Posts from — November 2009

Aaah Thanksgiving. The non religious based holiday where Americans do what they do best… eat.

It’s a time of seeing family, and celebrating what we have and how far we’ve come while remembering where we once stood as a nation. It’s a rather fun holiday and one of my favorites. I love getting together with family and having a big meal and seeing everyone. Though there is one tradition I have always hated. Going around the table and saying what we’re all thankful for. Hate it.

I come from a rather large family and often the food would lose it’s piping hot temperature before we finished getting around the table, past the uncles, around the grandparents, and back to dad who started the whole thing.

My family is in another state far far away and right now I’m eating a bowl of vanilla almond Special K, which is not a temperature sensitive meal, so I feel that now is the perfect time to shove this tradition kicking and screaming out onto the Internet.

1. This blog – It gives me an outlet for all the ideas that come swirling through my head and a place to read your thoughts as well.

2. Twitter - What kind of social media geek would I be without being thankful for the 140 character communication powerhouse? I have met so many awesome people

3. Facebook - I have met, communicated, worked with, and received clients from the Facebook articles I’ve written. It also provides a good source of relaxation with it’s online poker.

4. The G1 – I love this phone so much it almost brings me to tears. Thanks to it I can never go back to a “regular” phone again and will finish Hound of the Baskervilles by New Years.

5. TweetDeck – This is by far my favorite way to use Twitter. Being able to split up columns and follow groups has been invaluable over the last year.

6. YouTube – A never ending stream of entertainment and information. I never get tired of all the great content that can be found here. Whether it’s getting an English lesson or watching parents scare the crap out of their kids, it’s almost always a good time.

7. Disqus – I really do love this comment engine.

8. Amazon – Holy crap the ultimate solution my shopping needs. Books & music all rolled into one!

9. HP Netbook – The ultimate in portability and usability. I freaking love this thing.

10. You – Without the Internet we would probably never have the chance to meet and you would never have read this post.

What about you? What are the 5, 10, or 20 Internet related things you’re thankful for? If you create a post about out, link back here so it will show up in the track backs or put it in the comments.

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

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The awareness campaign seems to be exactly what social media was made for. An awareness campaign (social media or not) is used to increase the awareness of certain products or the brand itself. This is often used by established companies (like Chevy with their eco campaign, or the GAP ) to keep themselves fresh in peoples minds and assist with their ongoing bid to stay relevant in the current culture.

Front of mind is great for sales, but front of mind with a real personality, trust based relationship, and interaction is even better. One of the major advantages of social media is being able to find and target the exact people you’re looking for. The second big advantage is in the social aspect, people share info, products, and more with their friends and family, so having a good presence online will help increase your visibility.

Before you start a Social Media Awareness Campaign

Listen and then… Set. Your. Goals.

What do you want to do? Increase conversations about your brand, change the current online sentiment of your brand? Want people to talk about your brand at all? What ever level of awareness you’re trying to achieve social media is a powerful tool for that.

Setting up your listening posts and building a solid foundation can be done for free to cheap (on the software side) using tools like Google Reader, Google Alerts, Yahoo Pipes, etc. This will get you a rough idea of what you’re looking at. If you’re still craving more info and don’t want to create an action plan yet then you can look at some of the paid tools like BuzzGain, Techrigy or Radian6. Some of which not only compile online info about your company, but do sentiment analysis as well.

Setting up a Social Media Awareness Campaign

When it comes to setting up the campaign it goes back to your goals and what you discovered while listening. The platforms you need to be on will become very clear once you start listening and looking for your niche and conversations surrounding it. However, to start with we’re going to hit the big three to give some examples and ideas.

Remember the goal is awareness and the name of the game is engagement, so having the personality of yourself or your company shine through is key. You want your communications to be genuine and the value of what you’re bringing to the table to be very apparent.

Twitter – Without a doubt search is the most powerful feature on Twitter to date. Use the search to find people talking about your company, product, or niche. You can also use twitter based directories like twellow, wefollow, etc to find people who fall into the same categories as you. After you’ve found these people join their conversations. Meet them on their level.

In your conversations work your brand in when it’s appropriate, field questions, and build the reputation of you and your product. Twitter is also a great tool for doing giveaways and giving out special discounts. Create offers and tactics that lower the barrier of entry for people to try your product. If you send a free sample, then follow up with the person. If you hand out discounts follow feedback from the purchases.

Building the awareness of you and your product on Twitter is just as much about building up your own brand and reputation on the site as it is the product. People will come to know the product through you and vice versa. Remember Twitter is basically a giant word of mouth engine and your goal is to get people talking and then to keep them talking.

Facebook – Your greatest asset here is going to be your Fan Page. From it you can run contests to get people interested in you and then get them to share that interest with their friends via their walls. One of the best looking awareness fan pages is done by the Crayola. They have plenty of interactive ways to connect and communicate with them on their tabs and fun things for people to do with their kids.

With FaceBook you will want to befriend your fans on your profile (if done for your personal business & not a corporate one) and when you add them create a group that is just for your fans so you can easily look at just their updates and interact with your fans. This will also help you gain some extra insight into what your fans like and talk about as you get to know them.

You shouldn’t stop at just your fan page and profile though. Check out other fan pages and groups that are based in your niche and have some bearing on you or your company. Join these conversations and add value to the communities. This will also help you gain more fans as people get to know you.

Blog – You can help create interest and awareness by having good content that people want to share. As you continue to build up your reputation and build up your network in these different communities you will figure out how to get your blog in front of them. Work on building outposts for your content on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious to help get more exposure for it.

As you build your readership be sure to cover the types of information they want to see. From time to time ask them and look in the comments to see what’s being brought up. Building a blog readership is a long slow process but you can do it by creating good, informative content that people want to share about not just your products, but your niche in general. Become a source of industry news and information.

Managing a Social Media Awareness Campaign

Managing is going to come down to who you have running it and why. Did you contract out the work? If so make sure you’re holding WEEKLY meetings with them to make sure you’re both on the same page (20 min should cover it). If it’s internal then make sure that you’re in contact with them at all times and that they are representing your brand properly at all times.

When it comes down to you (or even anyone else for that matter) time is going to be the thing you need to monitor the most. You will need to be constantly building and typically the more time you spend the more you’ll get out of it. If you’re going to be handling the interactions then remember that integration into your daily routines will always be key.

By building solid relationships and connections with people who care about what you have to say each new product launch, update, etc. will get a little bit easier and you’ll see better results each time. Manage your time, your profiles, and the conversations you’re a part of. Measuring will help you decide if they are worth while to help optimize your efforts.

Monitoring a Social Media Awareness Campaign

Impact, impact, impact! When it comes to awareness you will want to monitor the impact your efforts are having. A lot of how you will measure will depend on what listening tools you’re using so I’ll cover some of the basics and also go over what to look for.

Low end “free” listening tools – Most of the results of these will be delivered to you via either RSS or email. Either way you will be able to see based on the volume if the conversations about you are going up or down. It will help you judge what’s happening with the volume of conversations. The sentiment results will have to be discerned manually.

Mid ground – Here you’re going to be able to compare the previous months results to this months and the next and so on. Many of these have graphs that you can setup and monitor what’s going on. This is going to help you build your ongoing plans as it will be easy to see where you have been and plan for where you’re going.

High level – These tools will do everything except make you coffee and you’ll be able to get a very complete picture of what’s happening. This clear picture will help you shape the next phase of your plan or create a course of action to keep you heading in the right direction.

Make sure that you have Google Analytics or some other web analytics tool running so that you will be able to monitor the traffic coming in and where it’s coming from. This will help you determine which platforms are working best, which ones need some work, and which ones need to be ditched all together. Knowing which ones are working and which ones aren’t will also help you analyze your interactions between the ones that work and the ones that don’t.

You’ll be able to look at how you’re interacting on one platform vs another. Are they different or are they the same? If they are different then look at the successful one and apply the tactics to the unsuccessful one. If they are the same then look at how you might need to adjust one of them to go a different route. The ability to monitor, measure, and analyze what’s going on is one of the powerplays of social media vs traditional media and the more you do it, the more you will be able to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Remember, social media is about the long haul and building for the future

What do you think? Any questions or comments?

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

This is post #2 in a 5 part series about the basic types of marketing campaigns and social media’s place in them.
1. Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition

image by Johan V

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ink shorteners are very prevalent in today’s online communities. They take big links like this: http://www.target.com/s/175-8025086-0539863?_encoding=UTF8&CPNG=Baby&LID=11478237&search-alias=tgt-index&keywords=argyle_sweater%5Fshirt&searchSize=30&ref=tgt%5Fad
v%5FXSGT0004&searchView=grid5&searchNodeID=1038576&AFID=
Google&searchPage=1&searchRank=target104545&LNM=argyle%5F
sweater%5Fshirt and turn them into smaller links like this: http://bit.ly/60KcN (I like the black and gray ones btw). This is incredibly useful when using messaging systems with limited space or characters like Twitter or Facebook status updates.

Right now you might see some of my tweets and updates that have links that look like this: http://go.shuaism.com/y8bd. This works as a subtle promotion tool for my blog and hopefully helps build value through everything I share (including my own content).

There are several ways to build your own link shortener, but the easiest one I’ve found so far is to use Adjix. They have a feature in the options to create your own using your domain. It’s really simple to do.

1. Sign up for a free Adjix account.
2. Determine what domain prefix you want to use (go. link. etc) and enter it into your profile
3. Set the proper Cname with your domain host and point it to partner.adjix.com
4. Wait 24-48 hours for the dns to update everywhere
5. Start sharing links using your custom link shortener

The reason I went with Adjix is because of it’s ability to quickly and easily pre-schedule links to be tweeted out. Often times I do my blog reading in a block and I find a lot of good content I want to share, but I don’t want to overwhelm my followers with a huge blast of links. Adjix allows me to schedule them out a bit so they get spread out over the day and also provides some rudimentary stats.

The Data
When getting this setup I was wondering how it would stack up against other link shorteners I’ve used and so I used bit.ly and cli.gs for a while and compared the clicks I got on the links during this time vs my own domain shortener. For data purposes I kept the amount of links used the same (35) and tallied up the results and divided to get the average. The results actually surprised me quite a bit. 

Cli.gs = 23
Bit.ly = 28
Adjix = 53

I guess using my own shortener isn’t such a bad idea when it comes to raw clicks. However when it comes to ReTweets I’ve discovered that most people reshrink the links from my own and send the link back out. Retweets with my personal link shortener are much more rare than when I used bit.ly or cli.gs.

 Cli.gs = 13/35
Bit.ly = 23/35
Adjix = 10/35 

So now the question is which is going to have more power since we all know people will RT something and then others will change the links to their own and so we lose the total train of data at that point. Do you find the amount of RT’s more important or do you find the amount of clicks from your initial tweet / update more important?

What do you think in RT vs Click? Do you know of any other simple ways to build your own link shortener?

Thanks for reading.
Josh “Shua” Peters

image by existentist

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Lead generation and acquisition is one of the four main types of marketing campaigns and yes, social media can be used in it. Actually, it can be used quite effectively so long as you have all of your other ducks in a row first. Which if you need help with there are resources that can help you with that. There will be more on that in a bit. First let’s talk about what this very important type of campaign is.

A Lead generation and acquisition is any campaigns used to gather information (like email addresses, profiles, mailing addresses, etc) with the goal of getting a list of people who are likely to buy from you. This type of campaign is usually measured by ROI to determine if what you’re doing is working, because if you’re spending more money than you’re bringing in, then you have a problem. This is also going to be covered a few paragraphs down the page. 

Before you start using Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
If you already have some lead generation strategies and tactics in use then go over them with a fine tooth comb and make sure they are easy to go through and don’t require too many hurdles. Assess what you want people to sign up for, and what ways they can get there. If you’re going to be sending people directly to your site make sure you have some targeted landing pages setup for your various types of leads.

Make sure you have your marketing funnels in place and that you are familiar with where people go at each step so you can send people there directly. You don’t want to send someone to step 1 if they are already at step 3. This will help keep your fall out numbers as low as possible.

If needed diagram out your current processes and look at the ways you can get people to the various parts. This is how you create your plan for inserting them and gathering the leads. Spending lots of time here and effort here can keep you from wasting a lot of your time and your potential customers time later on.

Setting up Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
If your company is already involved in social media then you should have your listening strategies and tactics in place so you know where your customers are and what they talk about. If not, now would be a good time to start. This will help you setup your social media lead generation.

Excluding the millions of forums, niche networks, and sites that your customers could be hanging out on there are 2 “de facto” sites that are very quickly emerging as the two you “need” to be a part of and one platform you should have. You see them on tv commercials, in ads, and part of more and more campaigns. They are Twitter an Facebook. These two have risen above and so I’m going to talk about them briefly.*

Twitter – This is where you need to be aware of what you’re monitoring and how it relates to your other lead generation tactics. If you’re looking for people to sign up for your newsletter, fill out a contact form on your site, etc. you need to be a part of their conversation when they have a problem and position yourself as part of the solution.

If you have more than one way you currently collect leads then evaluate what would work best for them and help direct them there first mentally with your conversation, then physically by sending them a link to where they can get more info, etc. This right here is why it’s so important to have your site and methods in order first, because once they leave Twitter it’s up to your site to make the final conversion.

Facebook- Setup your fan page and then populate it using your existing friends, family, and clients. If they are on Facebook you want them to be your fan. Here you can setup custom fbml tabs where you can have someone with web design skills create a beautiful info page that will lead people to your site where you can collect their info, or embed a form to do it right there on the page. A good example of good looking fbml tabs is The Gap (Born To Fit, Jeans, and Born to Share tabs).

There is also a great new Facebook app by JD Supra Docs called Email Signupthat collects people’s email addresses for your newsletter. By bringing people to your Facebook page and having good content and activity to make them excited, you can use this app to get them to subscribe. You can also use contests using apps like wildfire to help you gain leads, just make sure what you’re giving away is related to your company / niche so you can find qualified leads.

Blog – Dynamic content is a good way to keep bringing people to your site. Having relevant, good quality content is key to building your posts to be used in your lead generation. A simple strategy is to address the problem that your company solves, give some basic advice and an action step that people can use right away.

Offer to help if they need it, build links to your sales pages in the post and end with a call to action if they need your services. The better the info, the more you give, the more we will trust you. Also, be sure to have a sign up for more info, subscribe to your newsletter, etc. on the blog in a prominent place and draw attention to it.

Another tactic is to create something of value (ebook, white paper, etc.) that you can give away on the site in exchange for them signing up for your newsletter. This will help add value, and get people motivated to sign up for another good method of lead generation or even just help build trust, which is on it’s own a great thing to build because we like doing business with people we trust.

Managing Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
The best way to manage any social media is to find ways to integrate the activities into your daily activities. Once you get acclimated to the tools and their use then you can look at how you can bracket out time or how to use the tools more effectively. You don’t need to be in it all the time, just figure out what works for you.

Alternatively you can get savvy people to help you run it. It’s best place to find people who are passionate about your brand, best resource for this is often within your own company. Finding the ones who have the basic skills to communicate effectively and build quality, related content as well. If you’re lacking the savvy aspect, but have passion in droves then you’d want to look at calling in a good consultant or trainer to get your team up to speed.

Monitoring and ROI Social Media for Lead Generation and Acquisition
Figuring out how much time you spend on these efforts and the conversion rates is how you will be able to figure out if these tools are productive for your lead generation. On your site you should have some kind of tracking setup like Google Analytics or Omniture. Setup a campaign and watch the traffic coming from Twitter, Facebook, etc. Watch the conversion rates to know how many people signed up or gave you their contact info.

Once you know what that number / rate is you can then determine how useful the tools you’re using are for lead generation so long as you know what each lead is worth to you. Based on your other efforts you should already know that if each customer who signs up for your newsletter, etc is worth a certain amount. For this example lets say you know that based on your previous efforts each lead is worth $10 because that’s the average revenue generated from your newsletters.

ROI = money generated – investment / investment

So for this example lets say that 60 new leads were generated, each lead is worth $10, you spent 15 hours getting them and your time is worth $30/hr.

ROI = ($10 * 60) – (15 * $30) / (15 * $30)
ROI = $600 – $450 / $450
ROI = $150 / $450
ROI = 33%

 So in this example it’s been mildly successful.

 Two things to keep in mind. 

1. Don’t forget to add any money you might have saved when comparing it to anyof your previous or current methods. If you spend less time but get equal or even just slightly less results than other methods you’ll be saving money on man hours as well.

 2. As you get more and more used to the tools, the processes, and get better at using them the amount of time you spend using them for that specific purpose might go down just because you’re using them more effectively. Or, your time may stay the same, but your conversion rate might be better because you’re using them more efficiently. That’s why it’s important to monitor, to see what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve.

 Do you have any tips or stories to share about using social media in a lead generation / Acquisition campaign? If you do, please share it and any other thoughts you have on this below.

 Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

*The best social media plan is always tool agnostic, but I needed tools to give examples.

This is post #1 in a 5 part series about the basic types of marketing campaigns and social media’s place in them.

Image by Jessica Flavin

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I’m putting on a social media workshop December 9-10th at the Beta Loft in Salt Lake City, UT and I’d love to see you there. In fact I’d love to see you there so much that to readers of this blog I’m going to give you $100 off if you use this code smacsmw09 at the checkout, and as of writing this there are only 9 seats left so beg your boss to send you if they can.

The workshop is 2 days straight from 9am – 6pm and we will cover basics and get into some of the more advanced thinking and methods of social media. For a full outline check out the social media workshop link, but we will be covering social media and communications, pr, marketing, for your business, inside a business and more.

You will need to bring your laptop because we will be doing this stuff from beginning to end. My goal is to fill your brain with actionable knowledge and tactics that you can take back with you to your company or personal use. You will also get a signed copy of my book just for showing up.

Thank you for reading, hope to see you there.
Josh “Shua” Peters

The image by Randy Son of Robert has nothing to do with this post, I just really like it and wanted to get your attention

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You would think that with the national coverage of such follies as The Jaguar Post-It story other large brands would pay attention and learn from the mistakes of their corporate cohorts. Such does not appear to be the case when it comes to Toyota. I wrote an article for the Denver Egotist that looks at Toyota’s recent folly in one light, but I’d like to address it in a different one here.

The Story
Before we talk about some of the underlying issues of what went wrong I’ll give you some back story on this. Last Tuesday freelance photographer Michael Calanan was told by a friend that one of his photos were being used in a new Toyota 4runner campaign. The real rub of it is that Michael (and all the other artists involved) had no idea their images were being used.

Toyota apologized via Twitter to Calanan and 2 other artists, and they even made a formal statement about it in the Flickr help forum. They have removed the images from both of their 4Runner sites however, they still have not contacted the artists as promised. At the end of this post I’ll have a list of blog posts from some of the artists involved so you can get their perspectives as well.

Responsibility
Ok here’s the deal, it doesn’t matter who made the site because when you and I look at it all we see is Toyota. That doesn’t absolve them from what was done, but ultimately it’s up to Toyota to make sure the people they do business with are doing it ethically.

Both parties had an obligation here to ensure that the artists were talked to about this. They had a very nice concept, but the execution was poor. When getting involved, if you’re not 1000% sure on something ask someone who knows. A small consultation fee is worth it when avoiding the backlash from poor execution of this manner.

However if you do make a mistake own up to it and then take action. Toyota did great at owning up to it, but that’s where it stopped. Which brings us to the next lesson.

Sincerity
If you’re going to be seen as a company who truly cares then your apologies need to be followed up with sincere action. Right now it just looks like Toyota is only interested in saving their own skin and that’s it. It’s been almost 3 days since the whole thing came to light and they still haven’t talked to the artists.

Everyone screws up. We’re all human and corporations are made up of humans so it’s safe to say they will screw up. The real source of strength in that event is how you deal with it. If you make some half-hearted remarks to save face but do nothing to make amends you have failed. We are humans just like you and we expect to be treated with respect and sincerity just like you do.

Think of others
This is a simple lesson that we all should have learned as kids. When doing something that uses other people’s content you should ask yourself “do they even want it used?” What if some of the bloggers and photogs hated Toyota? Wanted nothing at all to do with them and now their work is on Toyota’s site.

We all have our own thoughts, feelings, and views based on the experiences we’ve had in our life. That needs to be respected and you can’t jump into the online culture these days with a “me me me” mentality.

Planning
To me it doesn’t look like there was much planning on the side of Toyota when setting up the social media column on their site. The execution of it all just reeks of “look what I can do”. If they had planned it all out then this post wouldn’t be written and people wouldn’t be pissed off.

Part of planning for this should have been “how do we get people to look at our expensive new site?” and one of those answers should have been “lets reach out to the people in our social media column”. Most people would be thrilled to have their work used by a major brand even just for the exposure it would bring and it eliminates the shock of finding out your stuff was used and you didn’t even know.

Importance of a Reaction Strategy
The online world today has changed dramatically and is in a constant state of evolution. This is why you need to be prepared for the worst. If Toyota had a reaction strategy for bad online press this would have been done and over with on day one. They would have known who needed to do what and how to do it.

Right now I can only imagine that their silence stems from one of two things. Lack of sincerity or panic because they don’t know what to do. Even if you have a true lack of sincerity you could at least try and make things suck less for yourself by having a solid plan behind how to react to situations like this.

Education
Like i said above, the Internet is evolving faster and faster and if you’re going to survive and avoid things like this you need to keep on top of it. If you don’t have time to deal with it or don’t want to then I’ll say it again HIRE SOMEON WHO WILL. What you will pay them in consulting fees or as a salary will be well worth it every time they help you avoid disaster and build your brand in a positive way.

Communication
Social media, hell the entire Internet is based on communication of some sort. Someone dropped the ball somewhere and left communication out of the process. Whether it was Toyota not communicating with the artists or Toyota not communicating with their agency to make sure it was done right doesn’t matter at this point. What matter is they didn’t communicate and it’s costing them.

Bottom line there is no excuse for what happened. Several images were copyrighted, some were “All Rights Reserved” and others were “protected” under the Flickr TOS. Until people realize that this isn’t the old west and playing fast and loose doesn’t cut it anymore we’re going to see more and more examples like this popping up.

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua”Peters

Related Posts by other people:
Artists
Michael Calanan: Found my photo used without permission
Dmourati: Oh What a feeling
Snorri Gunnarson: Toyota stealing photos of Flickr

Others
Photo District News: Toyota Apologizes For Using Flickr Photos In SUV Ad
Brands Anatomy: The bigger the brand the bigger the blunder
Cnet: Getty and Flickr deepen photo-license ties
The Denver Egotist: Toyota Shamefully “Borrows” Image from Local Denver Photographer

Gallaries of the “borrowed” images
Toyota, oh What a stealing! 1
Toyota, oh What a stealing! 2
Toyota, oh What a stealing! 3

Update: The agency of record in this case is Saatchi & Saatchi, other posts point to them as the culprit, and their site lists Toyota as a current client. I called them, left a message with the Toyota rep but haven’t heard back so I removed them as the “official” agency until I hear back from them.

Update: I talked to Erin Poole, the PR manager for Saatchi & Saatchi and she did acknowledge that they worked on the campaign and that they were in the process of making things right. I applaud them for that and I’ll be doing a follow up piece about it.

Update: It looks like Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi were very serious about making amends. I talked to some of the artists and they received a stipend of around $500  for the use of their image and an offer to keep using it on the site. Kudos to Erin Poole and the folks at Toyota for taking action and working with the community and not against it.

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This nitty gritty details of PPC (pay per click) and Twitter post is brought to you by yesterdays post What do PPC (pay per click) and Twitter have in common? Everything! After making it’s rounds on Twitter I received several DM’s asking for more info and a deeper explanation, so here we go.

Keywords
Keywords are the backbone of a PPC campaign. If you don’t have your keywords list ready you won’t know what you want to bid on and you won’t be able to write your ads and so you won’t have a PPC campaign. It’s really that simple. When it comes to Twitter and using it’s search feature you’re going to be searching for keywords.

Lets stay with the bird theme I started yesterday (it is Twitter after all) and say you run a store that sells bird supplies online. A very simple keyword list you might be using for a PPC campaign might look like this:

• Bird Cage
• Bird Feeder
• Bird House
• Bird Food
• Bird books

Depending on how in depth you want to go and competitive the field is you might have a list that spans dozens or even hundreds of keywords you bid on, but for the sake of simplicity lets just say these 5 are your main ones that cover the largest portion of your business.

If people are looking for it on Google, chances are they’re also talking about it on Twitter. What you want to do is take your keywords, do some searches, and then get the RSS feed of that search sent to your Google Reader or feed reader of your choice. If you’re not using an RSS reader use Google’s, it will make your life easier.

Here’s an example using our keyword Bird Books

It’s not anyone looking to buy a bird book, but there were people talking about a really cool bird book that seems to have recently come out (it actually is an incredibly awesome site: The Bird Book). If you have anything that compares in your shop to what’s being talked about bring it up, or simply join the conversation and make some new friends.

Once you have your lists setup and they’re being delivered your RSS reader then you can setup a schedule to look through them. When you do this think of them as leads, they’re people who could possibly be interested in what you’re offering so screen the results as they come and look for good, qualified leads of people looking for what you’re selling.

Optimizing
Optimization is a big part of a PPC campaign, you look at what words and ads are performing, which ones aren’t and you try out alternative copy inject holiday relevant terms with your other keywords, etc. If a keyword or an ad isn’t performing and it’s just not getting the kind of conversion or traffic you want then you cut it. Same with Twitter keyword searches.

Using the Advanced search option (to the right of the search box) you can create more detailed searches and optimize what you’re looking for as you hone your feeds and figure out what’s working and what’s not. Right now I have a list of 25 search feeds delivered to my RSS reader that I work with and optimize as needed and check 1 – 2 times a day.

It will take time and some work will need to be done with it, but  it will help you connect to the right people and help you find the right kind of leads. Keywords and searching is where the power of Twitter comes from, use some of the efforts you’ve already put in place through other marketing methods and start integrating everywhere you can, in the end it will make things easier to manage.

Thank you for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

P.S. How was that? Better? Did it help clarify? Are there any other questions you have about this idea? If you do, please put them in the comments.

image by Oddsock

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What do PPC (pay per click) and Twitter have in common? Well the short answer is everything when it comes down to the core of it. The most powerful feature of Twitter (and one of the major factors in it taking off) is the ability to search for keywords or terms. PPC ads are often based on search terms (keywords) you bid on, as in the case of the ones we see on Google everyday.

If you or your company is running a PPC campaign then you should have a list of keywords you’re bidding on and have a core set that are the most valuable to you. You should also know which keywords have the best conversion and which ones are costing you the most per click.  These keywords should be translating directly into your Twitter searches.

By using the same keywords on both mediums you’re going to be able to hit more people who are interested in and talking about the keywords you’re interested in targeting. The big difference is on Twitter you have the ability to make a connection with the person and make it a more personal experience than a PPC ad.

Social media integration doesn’t just stop at making sure your Twitter and FaceBook profiles are listed on your companies site it involves making sure that all of your other marketing enhances your social media efforts and vice versa. It’s about looking at everything you have available and seeing how they can best fit together.

What do you think? Any other “basic” internet marketing tactics that could easily help with your  social media use?

Thanks for reading,
Josh “Shua” Peters

UPDATE:
I’ve had a few discussions on Twitter with people (mostly via DM or I’d post it up here) about this article and they felt I missed out on a few points or that I didn’t give enough info to use the word everything. Sometimes when you get so used to working and playing in the field you forget that not everyone draws the same parallels immediately because it’s not something they mess around with everyday.

Someone felt as though I was “speaking above them” and felt I did a horrible job of explaining to people trying to learn. I apologize sincerely for this and hope no one was seriously off put by this.

To make up for this I’m going to add a few more points and give a few tips for managing this in a post I’ll put up tomorrow. I have work I need to finish right now, but I will burn the midnight oil to get a companion piece up for you who want a little more info and I’ll do better next time, I promise… fair enough?

Josh “Shua” Peters

image by Koshyk

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