange County on twitter took a trip to Temecula for a phenomenal wine tasting trip. It included a limo ride out, stops at three wineries, over 200 tweets, pics and FB updates and finally, a whole lot of wonderful pictures and memories. It was also entirely planned through the use of social media, with companies who wanted social media exposure, and were willing to work with our group to make it happen.

The planning of the event started almost 5 months ago, as a tweet between a few of the women who attended, mentioning that it would be fun to do a wine tasting trip out to Temecula. I loved that idea, and started doing some research on how to make it happen. There are over 15 wineries in Temecula, most of which were on twitter. Unfortunately, most of the accounts weren’t managed well. Of those that were, I started sending tweets, talking about our idea of a wine tasting trip. A few of them immediately brushed it off, worried about what we might tweet or how their winery would ‘look’. But, three wineries did pay attention, and were willing to take the risk, @leonessecellars, @robertrenzoni & @oakmountainwine. They all offered half price wine tastings, and Joel Reese of @winehostTV who works with Leonesse Cellars gave us a behind the scenes, amazing tour, of the winery.

In addition to recruiting the wineries through twitter and later, through facebook, the rest of the event was also planned through social media.

The limo (ULC Limos) was recommended through twitter and has now been convinced to start an account soon.

All the messages to organize the trip were sent via facebook or twitter. This made it simple to track, and easy to follow

Almost everyone who attended originally met through twitter, social media networking events or blogging events.

Everything that happened on Saturday was sent via tweets, status updates, whrrl stories and twitpic.

Anyone who didn’t attend could track our tweets, photos and conversations via the hashtag #twwt.

The minute we all got home, we uploaded photos to facebook, became fans of the wineries on facebook, promoted them to our friends, and made sure we were following them all on twitter.

So, how can our wine tasting help your business? Because this type of event will happen again! And next time, your business could take advantage of it. Small twitter networking events are popping up all over the place, and it doesn’t take a big hoopla to make them happen. This event was only 15 women, but the hashtag was followed online, and the conversation spread to over 100 in just short moments. Your business can plan the next small event with just a few simple steps:

1. Pick a date that works well for your audience. Our group was a lot of mom’s and small business owners, so we needed a weekend event.

2. Find an easy way for the attendees to get there. We chose a limo because 15 women + 3 wineries = bad idea for driving. It also kept us all together, so we tweeted more and shared more pictures.

3. Make it fun! We were not met with sales pitches and business strategy, we just enjoyed the wineries and had a blast with each other. This meant we were much happier to tweet about our experiences and were actually having fun!

4. Remember you can’t control the conversation. There was no way for the wineries to know what we would tweet, so they made sure to show us a great time so that our tweets would be positive.

So the big question is…will your business take advantage of an event like this?

Or will you be like @scwinery, who told us we couldn’t visit because they were concerned what we would tweet?

Unfortunately, even after listing 10 great topics that any blogger can use last week, I still didn’t feel motivated today (what? I’m not perfect!). So, I decided to ask for some help from my friends and posted the above status update to facebook and twitter. Thank goodness for great friends, because in just 10 minutes I had the following great ideas! And now, I have some awesome ideas for next week

Ideas from Twitter:

@ParagonMoon: Blog topic: I can get over having done something I shouldn’t have. But to pass by opportunities is deeply regrettable and soul-damaging.

@Hagre: do a how-to of something you’re good at, or go explore someplace new and write about it! Just a couple thoughts!

@Sn0wSurF3r gave me two: How about, “you don’t have to blog just for the sake of blogging?” OR I want 2 read about how people should use lawyers at the beginning of contracts so they don’t need them after things go south

@influxx: take a break and come back fresh tomorrow. Dont force it. It will show.

@healthOC: I want to read about how the market has positively or negatively affected your business and/or others in your field

Ideas from Facebook:

What ideas do you have to add to the mix? What would you like to see me write about?

A recent article from Vanity Fair: America’s Tweethearts proves how little they actually understand twitter!

Thanks to @markdavidson, I discovered and read the story. Pretty soon, many of us were in conversation about the missteps and failings of the article.

Mark believes that it capitalizes on female stereotypes and paints these intelligent women as objects.

Joe mentioned that the people they chose were not a representation of real twitter elite.

Jason commented the entire article comes off as patronizing and is bothered that people find it interesting.

EricaJoy added a few others that should have been considered – and the fact that as it stood, it was crap.

While I agree with the points they made, I have a few of my own:

1. I believe that the article paints a poor picture of twitter and really fails to capture the point of the tool. Twitter isn’t about followers, it isn’t about popularity, and apart from @juliaroy, the key women in this article are very poor examples of twitter users. They all have 40k+ followers but follow, on average, less than 10% of them back! That means they are not conversing, not sharing and definitely not participating with their followers. Pathetic, and not the way twitter should be used.
2. The other “twilebrities” it mentions – Obama, Britney, Ashton – are just as bad as examples! None of these people will ever be asked how to use twitter to improve your business, they will never speak at a conference about combining twitter into a social media strategy. The people that do get asked those questions? And do speak at the conferences? THOSE are the “twilebrities”
3. This line from the article “Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences, only a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver” really twisted me…Twitter does require real sentences, real thought and real participation. If what you are doing is declarative and abbreviated palaver (which is really just big words for a short statement of unimportance) then you really are failing at twitter. And, the fact that Vanity Fair thinks that’s what twitter is – proves they have absolutely no idea how it really works.
4. And the last reason I know that Vanity Fair fails at twitter? Their account is run the same way…48k+ followers, only following about 300. How is that participation?

What do you think of the article?

Today, @MiaChambers posted a link to twitter about ghost tweeting, asking for our thought on whether it was right or wrong. Most responders were quick to say that they thought ghost tweeting was wrong in all areas – but I disagree.

I believe that ghost tweeting for an individual would be wrong, but a ghost tweeter for a brand is completely acceptable (and is commonplace).

For example, if @scottmonty had a ghost tweeter and didn’t tell us, that would be misleading. However if @Ford hired their marketing company to manage twitter for them, that would be perfectly acceptable as we don’t expect it’s the ghost of Henry Ford behind that account.

What say you?

Tweetup Tomorrow!

Over the next 25 posts, ending on my birthday, I will be covering an incredibly creative moment or idea from a year of my life AND one creative moment in either the marketing, advertising, technology or media world.

Today, I gave my followers a chance to create their own two-word tuesday. Here are their two-word responses to the tweet “In two words – what are you feeling right now?”

chrispenner super hungery

HennArtOnline Fiery Passion!

TravelCostaMesa Too cold!

caflowergirls it’s raining!

PaulTTran Cock Tail?

tsc0809 slightly demented

parksdesign time delayed

AngryJulie Monster Energy

RicDizon Manage Priorities

OakleyOC Pleasantly surprised

GregoryPerez Distantly focused

HyattIrvine Cautiously Optimistic

Thanks to all my followers for chiming in today!

*And don’t forget to register for the Business Strategy Workshop!!*

It has been an absolutely insane day. Great in every way possible – lunch in Redondo Beach with Simon Salt and Tessa McNabb of IncSlinger, 2 new projects confirmed via email and plans coming together for my workshop in October – but no matter how good it was, there was definitely not enough time in it to get everything done. Twitter, this blog post and most of my phone calls and emails have been ignored until just this moment.

After finally finishing the design for a new site, I decided to take a brief brain break and get writing for my post today. I stopped by tweetdeck first to see if there were any important replies needed, and noticed a tweet from Ed Schipul (the brilliant owner of Schipul Web Marketing that I had the opportunity to meet last year) floating through my stream:

I paused. Re-read it, took a deep breath and couldn’t help but smile. While I know Ed meant it to be a frustrated, need-to-have-a-drink type tweet, I couldn’t help but smile.

Know why I was smiling?

Because no one has it easy, even awesome business owners like Ed, have rough days. But what separates him from the ‘average joe’ is the fact that tomorrow, he will keep going for that finish line. Even if again he doesn’t quite make it, he will keep going.

And that is why this tweet, from this person, makes me smile.