Twitter for Business: 15 Masters Show You How

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Twitter is being talked about by everyone. You know when Oprah talks about something it’s gone mainstream. With over 19 million unique visits a month, up from only 4 million in December, Twitter is by far the fastest growing social media website right now.

If you’re struggling to see how to tap into all those people and all that growth to help grow your own business, here is something you need to check out.

Twitter Masters TeleSummit 2009

The Twitter Masters TeleSummit 2009 brings together 15 of the best social media marketing experts to share exactly how to tap into that market for your business.

We’re talking 15 hours of interviews with some incredibly sharp people who know their stuff when it comes to Twitter. People like Joel Comm, Dan Hollings, Carrie Wilkerson, Scott Stratten, Deborah Micek, Scott Tousignant, and the marketing team of Travis Miller & Jimmy Vee just to name a few.

There’s a broad spectrum of backgrounds and approaches to Twitter in this group. Follower counts for these folks range from just over 2,000 to in excess of 58,000 followers!

Did I mention they’ve invited Yours Truly to be one of the speakers too?

Sneak Peek at What You’ll Learn

Here is just a tiny taste of some of the topics the speakers will be covering in this landmark event.

• Connecting online and offline strategies quickly
• Simple techniques that increase your followers by being yourself
• Successfully creating buzz for your business and product promotions
• Create fanatical fans on Twitter through offline leads
• How Twitter can build strong relationships one tweet at a time
• Big mistakes social networkers make that cost you fans, followers, leads, and sales
• 4 Hands-Off Twitter tools to manage your time and get business done efficiently
• Building a word-of-mouth army for you on social media sites
• Attracting interested followers through retweetable (RT) material every day
• 12 Must-Have Tools when Using Twitter For Your Business
• Create a growing and active fan base in just a few weeks
• 2 simple ways to streamline your social media strategy
• Build an intentional Twitter space that gets you heard and respected by your followers

And here is what you’ll hear from me.

Becoming a Master Media Marketer
by Blogging and Micro-blogging (Twitter)

• 4 Top Reasons Bloggers NEED Twitter
• 9 simple trade secrets that get you noticed and attracting more subscribers
• Effective and proven Twitter techniques that gain influence without automation
• Why Twitter is the “Secret Weapon for Non-Profits”
• How to build presence on a shoestring budget

It is an amazing amount of content.

And here is the best part…

They’re Giving it away for FREE!!

That’s right. If you register for the event prior to the kick off on Monday you can listen to all 15 interviews absolutely FREE!

UPDATE: You can still listen to the remaining interviews for Free until the end of the week!

It doesn’t get much get much more affordable than free, I know.

But I’m sure you’ll want to get the mp3 recordings of the entire series. The folks running the Twitter TeleSummit are offering downloadable recordings of the entire series that you can listen to as many times as you want along with PDF transcripts of each interview to study at your leisure.

Be sure to order them when you register now so you can save 30% off the price. If you place your order before the end of the TeleSummit you can get all the recordings and all the PDF files for only $67.

After that the whole enchelada will still be available for the incredibly low price of $97.

Go Register Now and get your complete set of this incredibly valuable information so you can harness the power of Twitter to help your own business grow.

How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day

And Why You Really Don’t Want to Do It.

With the social media service Twitter beginning to be more widely adopted, less sophisticated marketers are joining the community. Some of these folks are opportunists of dubious ethics who are not looking to use the medium engage the community.

Instead these social media hucksters are simply looking to take advantage of Twitter’s simple format and established user base to push their weak marketing message out to a larger audience.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the slimier and more obnoxious fringe of the internet marketing world saw Twitter as yet another target for their short sighted slash and burn, spammy approach to marketing.

Some of the worst offenders are actually selling “secret” techniques on how to quickly build a massive Twitter follower list. I’ll save you the money & tell you exactly how to do it. For free. Read more

Carbon Motors Police Car of the Future in Savannah

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see the future of law enforcement vehicles. And it’s pretty cool.

No. It’s way beyond cool.

The coolness was on display down at the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center in a public event that, well,  really wasn’t publicized all that well. I happened to hear about it from my good friends over at the Creative Coast, and being into cool stuff, went down to check it out.

Straight off the company executives made a big point about how no one would be allowed to touch the car, which seemed kind of strange to me. I mean granted they don’t want some doofus breaking the $5 million prototype that they are staking the future of their entire company on. But shouldn’t a police car be at least somewhat doofusproof?

Of course they then proceeded to parade any law enforcement personnel that wanted a closer look through a tour of the interior, pushing all the buttons and touching whatever the heck they wanted.

That part I get. All the police officers had guns. You walk up to my car with a gun and I’ll probably let you sit in the driver’s seat too. Touch whatever you want. And I’ll smile while you’re doing it, just like they did.

I briefly thought that perhaps I should have brought my Glock stuffed down the back of my shorts like Magnum used to do. Though somehow I don’t think that would have gone over so well in a room full of police officers.

I took my pictures from a distance. But I digress. Read more

Loving to Hate Facebook

As long as we’re on a a Facebook roll this week, I thought I’d share this little video I found via Cherly Smith’s blog. Over and above the TOS issue, the video pretty much sums up the things I don’t like about Facebook.

Check it out. 25 Things I Hate About Facebook – What do you hate about Facebook?

Facebook Overtakes MySpace

Yesterday we talked about a change in the Facebook Terms Of Service that means Facebook owns your content – forever. And then at a talk I participated in for our local Small Business Chamber here in Savannah yesterday a couple of the panelists shared a little about how their being active on Facebook is leading to direct donations in support of their non-profits.

Facebook Now On Top

In spite of the new TOS changes Facebook is growing at a record pace. In fact, Facebook surpassed MySpace to take over the number 1 spot for social media traffic levels.

You can see by the Compete comparison at the right that Facebook has been growing traffic steadily since last spring while MySpace has been steady to slightly declining over the same period.

According to the published Facebook statistics they currently have over 170 million active user accounts with over 15 million users updating their statuses at least daily. (I’m not one of those 15 million.)

MySpace doesn’t have any published statistical data that I can find. In fact, the only “company” info they have on their website is this very lame “About Us” page which doesn’t say much of anything. Perhaps that is part of what contributes to the general perception that MySpace is for kids. If they don’t bother to even appear to take their business seriously, why should the rest of us?

Real Connections

Personally I’ve never done much of anything with MySpace for myself beyond opening a profile and poking around a fair amount so that I could have an understanding of the platform’s pros & cons when working with clients.

However I am fairly active on Facebook (in spite of my TOS concerns). I probably average checking in on my account about once a day to see what my friends are up to. I figure since so many others are active their it would be irresponsible of me not to. I’ve got over 300 friends there and have connected with folks that I haven’t been in contact with in years. Ok, in some cases it’s more like decades.

If you want to send me a friend request, here is my Facebook profile.

Congratulations to Facebook for becoming the number 1 social media site. It’s a place where we can all make real connections.

Facebook Now Owns Your Content – Forever

Update: This subject made the front page of Drudge yesterday. The article is here.

I’m big into social media, especially as a way to promote your business. Even so I’ve never been head over heels about Facebook as a means to promote business. I know many businesses out there who see great returns from their networking on on the site.

Facebook recently made a change to their Terms Of Service that make me a little less enthusiastic about the site.

Their Content, Not Mine

As long as I can remember Facebook has always had in their TOS that they can do whatever the heck they want with anything that gets posted to their site. However, until the change this month, if you ever closed your account that “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)” of theirs would expire.

Sure they’d probably still keep your stuff on their servers. But at least they wouldn’t have the rights to distribute it once you closed your account.

You see, their TOS used to have this at the end of the Licenses section:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

But I guess that Facebook decided they just couldn’t stand to ever part with any content you gave them (and probably thought was yours) so they  deleted those two sentances from their TOS.

Business Implications

Does this mean that Facebook is a bad idea for businesses? No. I think it still can be a great way to help get the word out about your business. Just understand that anything you post/upload to Facebook is not yours, it’s theirs.

What it does mean is that it is especially important to keep in mind the Law of Online Perpetuation:

Internet content will persist in direct relation to how embarrassing it is to you irregardless of your efforts to remove it, so don’t be stupid.

And in the case of Facebook, that could be forever.

BuddyPress One Step Closer to DIY Social Media Site

Social Networks can be very powerful. For those who know how to tap into them effectively, social media websites are are greatly accelerating businessesby expanding their reach and influence in a cost effective way.

There are even tons of options for those who want to create their own networking groups. If you want an all-in-one solution you might look at Ning or CollectiveX. To add social modules to an existing web site, KickApps is an option. Or if you just want some basic message board like communication you can look at a free Google Group or Yahoo Group.

But what if you want more control than any of those options offer?

Up to now your only option would be to spend a huge pile of cash hiring a crew of programmers to develop a custom solution. That’s out of reach of most small business owners.

Open Source to the Rescue

Leave it to the good folks at Automattic to come up with a solution. They are backing BuddyPress which builds on their WordPress MU (multi-user) platform to create full blown social media sites. For those who are familiar and comfortable working in the WPMU environment, BuddyPress is a very cost effective way to get a new niche social media site up and running relatively quickly.

And BuddyPress moved one step closer to being ready for prime time today with the release of Release Candidate 1, which means it is getting more stable and most of the bugs have been worked out of it.

This is really good news. Having an open source option for creating social media sites really opens the doors for organizations that can really benefit from providing a way for their communites to better connect.

I’ve been working with BuddyPress for a couple months now and I’m impressed. Something tells me once word gets out about this project we’re going to see BuddyPress sites all over the place.

Update: Here is a video intro to BuddyPress so you can see what all it can do.

Help Us Help You – A 3 Minute Survey

Here at SuccessCREEations we are looking for ways to serve you better.

We have been getting quite a few inquiries lately from folks wondering if we have any kind of material they can purchase that will help them get started with blogging and social media.

Unfortunately we don’t. Yet.

However on the good news front we do have a wealth of information just waiting to be packaged up in a format that will make it easy for people to wade into the wonderful social media world.

That’s why we’re asking for your help.

We’ve put together a little 4 question survey. If you can spare about 3 minutes to go fill it out we’d be much obliged.

• Click Here to take survey

And thank you in advance for helping us help others learn more about social media.

Social Media Autoresponders – Good Marketing or Missing the Point?

People generally prefer to interact with other people rather than machines. And most folks are especially not keen on interacting with machines masquerading as people.

Ever get frustrated by an automated phone tree when trying to contact a business and feel like screaming, “I just want to talk to a person!“?

Robocalls were big in the news leading up to this past election. You know. Those recorded calls that just start talking at you as soon as you answer the phone.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a political candidate or a credit card sales pitch, I hang up on ‘em without listening.

Autoresponders

In email marketing there is a thing called an autoresponder. The most basic form is the email you get when you first subscribe to a list.

There are some very real benefits to email autoresponders. For starters, they help ensure that you really meant to subscribe to that list. In that capacity they help keep spam down a bit.

Another benefit is that you don’t have to wait to get the information you signed up for with email autoresponders. No matter what time, day or night, you can have access with a good autoresponder system.

One reason why email autoresponders work so well is that we don’t have the expectation that the sender is sitting by their email just waiting for us to sign up to their list. The automation helps us out as recipients as well as making life easier on the sender.

It’s a win-win and I am a fan.

Social Media is Different

Social media sites like Twitter, for example, have a different expectation. They are by their very nature more personal than email. That’s the “social” part. Read more

Age of Conversation 2 Released Today

Today marks the official release of the collaborative social media book, The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It?

The book includes chapters from 237 authors (including yours truly) from 16 different countries and addresses the broad topic of some of the mistaken ideas people have about how social media intersects marketing efforts. The eight topic areas covered in the book are:

• Manifestos
• The Accidental Marketer
• A New Brand of Creative
• My Marketing Tragedy
• Life in the Conversation Lane
• Keeping Secrets
• From Conversation to Action
• Business Models

Capital ‘C’ Commitment

The Age of Conversation is the brain child of Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, and as such is truly an international effort. Drew is in Des Moins here in the States and Gavin is half a world away in Sydney Australia.

And they have had their hands full shepherding the 200+ authors and bringing all the aspects of the project together. They’re two highly committed men.

And the best part?

All Proceeds for Charity

The best part is that all of the revenue (above the actual publisher costs) is being donated to charity to help kids. The charity they have chosen to support is Variety, the international children’s charity.

Their goal is to raise at least $15,000 dollars for the charity. It’s ambitious. We need to sell a bunch of books to get there.

But with 237 bloggers generating conversation about it, I think it’s a vary achievable goal. So go buy a copy or two in your favorite format.

Pricing for The Age of Conversation 2 is:

• e-book: US$12.50  ($10.00 going to charity)
• paperback book: US$19.95 ($8.02 to charity)
• hardback book: US$29.95 ($4.60 to charity)

I bought my copy already. Go get yours right now.

It’s chock full of great information from some of the world’s leading bloggers and marketers. And you will be supporting a worthy cause at the same time. Read more

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