Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Even small events can serve to jumpstart some word of mouth for your business. One of our clients is having some local events for their brand and wanted to know what tactics would get people talking. This is a good questions but before we go into specific tactics on how to achieve that there are some questions they need to answer first:

- What’s the event about? What’s going to happen there?

- Why should people care? (otherwise nobody’s going to spread it if they know nothing about you)

- Do we have any material we can support it with like videos or something to generate some interest?

- Anything in particular that’s part of the show that would get people talking?

Once you answer these questions then you can start with the creative, push it out on your blog or any other medium you have a presence on. If you want people who don’t know about you, they need to know who you are before they even give you their information or much less pay to see you.

The key is to ask yourself: Are we answering everyone’s questions?

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Halloween is almost here and lots of people will go out trick or treating with their favorite costume resembling their own personal brand. What, personal brand?

Mike Michalowicz has written a great piece on how you are your brand and it’s worth a read. While his post touches on how you dress to represent your brand, he does touch on an important factor in branding.

Your brand experience doesn’t start with your product, it starts with you.

Your behavior determines your brand experience and everywhere you go you’re representing your brand, how you act is the perception you’ll create about your company.

Key Takeaway: Determine what expectations you want to set and act on them consistently because your brands starts with you.

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Steffan Antonas brought up a great Twitter topic today…Focus on providing value.

Value and social media go hand in hand, as a society we’ve never had it easier to be able to influence a community. Tools like Facebook and Twitter provide us with a one-to-many connection but the very things that make us human such as building relationships are put in second place in favor of this new found capability of broadcasting!

Guy Kawasaki says that whoever doesn’t care about his number of followers is lying, I don’t completely agree with this but ok that’s how most people work. As recent reports state, Twitter is a self-promoters paradise. 80% of our followers will end up being self-promoters!

Do all of these followers really care about you? Not really sure. Michael Jackson has millions of fans around the world and I bet you each and every one of them cares!

Of course we want to get traffic from our followers, but do you know what the #FF (follow friday) means? It means someone is recommending you because you’re useful, not because you’re self-promoting your 140 characters off!

Why not focus on getting a whole bunch of times on people’s #FF list and the upcoming Twitter lists? That’s a sing of influence!

I find it way more important to post useful stuff and promote others, we can be retweeted and added to #FF and that’s a signal of influence. If some of those followers end up clicking-through to our website to see what we’re all about and like it, then we’ve done our job. That means they’re listening and paying attention.

To take a page from Steffan’s post: If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, how many of your followers would follow you elsewhere? Or to put it more bluntly, if you were to disappear tomorrow who would care?

Here’s to some happy listening!

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What do you do to deal with bad feedback on Twitter? Do you quit?

You don’t!

Yesterday I got an email from one of our clients, The Jumpitz. Saying they wanted to stop tweeting because some of their followers said that they were tweeting way too much and that most of the tweets were irrelevant to them.

Ouch!

Ironically we had just advised them to create a Twitter account for each of their cast members so they could personally engage with their fans on Twitter and one of the cast members, Jake, was told by one of the fans about the issue.

As we diagnosed the problem we found the Alltop Kids feed pushing content to their Twitter account. We immediately shut if off and deleted all the irrelevant stuff that was posted to twitter.

Back to normal right? Wrong!

I personally suggested they not cut off Twitter communications as this would only make things worse because it would be the equivalent of disappearing off the internet. Engaging with your ecosystem is imperative right now.

You need to be actively participating in your community and sometimes there will be some problems, especially when you’re testing different approaches.

All in all they didn’t shut down the account but there are some lessons to be learned for sure.

Lessons learned

• Don’t put a random feed behind your Twitter account. It’ll be a firehouse of content you can’t control!
• Don’t Tweet about just anything. Ask yourself: Does it add value? Is it interesting to them?
• Don’t ignore the feedback. Ignoring it will only make it worse. Apologize and say what happened. Be transparent and genuine, this means your just as human as everyone else. Adjust and do things right.

In what other ways do you deal with bad feedback?

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Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

Interesting panel at Twittercon moderated by Guy Kawasaki. Here are some highlights with some of my thoughts:

Quality or quantity of followers.

There are differing views around this topic, but it’s important to understand everyone has a different strategy (if any). In my professional opinion I think what matters most is the actual relationship you build with a close few. In essence ‘pick your poison’. What I mean by this is that you pick your talkers and other talkers will emerge, if you can influence a certain number of your followers then they can influence their followers.

Because unless you’re well known like Guy Kawasaki your tweets will be lost in an endless sea of digital thoughts.

How to Tweet and what to tweet about.

This is an often asked question and it’s hard to put a concrete answers behind it but it all boils down to asking yourself: Does it add value? Is interesting to them?

When to Tweet.

How often should you tweet? My suggestion, as often as you have something interesting to say. Like I mentioned everyone has a different strategy, maybe you want to spend more time in conversation and less on sharing information, depending on this circumstance match your behavior.

A strategy that was mentioned is to schedule a Tweet multiple times in a day. This is interesting because if you have a large number of followers most of them are not online at the same time and thus gives you an opportunity to reach people at different intervals.

Tools: Hootie, Su.pr, Twitterfeed

What apps to use.

Among the apps mentioned were Tweetdeck, Twhirl, Tweetie (for iPhone), Co-Tweet and the web interface.

In what other ways do you use Twitter for branding?

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