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 Small Business Marketing, My Twitter Clinics, social media strategy, twitter strategy
Posted in What is Social Media

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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Social Media for Offline Business

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: Business, facebook, Ice cream, MaggieMoo's, marketing, My Twitter Clinics, myspace, social media, Social media marketing
Posted in What is Social Media

Being a social media for offline business guy, I take special note when anything local businesses are doing online and making visible to the customer. This weekend I had the pleasure of dining at MaggieMoo’s on West End in Nashville and thought I’d share that experience.

MaggieMoo’s is the first place I’ve been where their social media marketing efforts have gone beyond a Facebook sticker on the door. For the first time ever, an employee contributed positively to their efforts (unlike my example at Daily’s Gas Station).

Next to the register they have an 8 x 11 stand-up flyer suggesting customers “like” them on Facebook (as you’re about to do with the button at the bottom of this post :)) – but they didn’t stop there. The employee actually pointed out the sign, suggested that I “like” them on Facebook and added “Do so before March 15th because we’re giving away free ice cream that day”.

Social Media Marketing is about 2 things:

Engagment and Community
Driving Traffic to take action

What a breath of fresh air that was. Promotion, scarcity, likability and a knowledgeable employee. However, social media for offline business is still a leap. With 4 kids in tow, MaggieMoo’s was asking a lot of me to remember to go to Facebook and “like” them the next time I logged in. And since they didn’t gather my contact information, they didn’t have any way to remind me.

So at this point they’re relying on “hope”.

Unfortunately, hope comes into play again with their Facebook strategy as well. Since they haven’t uploaded any special, custom pages – they still don’t have a way to grab your contact information (which is the Gold in marketing). There’s no place to put your e-mail address or anything. And since you can’t message all your fans at the same time on Facebook – they don’t have a real good way to get me back to their FanPage – other than hope.

When you press “like” you’re taken directly to the wall where they pretty much post specials and promotions. I did find mention of the “free ice cream” down the page a bit, but there’s a disconnect immediately without seeing that promotion front and center.

That covers gathering contact information, but I’d also like to see them working to create more of a community on their page. I love that they posted a photo of one of their truffle cakes, but I would like to have seen them “tag” the person whose party it was eaten at. Maybe even start a “tagging” promotion for people who upload their party photos.

I’d love to see discussions about the best ice cream cake stories, or messy kids with their ice cream cones. Perhaps questions like what’s your favorite “mix-in” ice cream flavor, or name this mix-in recipe, or even stories of ice cream cakes that melted before they could get eaten.

Social media is about taking a group of unrelated customers and turning them into a community of fans. But a marketer must recognize the temporary nature of everything on the web. How good is 1,00o friends on MySpace right now? Without moving people from Facebook’s world to your own list – you end up with nothing for your efforts.

At least at MaggieMoo’s – you started out with great ice cream.

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Foursquare: the Future of Marketing

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: facebook, Foursquare Solutions, Grocery store, My Twitter Clinics, Pepsi, RadioShack, social media, using foursquare for business, Vons
Posted in What is Social Media

As a marketer of small businesses, I started using Foursquare with the sole purpose of learning how others were going to use it and make it successful. I checked-in to every place I was, places I wasn’t, got every badge I could find and every Mayorship. I really wanted to see how business was going to use Foursquare’s tools.

Guess what? Marketers are now seeing the true power Foursquare has.

Pepsi and Von’s Grocery Stores are really moving the needle. When you register for a Von’s card and sync it with your Foursquare account, they’ll give you a free 2 litre of Pepsi. So what? That’s nothing new, eh?

How about this then. . . when you swipe your Von’s card at check-out, you’ll automatically be checking in to Foursquare – which means all your online friends will see “Von’s”. That’s some great advertising for Von’s. And to keep you “checking in” Von’s adds free stuff to your Von’s card based on your Mayorships, Badges and check-ins.

Imagine becoming the Mayor of your local Veterinary Clinic (which means you visit there often) and getting a dog food coupon from Von’s – automatically! That kind of target marketing based on your social media preferences is surely changing the game.

The consumer gets rewarded over and over and over, Von’s gets publicity, Foursquare gets new users who check-in unconsciously, Pepsi gets word-of-mouth marketing like this and many times everyone gets a plug on Twitter or Facebook. Win! Win!

Scoot on over to the Bellagio in Vegas. The Bellagio has a team dedicated to monitoring social media sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter for mentions of their name. Guests who check-in on Foursquare, tweet their location or rave on Facebook get upgrades and rewards from The Bellagio. Mayorships and badges to them aren’t nearly the value of rewarding the “word-of-mouth” marketing guests do on their own.

Different from those two is Radio Shack and their holiday promotion. Instead of taking advantage of existing customers, Radio Shack and Foursquare created a “badge” that Foursquare users can earn when they go to Radio Shack and check-in. The incentive of the “badge” wasn’t enough to drive sales, so the badge itself gives users 20% merchandise during the holidays.

For Radio Shack, they not only get new customers into the door using the coupon, but have their name on a badge on all Foursquare user’s phones, the internet, every Foursquare related website, press releases and more. From a driving traffic perspective, Radio Shack’s promotion is much more traffic-centric.

The Pepsi / Von’s promotion is certainly the most cutting edge. Connecting your grocery card to social media as a means of getting the Von’s name out there hundreds of times per day is genius. But then rewarding users based on their Foursquare habits – that’s over the top cool.

Please. . . please tell me if you know of any cool Foursquare promotions. Leave a comment below. I love hearing how business is using these new social media tools.

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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 Common Marketing Mistakes

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.

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Integrating Twitter into Your Business Model

Posted By: DanRMorris | Tags: marketing, My Twitter Clinics, social networking, TweetLater
Posted in What is Social Media

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 What is Social Media

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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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 Niche Internet 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.

more Looking to Become a (…)

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Last updated by DanRMorris at February 20, 2010.

Twitter Problems: Contingency Planning

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