What’s Twitter & Who’s Twittering?

Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 7:53 am

What's Twitter and Who's Twittering?

The micro blogging social media site Twitter is fast to use and very responsive. No long articles with 500 words to post here!

Just 2 lines to say what you are doing, reading, promoting or thinking.

Twitter is a quick way to link to any page in any niche you want to promote. Its a fast way to share a video you liked or an article you found helpful without writing a long post about it.

More than anything else though it's a way to gain a fast group following and link a feed to a blog or social site and vice versa.

You can converse with people on Twitter. You can private message your followers. You can say something or nothing. You can eavesdrop on other people's conversations.

What's Twitter? One of the most unassuming and useful tools around so far as social media sites is concerned.

How to Use Twitter Video

Watch this short video guide to Twitter about who is twittering or tweeting on Twitter and why.

Is Twitter Noise or a Valid Business Tool? (socialmediatoday.com)
10 Steps to Encouraging Your Customers to Become Evangelists (kylelacy.com)
Facebook and Twitter Lead the Pack as Social Media Usage Skyrockets (mashable.com)

Web Media Strategy 2010

Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 4:45 pm

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: Image by kk+ via Flickr

This slideshow by Jeremiah Owyang focuses on planning a web media strategy for 2010.

The main four points it makes are to

Listen to your clients

If you are not listening - you don't know what customers want so you won't know where they are looking for it or how to position yourself with web media so they find your business web pages.
If you are not listening - a swag of negative comments may be posted on the web without your knowledge
If you are not listening - you miss out on the intelligence you need to develop new products for them

Provide systems to help them

Help desk software is a valuable tool for online complaints that is private to you and the customer but enables you to keep a record of the complaint and resolve it quickly and to the satisfaction of the customer. If customers have no private means of complaints they will take it public!

Provide discussion areas for them

Forums and blogs and social media pages can all be places where other community members can help your customers by advising people how to use things and giving other valuable information. People can comment and ask questions and generally this helps them to feel connected to your company.

Employ a person or team of people just for this

To keep up with the web based systems, depending on the size of your company and the amount of traffic you get - you are going to need staff!

Start training your people now to handle these systems so you are not caught out later trying to catch up and unable to tell the difference between an expert and amateur. Social marketing training is a big topic, every site is different and has things to learn.

The technology is the easy part, it's there now and can be used as is. Education systems can't keep up! It's the people with the "know how" who are in scarce supply.

Social Media Trends for 2010

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

People Don't Scale. How Does That Affect Social Media? (businesspundit.com)
The Inside Word: Social Media Is Losing Its Authenticity (paidcontent.org)
Web Strategy Survey (slideshare.net)
Conversation Intelligence: Top Social Media Marketers (ecairn.com)
The growth of twitter (with analysts) (thecustomercollective.com)

How to set up who sees what on facebook

Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 5:20 pm

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: Image via Wikipedia

Establishing Facebook Privacy

How to set up who sees what on Facebook

Facebook is a place to relax with your friends and be yourself, to mix old friends with new friends and to have fun. But Facebook restricts you to only one profile with all your friends lumped in together.

Most people enjoy the social networking of Facebook and like to explore their friends profiles and the photos and videos that they may upload. You may not mind sharing a family photo with a few close friends but may prefer to not have the same photo available to kids at school if you are a teacher, to managers at work who may not approve or to complete strangers who can save a copy of the photo to their computer and use it as they please.

It is important if you are using your personal Facebook profile to network into the larger Facebook community to set up rules for "who sees what" on Facebook. These are called privacy settings and although it may take a little time to set up the friend groups, it's worth doing as soon as possible before your community of friends grows too large to manage.

It can be awkward if a work colleague or a complete stranger wants to friend you on Facebook. It could be unprofessional to refuse, but you'd prefer not to have your personal friends and family open to them, or to expose your personal friends to everyone you agree to friend, especially if they are marketers looking for prospects.

It is highly likely if you use Facebook for business as well as pleasure that you'll want to set up a Facebook page. You can set up "who sees what" on Facebook pages as well and establish further privacy rules. This excellent Facebook tutorial video will show you how to group your friends into networks and then to use the privacy settings to allow each of the groups to only see the specific areas of your Facebook space that you want them to.