50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

Having immersed myself in Twitter for a few days now, I’m finally beginnng to distinguish between the good, the bad and the downright ugly when it comes to using Twitter for business.  If you’d rather not learn the hard way (as I did) here are 50 great tips from social media strategist Chris Brogan:

First Steps
1.Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)

2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.

3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.

4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.

5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).

6.Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)

7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.

8.  Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)

 9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.

10. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

(more…)

New Report: 5 Email Marketing Trends to Watch

StrongMail released a new report this month showcasing best-in-class emails across five industry verticals. Here are five trends identified across all of the winning campaigns that you may want to watch out for and adopt for your own:

1. User-Generated Content
Two of the five best-of-breed emails leverage user-generated content,  with great success. Expect to see continued adoption throughout 2009.

2. Forward to a Friend Meets Social Media
A great fit for email marketers with the appropriate audience and content. Two of the five winners leverage this functionality to help fans spread the word about their favorite articles and topics.

3. Integrating Website Navigation
Four out of 5 best-of-breed emails included some form of website navigation in their email, making it easy for the recipient to access the information most relevant to them.

4. Focused, Clear, Compelling Messages
All 5 winners featured a central, clear and compelling message to entice the recipient to click through.

5. CAN-SPAM Compliant Footers
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires that all companies include a footer that contains the company’s mailing address and an unsubscribe mechanism. All 5 winners had clear CAN-SPAM compliant footers with simple, easy-to-use unsubscribe functionality.

The full report is complimentary, and available for download here.

6 Free Tools for Online Reputation Management

If you’ve never Googled yourself before, you’re part of a very tiny minority.  On a personal level, tracking your online rep may just be a vanity thing (and perfectly normal, don’t worry) — but from a business point of view, it’s an absolute necessity. 

So if you aren’t keeping tabs on your company or brand’s “web-putation” the time to start is NOW, and i think you’ll find this article on MarketingProfs.com extremely helpful: 

Six Free Tools for Online Reputation Management by Dan Schawbel

As Schawbel very sensibly points out “Part of your brand is in the hands of others, so it’s critical that you monitor it before a flame becomes a forest fire.” You can also use all the feedback you finds part of your marketing strategy, to discover your audience and market to them directly.

The 6 monitoring tools he recommends are below (they’re explained more fully in the article).

1. Google - http://google.com/alerts 
2. Blog posts - http://technorati.com 
3. Blog comments - http://backtype.com
4. Discussion boards - http://boardtracker.com 
5. Twitter - http://search.twitter.com 
6. FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/search 

So there you go.. time to get cracking on the tracking! I hope you like what you find… If you don’t, it’s probably time to make some much-needed changes.

Another Twitter-torial: How to Engage People on Twitter

Twitter-torial: How to Get Followed on Twitter

WebWatch: Twitter and its entourage of apps

Using Twitter for business was all the rage at the Email Marketing Sumit this year, so with a bit of a “here we go again with even more social media eck eck” yawn, I decided to check in and see what it was all about.  Three days later, I am completely and irrevocably HOOKED.

Apart from the opportunity to see daily just what an awesome couple Ashton & Demi really are (he asked everyone to help him greet her good morning and she got thousands of “Good Morning, I love you messages” when she woke up! Awwww!)… how funny Christopher Walken is… what Perez Hilton is squealing about at any given moment (yesterday it was Madonna. He thinks she’s God) … and more, I also now see what an incredibly powerful  business tool it really is.  (More about that in future posts - am busy reading what P Diddy, MC Hammer and Michael Urie are saying.)

If you aren’t on Twitter yet, try it out!  I’ve posted a couple of great “Getting Started on Twitter” videos below, courtesy of Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media.

You can also find an article about 27 cool Twitter applications here.  (My faves so far: Twitter Gallery, Digsby, Splitweet and twtQpon) 

Happy Tweeting!  You can find me at www.twitter.com/chiniehdiaz  

 Getting Started on Twitter

How to Find and Follow People on Twitter

More Twitter-torials coming soon!

WebWatch: The Marketer’s Addictionary

Marketingprofs.com recently added a new section to their site called the Marketing Addictionary - and being the wordy nerd I am, I naturally fell immediately in love with it.

What on earth is an “Addictionary,” you might ask?  Marketingprofs.com’s Ann Handler explains it as “a sort of lexicon for a new generation of marketers, where users (this means you) can stake claims on new linguistic territory by creating new words to describe the world we work in.”

 Some of my favorite new words from the Addictionary include:

• “wannapreneur” - someone who claims to be an entrepreneur but doesn’t actually own any businesses
• “social notworking” - someone who fritters away their workday on Facebook or Twitter (love this! haha!)
• “disemvoweling” - the rapid disappearance of vowels in the English language due to texting and Twitter 

Check it out at  http://words.marketingprofs.com - and feel free to invent some new words of your own

Key Takeaways from the 2009 Email Marketing Summit

Am back from attending Marketing Sherpa’s 4th Annual Email Marketing Summit, with a new professional certification in Landing Page Optimization, an advance copy of the insanely heavyweight (literally and figuratively)  “Best Practices in Email Marketing Handbook” and a ton of new ideas that I will probably take weeks to digest — and even longer to actually apply. 

 In the meantime, here are the top 8 takeawaysfrom the Summit, for those of you who missed it:

Takeaway #1. You can rise above email clutter

Takeaway #2. Target your measurement and testing activity on actionable data

Takeaway #3. Segmentation data is at your fingertips – use it!

Takeaway #4. Keep moving toward triggered email

 Takeaway #5. Highlight email’s cross-channel impact

Takeaway #6. Make email work in tandem with Web 2.0 and user-generated content

Takeaway #7. Respect your international audience

Takeaway #8. Email and email marketers are poised for an expanded role

To see the expanded list (with explanations) see Marketing Sherpa’s recap. (open access to non-members til March 26)