My Twitter Clinics | Letters From Dan

Don’t join the “follow us on Twitter” heat wave.

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: 5k marketing, facebook, facebook strategy, follow us on Facebook, follow us on twitter, Local Search Marketing, My Twitter Clinics, social media strategy, twitter strategy
Posted in The Social Media Phenomenon

Arghh. . . Don’t just follow us on Twitter. . .

I got a 5K flyer in the mail yesterday, and the Twitter/Facebook logo duo caught my eye immediately. That’s probably strange to you, but I see them everywhere – and most of the time I take pictures of them or clip them out and put them in my ‘workshops example folder’.

So the entire flyer was about a 5K race coming up. Great imagery, cool logo and art. Then they had the date, race starting times and the “Register at Active.com” statement. And then to finish up the flyer, the footer including the host organization’s mission statement and the Twitter/Facebook duo.

I didn’t include an image of the flyer itself. It’s a local event for charity and I really just thought they didn’t need to hear this at this point. But I’ll tell you this is a perfect lesson in Marketing that I think all small businesses should heed.

To be blunt “Nobody wants to follow you”. Or me. Or anyone else for that matter. We want information. We want discourse, tips, strategies, etc. . . We just don’t want to follow you on Twitter for the hell of it. That’s no incentive whatsoever. And I have “liked” so many companies with poor Facebook pages, I’m not inclined to visit too many more.

On the flipside, their Facebook page is 1000% better than most. They’ve got actual social interaction going on. They’ve got videos of people talking about their race last year, race maps, updates on training run times and practice race days. Just great stuff. It’s too bad their flyer doesn’t say that.

On top of that, they ask you to register at Active.com right on the flyer, when they could easily have had you get the link to the Active registration page on their Facebook page. In fact, their fan page is so good, I bet it would even improve their conversion rate over the Active.com order page.

1 more missed opportunity.

So my charge to you is: Don’t ask anyone to follow your business on Twitter. Don’t set up a fan page on Facebook and don’t put that “Follow us on Facebook” sign on your company invoices. Nope. Resist. Don’t do it. In fact, don’t even start a social media strategy unless you know what you’re going to do.

The 5K folks had a great plan in mind for their Facebook page. They should have said, “Get up to date information about the race, get registered for door prizes and hear what past participants have had to say about the race – all on our Facebook page. Also, become a fan and then get all the Registration Information.”

How many more fans would a race of 700 people get to their page with that marketing plan? With only a week to go – they have 114 fans. That’s 586 fans shy of the number who registered directly through Active.com.

I would encourage you to jump over to this Social Media Examiner article where they interviewed the folks at Intel about how they manage their Facebook page. You can see here how important it is to have an objective – and how to drive people there using that objective.

Don’t ask people to “follow you on Twitter” – give them a reason.

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How Twitter and Obama Got Hacked

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: hacker croll, internet security, My Twitter Clinics, obama hacked, twitter hacker, wordpress hacked
Posted in An Internet Marketing Journal, The Technical Internet Stuff

Both Obama’s Twitter account and Twitter itself got hacked into. Can you believe that? Well I read a great article on how the hacker did it.

This will amaze, but hopefully will inspire you to take action, too.

The hacker’s name is “Hacker Croll”. He’s a 20-something Frenchmen who breaks into corporate and personal accounts in his spare time. Hackers likeCroll are incredibly diligent and patient, as you’ll see here.

Hacker Croll shamelessly publishes the methods by which he gains access to accounts, and to start with he utilizes an entire network of sites to gain enough information to break into the target. He starts by building a database of information about the company and its employees. He keeps track of any information he can get his hands on, even the employees’ pets names.

As you continue to read this, keep Nicole Dean’s e-Book”How To Avoid Disaster” in the back of your mind. Can you really afford to be without it? http://danmorrismarketing.com/password

Hacker Croll knew that he probably only needed a single point-of-entry into any one of the business or personal accounts in his list. Since most sites are set-up so that users log-in with an e-mail address and password, once he got one – he likely could break into many. Why?

Because people generally use the same information for each site. Imagine if someone hacked into your e-mail account? Could they not go to any site on the web and press the “I forgot my username” button? Or the “I forgot my password button”. It is precisely this system that allows hackers like Hacker Croll to break your simple Hotmail password in order to break into your bank account.

Going back to Twitter, Croll knew that he only needed to find the weakest employee password to get into the network. Companies that allow their employees to come up with their own passwords are in jeopardy for precisely this reason. Unfortunately for Twitter, Croll found such an employee and was able to crack his Gmail account.

If you’re a business owner, you should know that because of human habits, someone could break into your server just by learning the password of an employee’s personal blog, or e-mail service or twitter account.

From there, Croll mines the Gmail account information for more information about other sites the user is registered at. He quickly found that the employee used the same password at many sites. And in the case of “secret question” websites, he found it even easier to break in. Imagine trying to break into an account where there are a billion possible passwords, and then get help from the secret question as it narrows the options down to “pet names”.

From this point Croll had access to all the employees email attachments, business notes, and important information. That led him to quickly taking over the accounts of the founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Croll then got control of their AT&T, Amazon, iTunes and MobileMe accounts.

He got access to over 300 business documents which he sent directly to the media to proved he’d broken in. In this case he didn’t steal the secrets or hurt anybody. He did what he wanted to do – expose weakness. He even sent them a note that said “better fix your holes, or someone malicious will break in next time.”

Regina Smola, of WordPress Security Lock, and I are putting on an internet security seminar March 31st. We’re going to be teaching you everything you need to know about keeping your WordPress blog and Twitter account safe and secure. And how to recover from problems should they occur. If someone hacking into your accounts will put you at risk, you and your employees need to join us!

Take Action today. Go to http://danmorrismarketing.com/security – This is one problem where waiting could be too late.

Don’t join the “follow us on Twitter” heat wave.
Integrating Twitter into Your Business Model
Twitter Problems: Contingency Planning

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Integrating Twitter into Your Business Model

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: marketing, My Twitter Clinics, social networking, TweetLater
Posted in The Social Media Phenomenon, The Technical Internet Stuff

Today I spoke to Terri Brooks with the Social Media T Room about integrating Twitter into Your Business Model. We covered the three basic business models used on Twitter and some contingency planning tools to keep your business account secure.

The primary model on Twitter is the One User One Account model. This is the most “respected” model where you spend most of your time (your Twitter time that is) tweeting live, responding to others, Retweeting others comments and general relationship building. It is this model to which you’ll read about most.

To make this happen, go to twitter.com and set-up a Twitter account. Done.

The second model I call the Broadcast Model and would consider this a tool most closely related to advertising on radio. Basically, a Broadcast Model Twitter account is an autopilot account that both auto-follows and auto-tweets messages.

What makes this better than radio is the ability to follow people who use specific keywords. In radio you try and align your target audience with the kind of radio station they’re listening to. Very unscientific. Suppose you could build a Twitter list of 10,000 people who’ve mentioned wine, and 6,000 of them follow you back. That’d be a great start for a company in the wine industry.

I started using this for my Twitter Problems account and it gets retweeted more than anything else I do. Useful?

To make this happen you have two basic steps. Get a Twitterfeed account and follow the instructions there. This is the service that will auto-tweet news and information related to your industry. Then get a Tweetlater.com or Twollo.com account and use it to auto-follow people who tweet your keywords.

Finally, the third basic model for business Twitter accounts is multi-user account. I’m going to break this into two separate purposes.

twitter.com/predfans uses the first purpose brilliantly. Suppose you want to tweet about the Predators Hockey team a lot but know that many of your followers are going to be turned off by this. Using a service like retweetbot.com, you can tweet directly to predfans and ONLY people who follow Predfans will see that tweet. This would be great for a conference. People interested in the Predators or in your conference could then follow one account and see all the relevant tweets.

Cotweet.com specializes in this as well. They want you to have one Twitter account for your business. But that one account shows Tweets from multiple people in the company. For instance if you’re the local Zoo, the dolphin handler could be a tweeter, the guy who scoops the elephant dung could tweet and the marketing guy could tweet. But the public would only have to follow the one zoo account to see all those tweets.

To make this happen, check out retweetbot.com and cotweet.com. All the necessary instructions are there.

So what do you think? Which kind do you prefer? Do you see the benefits and drawbacks from each?

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Twitter Problems: Contingency Planning

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: contingency planning, My Twitter Clinics, spam, twitter glitch, twitter problem, twitter problems
Posted in The Social Media Phenomenon

Do you spend hours of time on Twitter?

Let me rephrase that.

Does Twitter mean something to your business?

If so, what would happen if Twitter went down? If you lost all of your followers? What would happen if someone started spamming from your account? (Could you imagine if someone started sending out porn links from the @microsoft “verified” account?) Do you have a contingency plan?

The fact of the matter is having a contingency plan is sometimes what makes and breaks a company. Let’s take a look at Toyota for example. They’re suffering some major PR bruising right now because they’ve failed to act timely and confidently in the face of their automotive problems.

Let’s compare that to Johnson & Johnson – the definitive contingency planning company. When someone reported they’d found a needle in their shampoo – J&J went into action. They’d already brainstormed that problem and had a book with the fix already written. Within a week they had all the affected shampoo out of stores and new “Needle-Free” labeled shampoo on the shelves.

We know that Twitter has become part of our business because you can barely watch any news program that doesn’t cite Twitter or invite you to comment on Twitter. More and more people are joining Twitter, following companies, brands and people and “believing” what is being tweeted. That being said, it’s also largely out of our control. Everyday, people are encountering twitter problems like:

Spammers
Lost Followers
Lost Profile Photo
Deleted Account
or the inability to log-in among others

The key is to get the solution in your hands BEFORE you have a problem. For example there are two things you have to do to stop a spammer should they get access to your account. Unless you do both, you likely won’t stop them. And once you see spam with your name on it, how long do you have to fix it before your customers’ notice? Before they complain? Before they unfollow you?

I wrote a report called TwitterGlitch that highlights these problems, how to fix them, who to talk to at Twitter to get them fixed and even which third party “help desks” are monitored by Twitter.

The smartest thing you can do to protect your Twitter account is to click on “Profile” everyday and make sure all the tweets on your front page were left by you. And if you’re using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, make it a habit to log-in to Twitter.com once per week to check your account log-in. Otherwise, get a copy of TwitterGlitch and have the solutions to your problems in your hands. Don’t make finding the solutions your second problem.

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Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, Latitude and Outlook: The Future

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: AOL, facebook, Google Wave, Latitude, lebron James, My Twitter Clinics, Outlook
Posted in The Social Media Phenomenon, The Technical Internet Stuff

Have you seen what Google Wave is all about yet? It honestly will change the face of the internet forever. There’s no going back. Even if Google Wave fails, if no one uses it – there’s no way to put back the ideas they’ve presented.

Imagine if AOL had failed? Would the internet had failed? I don’t think so. The idea behind the collaborative sharing that AOL put together could never be forgotten and so it shall be with the Wave.

Will Facebook, Twitter and Outlook still exist now seeing what is possible? Or will they adapt and co-exist with this new technology? Can you imagine integrating Twitter with your Outlook account? What about integrating YouTube and Facebook with that?

And finally what really sets Google Wave apart – the blog. Turn an e-mail into a blog post instantly, and then allow commenters to be seen in your Outlook – and have people that know you on Outlook be able to comment on your blog without ever going there. And if they incorporate Google Latitude – you’ll never wonder where anybody is, where posts were made or where your true fans lie.

The saddest part about Google Wave is the fate of the engineers behind. They’ll be lauded in engineering circles. They’ll be applauded at Google conventions. And they’ll be heralded in internet chat rooms. But they’ll never be made into a poster on a teenagers wall.

There’s nothing sexy about genius, hard work – unbelievable ideas and concepts that will shatter what we know today. Nobody will take down their Lebron James poster. Nike will not feature Lars in a Superbowl commercial. And McDonald’s will not be giving out Google Wave Toys with the happy meal.

The price of genius is silence from our popular culture. So Cheers! Google Wave engineers. Thanks for this one big step for Google, one giant step for the Internet.

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Connect with Dan

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: Connect with Dan, delicious, facebook, friendfeed, My Twitter Clinics, stumbleupon
Posted in

It’s so cool to build connections on the different social networks. I regularly chat with people on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Stumbleupon that I never would with Facebook alone. Below is the list of networks you can find me, as well as a bit about what you can expect from me on them. Click on one of the buttons to visit my profile!

Facebook is where you can find me. Not that I’m on Facebook a lot, but what I’m doing, my pictures, and all my friends are there. Please come hang with us!

My Favorite Place To Take Kids on Vacation Is. . . is a Facebook group I started to get people together sharing their favorite places to take kids on Vacation. Join and share yours.

I get e-mail on my phone, at my desk, at my home office so if it’s easiest to e-mail me, feel free to do so at tri4time@hotmail.com

I didn’t start using YouTube until this year, but now absolutely love it. I post most of my Facebook videos and a lot more here on Facebook. Check out all my social marketing tips here.

I enjoy LinkedIn, but don’t use it as well as I should. I’d love to hear your tips and ideas on how to use LinkedIn better.

I’m loving Foursquare. It’s not a site we can chat, but we can connect there. If you join, “friend me” – it’s a great way to see what local businesses are doing for revenue.

Before voice mail, before Facebook and before the contact form on this blog – I’m on Twitter. The only faster place to reach is my cell phone (but not always)

I love Stumbleupon. When I first found it I was addicted to the Stumble button. Now I just love seeing cool pages and ‘stumbling’ pages for friends. Check out my page, there are some really cool websites out there.

I use Flickr for both my personal photos, photos of cool places we’ve visited and as a marketing tool. I load up all the photos from my websites and both caption and save them as my keywords. A lot of traffic can be derived through keywords. Add me as a Contact to your Flickr account!

Technorati is a great way to increase the exposure to your blog and to create new friends with similar interests. Let’s chat there.

FriendFeed i(and spnbabble) are great places to go when Twitter is down. I also keep track of some of my off-line groups like “Nashville Geek Breakfast” there.

Brightkite is different from the rest for me. When you travel you can log-in on Brightkite with your location and it shows you whose near you. I use it to see what’s going on in the places that I’m traveling.

Delicious is almost my favorite web app. I save everything to my Delicious account, my favorite sites, my most used sites, sites I need to visit later. Then when I’m on the road – no matter where I am – I can still get access to it all.

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Looking to Become a Better Affiliate in Niche Markets?

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: affiliate in niche markets, David Perdew, My Twitter Clinics, NAMS, Niche Affiliate Marketing, Niche Affiliate marketing System, Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop, Niche Cash Generator, Niche Mall, Niche Widget, YouTube Videos
Posted in An Internet Marketing Journal, Niche Affiliate Marketing

Ijust returned from the Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop today that David Perdew put on. I’m pretty excited and will be Tweeting about it all week.

In case you’re not familiar with the Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop and products, David Perdew has put together a “community college” for all who want to be an affilite in niche markets. He’s created products like the Niche Mall, the Niche Widget and a 10 part video series called Niche Cash Generator that allow budding internet marketers to go from nothing to “in business” in a matter of minutes.

What’s great about NAMS is that it is not a pitch fest, in fact it is truly a hands-on workshop. Lynn Terry, Kathleen Gage, Mark Hendricks, Joe Marsh, David Perdew, David Preston, Alex Syseof, the WordPress Wizard and many more have taught at the workshop.

During this last workshop, 4 of the internet marketing experts put on a live, recorded “teleseminar” about how to create and sells products in 90 minutes. It was fantastic to get a step by step plan from the experts, which really breaks it down and makes it very simple. Buy that teleseminar for yourself here. In fact, in 90 minutes this teleseminar was thought up, created, recorded and put on-line to be sold. That was awesome.

I’ll be sure to link up all the videos, chat and new products here over the weekend. Enjoy the day!

Check out:

Letters From Dan

How Twitter and Obama Got Hacked

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