Tag: twitter

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

I’m running into more and more people whose Twitter profile shows only, “This person has protected their tweets.”

After almost five years on Twitter, I still don’t understand why people would want to do this, and why Twitter actively encourages new users to protect their Tweets. It’s not any kind of security feature. All it does is make your tweets invisible unless someone’s following you. And why would anyone follow you if they can’t see what you’re posting and decide if you’re worth their time?

When you “protect”—a more accurate word would be “isolate—your tweets, they cannot get passed around. And people who are checking you out will not tend to follow. A far better way to inoculate yourself against Twitter spam is to follow people who post intelligent and interesting tweets. Yeah, you’ll get the occasional nasty tweet with a virus link, when some idiot hacks into one of your friends. But you’d get those even if your tweets are protected, as it does nothing to stop inbound tweets. And they’re easy enough to spot and ignore/delete. (Hint: if anyone’s saying they saw a funny picture of you, they can’t believe you’d do this, etc. and a link—or just a link with no text—don’t click, and drop them a note that they’ve been hacked.)

If you’re so impressive and famous that new followers want to follow you without knowing what you’re saying, well, OK—but you’re still shooting yourself in the foot. More followers—more REAL followers, not autobots—give you more influence, and even more status.

People with protected tweets tend to have very small numbers of followers of which a fair percentage are autobots. And this means they exclude themselves from a lot of co-marketing and self-marketing possibilities; no company is going to want to partner with someone whose tweets are invisible, no one will visit your blog on the basis of a tweet they can’t read.

Fortunately, it’s easy to turn the “protection” off again. If you’re not on Twitter so people can read your stuff, notice you, and build relationships, why ARE you on Twitter?

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Overlisting people for Follow Friday and its many genre-specific siblings on other days of the week has polluted Twitter–too often, you click on a profile and see nothing but undifferentiated lists of people to follow. This does no good for the people making the lists, and hardly any good for those mentioned.

But naming people to follow is still a useful thing when done right. I’ve added many followers by checking out some of these folks and following them. Typically, each week, I’ll pick one person’s list that mentions me, and visit the other people mentioned.

There are, of course, many ways do “do it right.” Here’s what works for me, personally; your solution may look different.

When I do my #ff (and my eco-Monday), I list several in one tweet with a couple of keywords, such as “humor” or “green marketing.” With hundreds of people on my list to spotlight for Follow Friday or Eco-Monday, I keep a document in my email program that groups them by category in batches of 140 characters or less and also lists the dates I mentioned them. Here’s an example:

[1/8/10, 7/11/11] Green-3 @billmckibben @zerofootprint @greenbucket @Greenopia @gosner @greenmarketing @MarcalSmallStep @greenforyou

So in this case, this is the third batch of green contacts (out of 36 so far–yeah, I need to make an official Twitter list), which I posted in January 2010 and repeated in July 2011. All I have to do is scoop up the part after the dates and pop it into Twitter, then add the next date in the brackets. 114 characters, eight people recommended, and I’m done until the next time. If it’s an Eco-Monday post, I won’t label them “green,” because it’s obvious. On Follow Fridays, I try to always give some clue abut why I follow these folks.

But here’s the thing–I do *one* #ff tweet and one #ecomonday tweet per week, and I post plenty of other useful content during Fridays and Mondays.

Then I come back and say thank you to anyone who has #FFd me (or retweeted, mentioned my book, etc.)–but I do it as Thanks for the #ff, and that way it’s clear that I’m saying thank you and not necessarily endorsing them.

I skip pages that are nothing but long lists of people to follow. BORING! They’ve lost their chance for me to follow them back if that’s all I see when I visit.

Yes, this does annoy a few people who like to be on my list every week. There’s at least one prominent marketer who used to #FF me each week, but I only #FFd back once in a while. She stopped. But at the moment, I have 583 people on my #FF list, and that number is always growing; I’d be foolish to post them all at once every week. It’s not about ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,’ but about another way I can be a useful resource for my own followers while keeping a Twitter profile that people actually want to read. And event hough she hasn’t listed me in a year or so, that marketer still shows up on my list every once in a while.

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

1. Listen before you talk.

2. Share advice and resources at least 8 or 10x as often as you self-promote.

3. Be friendly, helpful, and interesting; provide useful and accurate information that builds people’s trust in you.

4. Amplify your message across different channels, but only in ways that make sense and don’t annoy.

5. Reach out to others, both individually and in groups (as appropriate).

Using these rules, I’ve grown my business more from social media (all the way back to 1995) than anything else I’ve ever done to market my writing and marketing/publishing consulting services, and have also sold a fair number of books and other information products.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

In the better late than never department, I am finally posting my social media policy. I’ve resisted in part because no matter what I come up with, it doesn’t seem ideal—but when you reach a certain degree of online popularity, a policy really becomes necessary. I currently have 4570 followers on Twitter, over 1200 on Facebook. LinkedIn stops counting at 500, which I surpassed long ago. And I wish I could simply follow everyone back and actually keep up, but I haven’t figured out how to clone myself. I think I’d need at least four of me, just for social media.

In the interest of transparency, I should explain that I dip in and out quickly. Most of my status updates on both Facebook and LinkedIn originate on Twitter, via a Facebook application called “Selective Tweets.” My other participation on Facebook usually starts with following an e-mail notification link to a comment on my wall or a private message. While I’m there, I look around quickly, Like or comment on a few messages, and scan my home page. I interact with LinkedIn primarily by participating in discussion groups.

On Twitter, I tend to follow more links, look for things worth retweeting or posting to my Green and Ethical Marketing pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, check out a few of the latest people following me, and follow some of them. I try to spend no less than 15 and no more than 30 minutes daily on all social media combined.

Facebook and LinkedIn:
On these networks, I accept almost everyone who reaches out with a connection request, unless your profile is empty, you focus on things I find disgusting (sleazy get rich schemes, sexual exploitation, bigotry, ways to fool the social networks—stuff like that). If you abuse the access I give you, I unfriend you—which, fortunately, doesn’t happen often. However, it may not be instant. We do them in batches, and we have found that with Facebook, it’s best not to do more than 20 at a time, so as not to set off their internal alarms. If there are 50 or 60 waiting, it may be quite a while. My VA visits your profile and determines whether you’re a marketer, activist, environmentalist, etc., and sends you an appropriate message that I’ve prewritten.

For both Facebook and LinkedIn, I will open direct messages when I get the e-mail notification—but those notifications don’t always arrive. LinkedIn asks me sometimes several times a week to verify or update my e-mail account because notifications are bouncing. Twitter does likewise—this happens whether I keep the former address or switch to an alternate at a different domain. Yet other times, the mail goes through just fine.

Twitter:
I pay much closer attention to direct messages and mentions/retweets/suggestions to follow me than I do to new-follower notices (which, as noted, don’t always even get delivered). If you @ me with a retweet or an attempt to engage me based on some meaningful connection (NOT trying to sell me something random, which will get you blocked), I will click through to your profile. If I like what I see when I get there, I follow back.

Because Twitter feels so much more personal to me, I’m fussier about who I follow. Your profile has to interest me, and that’s going to be personal, quirky, and in the moment (I might come back a different day and feel differently). But I can tell you a few guidelines:

  • If I notice that your screen name or real name has words like Green, Eco, Enviro, or Peace, I’m likely to click over for a look
  • If your whole screen is just lists of names (such as Follow Friday lists), I am not likely to follow
  • If you live in Western Massachusetts and especially if you use the #westernma hashtag, I’m pretty likely to follow back.
  • If your Tweet stream focuses on something that doesn’t interest me, I’m not going to follow. I once clicked on a follower’s profile to find a very well-done stream all about online gaming. While I admired the quality of his content, I have no interest in the subject and didn’t follow back.
  • If I recognize your name or remember meeting/corresponding with you, I’m likely to take a look.And I confess, I can’t keep up. Whether I visit your profile right away is going to depend on how many other new follows I got since I last checked. If I have 5, I’ll likely visit them all. If I have 30 or more, I’ll scan for people I know, then look for a handful with interesting screen names. If I happen to notice something in your bio about sustainability, social media, or other interests of mine, or if I see a high follower count, I’m more likely to click through.With 3879 people that I’m currently following, I barely glance at the “All Friends” column on TweetDeck. I pay slightly more attention to it than I did before I figured out how to reduce the update frequency. Before that, it was scrolling by so fast I could barely read a tweet, and clicking on a link was basically impossible.

    TweetDeck is my favorite tool for interfacing with Twitter. I use it to manage mentions not only of my twitter handle but also my name and my most recent book title (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), Direct Messages, and a small subset of people that I want to pay closer attention to. I also use it to search, to schedule Tweets ahead, and to keep track of certain topics.

    I do like the serendipity of the All Friends timeline, and therefore occasionally go to Twitter’s own interface to see people I don’t often see (especially if  happen to be on my iPad).

    Is this arbitrary, capricious, and unfair? Yes, I’m afraid so. And I’ll happily entertain any better ideas: post on the comments here, or Tweet me at ShelHorowitz

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

I came across a real wasted opportunity today. A twitter profile with exactly two Tweets. One said “at work” (3 months ago) and the other, “bored” (21 months ago).

Three very uninteresting words in 21 months. And somehow, this person has managed to get 180 people following back. Not me, however. (Now, do you see why I think autofollow is pointless?).

Twitter is such a powerful tool! I’ve used it to connect and reach out, to learn about trends and issues, to amplify messages from people who are putting out great content, to build my network, to ask for advice and favors, to support people I wanted to do favors to, to give advice, to publicize events and products, to get speaking gigs and book sales, and simply to chat up with friends.

Of course, I’ve been doing social media for over a decade. I am very naturally comfortable in the Twittersphere after 15 years on e-mail discussion groups. My wife, novelist D. Dina Friedman, (@ddinafriedman) finds it a struggle, and limits her participation. But when she posts, she posts good stuff.

It’s possible my new follower is getting tons of value by lurking on over 900 Twitter feeds. But even if this person can’t think of anything to say, it would be only a couple of clicks to retweet messages that were especially compelling. Not to do so is leaving most of Twitter’s value on the table. In Twitter as in life, you gain much more value when you give as well as get.

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By Posted on Posted in Blog Tour, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

I’ve just signed up for the Ultimate Blog Challenge (Twitter hashtag #blogboost), which means a commitment to add ten posts between now and the end of the month. Especially nuts because I’m speaking in Boston tomorrow and probably won’t even get on the computer. Fortunately, I happen to have one post already scheduled.

I’ll be honest. Despite the many benefits of participation (increased visibility, exposure to other people’s networks, and of course a nice boost in the search engines, etc.)—the main reason I’m doing this is because Michelle Shaeffer, a/k/a SmallBizMuse is one of the organizers (along with Michele Scism, who I hadn’t known before, but who seems to offer a lot of useful resources for solopreneurs). She’s been my Virtual Assistant for something like eleven years, and I’ve taken a sort of nachas (Yiddish word meaning pride in the accomplishments of one’s family) in watching her develop some marketing chops of her own, and a dedicated fan base, over the last year or two. She has 4989 followers on Twitter! All organically acquired, as far as I know; I only have 3395.

So my joining her blog challenge is as much a public thank-you for all she’s done for me these last 11 years as anything else. You, of course, will have different reasons for signing up.

Of course, when she’s rich and famous, I’ll probably have to go out and find a new Virtual Assistant. So it goes.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Thirty-one years ago, the housemate with whom I’d found an apartment moved out, and I invited a poet friend of mine to take his place. We shared that apartment for several months, until he, too, moved on, and another friend moved in.

Today, I went to see that poet friend for the first time since around 1980. We’d been completely out of touch–but about a year ago, a mutual friend tracked my wife down on Facebook. Turns out that mutual friend also convinced my old housemate to join Facebook, where we found each other a month or so ago.

The friend who moved in after him stayed in that apartment after I left, but later moved to Vesey Street, two blocks from the World Trade Center. It was a primitive form of social media that let me know, finally, that she was OK, two weeks after 9/11.

And there are a number of others.

I remember very clearly the first time something like this happened: AOL was still my Internet portal, so that fixes it somewhere in 1994-95. All of a sudden I got an e-mail from a high school friend. Tom and his wife Liz came up to visit (we live four hours apart), attended my wife’s book party in New York, and have generally reentered our lives. As have Lew and Katherine, the friends who connected us with my old housemate. A few months ago, they moved up from New Jersey to two towns away from us in Massachusetts; we hadn’t seen them since a falling-out somewhere around 1989. Now, we’ve seen them several times. In fact, we’re seeing them tomorrow.

Oddly enough, when I’ve searched for old friends, I haven’t had much luck finding them. But quite a few have found me.

I’ve forged or deepened many connections via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other communities with people I hadn’t known before–but those reconnections from 20 or 30 years in the past are particularly special.

(A slightly different version of this article was published on Technorati under the title Technology Helps Me Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past.)

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By Posted on Posted in Networking, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

Yesterday, I co-hosted a teaching call with the amazing George Kao, a social media trainer who specializes in highly productive techniques for using social media (and who is socially conscious, too.

George gave me permission to share his very informative handout: his slides are at https://georgekao.com/socialslides

I also want to share a few of the takeaways

* Find the actions that provide the greatest benefit for the least work (he lists many of these in the slides)
* Balance the human and the professional/expert
* Find easy ways to show you care, like spending one second to click and say you like a comment on Facebook
* Multiple approaches increase likelihood of connecting
* Twitter is not only indexed by Twitter, but searchable on Google–BIG reach! Easy way to spread ideas
* Make your last comment of the day (or in a batch of posts) count–it has more staying power because it will be at the top of your page all night

This was the fourth call with George I’ve been on since June. I always learn so much! In fact, it was the incredible value of his content that made me reach out to him, form a friendship (we and our wives had dinner when I was in San Francisco this summer) and partner with him to deliver this call to my network.

I’m going to be participating in his 12-session coaching program on social media, and also his program on running webinars for fun and profit, and eagerly looking forward to both. I have *never* encountered a better social media trainer, and I’m an avid consumer of coaching calls.

You may want to as well. There’s a signup link at the end of the slides. Each course is usually $720, but I’ve arranged a discount–you can learn form this “Jedi Master of Social Media” (my term–he’s much too modest) for $480. Mention my name. If you order both of George’s programs (normally $1440) with the one-payment option, it’s $920. Mention my name (Shel Horowitz), and George will paypal you a $200 rebate on this double package.

Full disclosure: yes, I make a commission on this. But more importantly, you get a tremendous education in social media that can knock months or years off your learning curve, set you on the path to profitability, and save you hours per week.

Will I see you on the calls?

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Social Media & Webinar Expert George Kao: Free Teleseminar on Success with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook in 15 Minutes Per Day

In addition to being very socially conscious and eco-aware (he was an administrator for the largest Green MBA program in the US), the amazing George Kao is a social network trainer who knows social media better than anyone else I’ve encountered. I’ve been marketing seriously via social media since 1995, and it’s been my primary source of clients all the way back to 1996. And yet, I learn so much from listening to George that I not only sat in on *three* of his calls in the last two months, but also made a point of seeking him out for a dinner meeting when I was in San Francisco.

I’m absolutely thrilled to be co-hosting this call (with my friend Allison Nazarian). If you only pick one teleclass to attend in the next few months, make it this one.

Mark your calendar: Tuesday Sept 22, 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. And dial in early to avoid being closed out. (There are only 250 seats.)

Sign up at https://georgekao.com/922s . Note: the call will be recorded, but the replay will cost $80.

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

This is something I’ve been struggling with pretty much since I joined Twitter over a year ago: how do you let people know you appreciate what they’ve done without filling up your Twitter stream with posts that are of low value to other readers?

Yes, if they’re following you, you can send a DM (Direct Message). But if they’re not, you have no choice but to post in the public stream. Because I don’t want my page to be dominated by what-should-be-private thank-yous (I hate it when I visit someone else’s page and see 70% of the Tweets are thank-yous, and I don’t choose to follow those people), and because when I’m thanking for retweets (reposting something I’ve posted, so their own network sees it) or Follow Fridays (nominations of cool people to follow) it’s generally a mixture of followers and non-followers, I’ve tended to send a group thank-you to everyone at once (which is very easy to do on TweetDeck). I don’t always know who is in each category, and it’s certainly frustrating to try to DM someone only to discover they aren’t following you.

I don’t send a thank-you for following me, because I don’t see auto-DMs as adding value very much of the time, and with over 2000 followers, it’s not practical to send real individual notes. But I do like to say thanks when someone retweets or nominates me as a cool person to follow. And yet, if my stream were filled with personal thank-yous to those not following me, the stream would become boring and people would stop nominating me.

Today, I logged on to find that someone had criticized my group thank-you practice, in both an @ reply (public) and a DM (private). He didn’t feel the group thank-you was sufficiently personal. And he’s right–I’ve never felt the solution was ideal.

So I wonder…what IS the ideal way to handle this? How do YOU balance the need to be personal with the need to deliver high value in a Twitter profile? I’m eager to hear your comment either below or on Twitter @ShelHorowitz .

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