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Previous: Home-Based Businesses & Web Apps: We've Only Just Begun If you ever go to a conference at which Guy Kawasaki is speaking, make sure you get to his talk early enough to get a good seat. Entertaining, informative, and as he admits, sometimes a bit controversial, his keynote address about Twitter at yesterday’s opening session of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City, by itself, made attending the conference a good investment for any size business. Kawasaki talked about how at first, like so many other business owners and professionals, he just didn’t “get” Twitter. But after looking more closely at it, he not only “got” it, but now sees it as one of the most important tools a business can use to spread the word of mouth about their business. He sees Twitter, in fact, as version 3.0 of the online world – a way to reach potentially hundreds of thousands of people, for free. In recent years a lot of businesses, website owners and bloggers have used the Internet for “Trickle Down” marketing. They aim at getting mentioned by an A-list blogger or a top site, because such a mention can drive a lot of traffic to a website. But that spike in traffic, Kawasaki pointed out, is a fleeting thing. It happens once and then goes away after a few days. What business should be looking for – and what he sees Twitter as a force for accomplishing, Kawasaki explained, is “Bubble Up” marketing. His bubble up philosophy of marketing is based on the premise that “You don’t know who the best evangelist will be for your product or service.” Instead of “sucking up” to A-listers (in the blogosphere or elsewhere), you need to let those true evangelists find you and get the word out about your products or services. Twitter helps makes that possible. In fact, Kawasaki says, Twitter has been extremely valuable in helping him build his site, Alltop.com into a popular site very quickly. Kawasaki presented a number of very specific tips for using Twitter to help those potential evangelists find you and spread the word about your business. Among his tips: De-focus. Don’t ignore the A-listers, but don’t focus all your attention on getting them to pay attention to you, either. The important thing is “who loves your site” and becomes an evangelist. Twitter is a numbers game and you need to have lots of followers. You want as many people as possible to find and follow you so they can “send the message up.” Automatically follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. “I think it’s arrogant," Kawasaki said, “if you think you are worth following but don’t think the people following you are worth following.” Have a goal for using Twitter and a way to measure how you’re doing at achieving that goal. He suggested one good tool for doing that is Retweetist, which shows how many times you’ve been retweeted. (A retweet is when someone repeats what you said so people they know will see it.) Make interesting tweets. Like most other things on the web, one way to get people to love you is to post information they want to know about. Monitor what people are saying about you. You can monitor the tweets about you by searching for your ID, company name, industry segnment and by watching @ replies. Save time with various social marketing productivity tools. One such tool Kawasaki mentioned is Adjix, which is a Firefox plug in that makes it easy to post to Twitter from any place on the web and also shows how many times people clicked on your links. Others included Tweetdeck and Twhirl, which both provide ways for individuals to monitor Twitter, and CoTweet, which is a tool for companies that need to coordinate multiple people using twitter (for instance a support team). Copy best practices. On Twitter that means looking at how other companies are effectively using Twitter to engage with their customers and build buzz. JetBlueAirways and Amazondeals were two of the good examples of Twitter use he mentioned. Be willing to “squeeze the trigger” on Twitter. One way of doing that – one that is somewhat controversial, he suggested - is to set up searches for things you’d like to get known for, and then automatically tweet a response when that search term comes up in a tweet. The tool he likes for doing that is TwitterHawk, which not only generates the automatic response, it also remembers who the response was sent to so you don’t keep spamming them with the same response whenever they mention the topic again. Make it easy to share. Add a Share on Twitter button to your website. Be willing to take the heat if you use twitter as a tool. People will say you are a spammer, that you aren’t using it right. And for that, Kawasaki has invented a new acronym: UFM. It stands for UnFollow Me. If you don’t like what he is tweeting, he says, just UFM. Posted on March 25, 2009 at 8:42 AM| Comments (13) Comments As much as I respect and admire him, his strategy of automating the hell out of how he uses Twitter in order to promote his service could end up driving many people to use other more relationship-oriented services that support actual communication, not just numbers games. But that won’t matter since the only folks left using Twitter will be others using automated systems to defend themselves against spam, so I guess we’ll end up with a zero sum game! Till then I’ll remain “arrogant” by not following his account on Twitter. By the way I highly recommend his blog’s tour of the Guinness facility in Dublin. Posted by: Dennis McDonald on March 25, 2009 at 9:55 AM I haven’t been there, but if @guykawasaki says its the best synopsis of his talk, I trust him. And found it useful, thanks :) P.S: the “interesting tweets”-paragraph has been duplicated. Intentionally to make that one sticky? ;) Posted by: Michael on March 25, 2009 at 10:19 AM I had taken a short class about twitter but learned more with this article. Thank you! Posted by: Steve Baker on March 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM I am not sure I still understand all this about Twitter. I read as much as I can about it, but it is still very elusive to me. Would it be something I could use to market a cleaning service? Posted by: tonya on March 25, 2009 at 1:35 PM Thanks for catching that and letting us know! We’ve fixed the duplicat paragraph problem. Posted by: Janet Attard Thanks for the synopsis! Very interesting. I personally don’t think there’s any one “right” way to use Twitter. I appreciate Kawasaki’s perspective, that it’s an effective tool, and that he explains how he uses it. And these are all good ideas to think about (even if one ultimately decides not to implement some or all of them). Posted by: Brent P. Newhall on March 26, 2009 at 11:20 AM I was disappointed and quite frankly, Guy Kawasaki really is not at the top of my list of relevant ‘Go To’ experts anymore. First, Kawasaki did not invent Twitter, how does that qualify expert status? Second, it is clearly obvious the speech was for the benefit of the big business corporate community. The basic premise of the speech: Promote genuine fake authenticity for the sake of profit; one of the reasons as to why I do not care for anything said by Kawasaki - as mentioned, he just doesn’t “Get it”. Posted by: Valerie on March 26, 2009 at 4:12 PM I am new at this. Guys, wat is twitter? Posted by: Nora on March 28, 2009 at 8:16 AM There is quite a polarizing discussion developing around whether to keep Twitter list limited to those few with whom I want to have genuine “conversations” —or— to grow my list as big as possible. My perspective on this keeps shifting around as I read comments but I’d like to add this: If I was a guest on a radio program trying to get my message out — wouldn’t it be good to have as many “listeners” (followers) as possible to inspire to think and act according to my message? Kate Williams Posted by: Kate Williams on March 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM Twitter can be used as you like in my opinion.It’s what you think it is. If your a business person,obviously you will use it as a business tool. If you like blogging,then twitter is the place to go,because twitter is micro blogging. If you want to share your new squidoo lens with the world alright just post a tweet.Some of the media see twitter as a threat for obvious reasons: Twitter tweets linked to a site or youtube channel reach millions instantly and it’s free. There’s nothing to “get” about twitter. It’s an awesome way to communicate your business,your thoughts and everything you think is important.By the way: “I”ll tweet this discussion to my followers Posted by: Maripa on March 29, 2009 at 12:54 AM Hi, Posted by: Chinese Investment UK on April 9, 2009 at 8:48 AM I am really in favor of the comment that Kawasaki made, I think that you should follow all those that want to follow you, otherwise, why would they have chosen to follow you? I am by no means a purist on Twitter. I believe that everyone should be able to make and use twitter to their benefit, however on the same line, if I am constantly barraged with sales messages one after another by the same person, I unfollow and block that person. Thanks, Scott Posted by: Scott Bradley on April 13, 2009 at 9:33 AM |
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The Real Reason to Twitter
I was looking forward to the keynote from Guy Kawasaki, but I came away with a diminished view of him.
Personally, I think he still doesn’t “get it”.
I found it a bit hypocritical that he considers it arrogant for people to follow a select group on Twitter vs. auto-following all.
After all, he’s merely making a gesture - he admittedly doesn’t even read the Tweets of those he follows unless they reference him.
That’s the height of arrogance to me.
Also, his references to being a spammer with a wink and a smile amazed me.
I would like to think he was joking, but the practices he outlined with TwitterHawk are just that - spam.
In my opinion, Kawasaki is a shining example of how to be inauthentic on Twitter.
Posted by: Shawn Collins on March 25, 2009 at 9:43 AM