Red Tape is Good?

"You need this?"

[tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”]

Perhaps one of the biggest irritants to any entrepreneur is the legal and technical red tape which larger companies can fly through, but which small business can easily trip over. It can slow your pace just seeing it up ahead. It can bring you to stop entirely and rethink everything you’d planned. It can even back you down if you succumb to the fear of what is entailed.

I learned recently how red tape can slow us down just enough to show us what we need to work on. It made me think how I sped through certain parts of a great plan and didn’t pay enough attention to crucial strategy areas. I got to the point of disillusionment, and then the next morning…I was sitting at my desk feeling grateful for the opportunity to save my idea. And I owed it all to the barriers that I had come up against by rethinking what I was trying to accomplish and how it would play out.

Red tape is scary for an entrepreneur who doesn’t have loads of capital on hand to throw at it. But red tape can actually cause us to rethink what we’re doing to the point of re-examining all the holes in our plans. It can actually show us how we’ve rushed over certain parts in our giddy excitement and neglected crucial legal, strategic and even ethical issues (which directly influence our brand down the line–and us, ourselves). In short, red tape is in reality like that person at the 8-K marker of the 10K race holding the water, asking you with a gesture “You need this?” Maybe you do need it for the last 2 K ahead before the finish line. An experienced runner might be tempted to think “It will only weaken my resolve, upset my body’s stride” but that stride may be in a very different condition 1 K down the line without a refresher in critical fluids to muscles that are nearly cashed.

We all need to refresh our outlook on what we’re doing from time to time. Red tape is, in the end, just a last ditch opportunity to do just that, before we go in too deep to back out. Red tape is…good?

Twitter for Business: 11 Guidelines

Swing your megaphone carefully.

[tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”] Twitter can be used for brand-monitoring, marketing, campaigns and PR functions within the social media sphere. Many businesses and other types of organizations already use Twitter as an easy first step into the social media community pool. Many are not, however, because of either a conflicting business model or simply due to an uncertainty about how to proceed. Often there is a fear of “getting it wrong”. For the more adventurous, the big temptation with Twitter is to jump headlong into campaign and promotional projects and “work out the kinks later”. This is a huge mistake for any company or organization with a reputation to care for. It’s best to slow down and experiment a while in a safe environment first before incorporating a “Tweeting” initiative within your organization’s communications.

Organizations should carefully select a Twitter rep from communications qualified individuals within communications and keep PR firmly in mind no matter what the exact purposing of the profile being used. Twitter is an extension of an overall communications strategy. Individual CEOs may have a Twitter account, and this speaks to the organization’s comprehension of Twitter’s social nature, but non-C-level employees should probably not be officially representing your organization. Don’t focus on ramping up followers and list subscribers like a superhero out of the gate.  Quality follows are everything, and software can’t teach you how to use it wisely.  Slow down for the good of yourself, company or cause. It’s worth it. You can always automate once you’ve learned who to follow and who not to, what to tweet, and what not to, and why.

In the end, there are no hard and fast rules. Being careful is the name of the game. Here are some basic guidelines for organizational Twitter communications:

1)      Choose your Twitter rep and profile info carefully from communications considerations—always keep PR firmly in mind, even if using Twitter for marketing. Only smaller outfits and can get away with being “extra-cheeky”, not IPOs, government agencies or NGOs.

2)      Experiment with every Twitter app you can for the good of your organization in a safe environment (like a test profile, connecting to test profiles on other sites and applications–all test profiles). If in doubt, always use a test profile, not the one you will use for your organization. In fact, avoid using the company name or other identifier. What if you flub up big time? You don’t want that reflecting back on the entire organization.

3)      Don’t spam fellow “tweeps” and followers with repeat tweets and sales-pitchy DMs. If you need to push something, be creatively unique in how you go about it. Don’t pitch your widget, converse about it. One way some pitch is to bracket the pitch with a joke or a winningly clever cautionary preface. Spamming via social media is an instant problem. Just don’t do it.

4)      Follow those who stand to support your brand or cause. Don’t follow political causes or religious institutions, for instance, with your corporate or government agency profile, and so on. Think with your PR cap on when you Tweet and follow / unfollow.

5)      Tweet in viral manner when possible by networking with partners and friends, but show restraint and discretion. 100 characters allows for multiple ReTweets (RTs). Remember, conversations about your brand or cause are kind of what it’s all about. Don’t be stiff. Respond to others who talk to you as a rule. Unless it’s Weird Frank…nobody talks back to Weird Frank…

6)      Be business-casual: nothing too raunchy, personal or political (unless you are a political cause), etc.

7)      Be discreet. Have your Twitter rep clear any tweets that are legally “iffy” before they go out. Train them to ask first. Give them guidelines on what to avoid tweeting about or who to avoid tweeting to. Also, remember to promptly go back and delete any iffy stuff that leaks through. Spelling is not always a deletion-worthy offense, but problematic messages are. Twitter’s own website allows deletion of your own tweets from your Twitter profile’s feed. The many sites and apps that republish those tweets after they have already gone viral…won’t.

8)      Use multiple profiles when representing multiple business units or departments. This keeps things focused. It also spread out the safety net in case somebody flubs on one of those profiles and you need to take action of some kind to correct the situation.

9)      For CRM via Twitter: Monitor your keywords thoroughly via Twitter apps AND via available social media and  blog search tools (like backtype and HootSuite, etc.). Always respond privately. When a resolution is complete, if your customer is impressed and tweets how you fixed the problem out loud, people will look on you more favorably than if you try to maneuver your customer into a corner (this can be fatal online—imagine the big company bullying the customer, okay that’s not going to play, obviously).

10) Don’t change your Twitter name around. Nail it down to what it should be well before you start courting followers. Why? Several reasons. One is consistency. You don’t want people unfollowing you because they don’t know your new name. You also risk trust in other ways. A changing profile name is often the tell-tale sign of a “sleeper”–a spammer who wanted to fool people into following him or her and then goes on a spamming spree out of the blue. And yet another reason has to do with SEO. Because your PageRank for your Twitter profile is an extension of your organization and your website(s) in many ways, tweets and profiles CAN impact your PageRank for your official website, way over there, as well as your Twitter profile, way over here, via the complex ways that inbound links are aggregated and in how they support the PageRank and rankings of any and all sites that you and your followers link to or re-tweet. And since PageRank (whether your profile on Twitter or your site receiving beneficial Twitter-originated links) doesn’t heal for many moons, it matters a good deal. If in doubt, starting a new Twitter profile can often be the better move, unless you already have lots of followers. You can change your Twitter name if you must, but it will probably zap your PageRank for many months (unless Google changes something in that department soon), so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

11) Use list-creation in a way that supports your organization. Many don’t create lists for the first 6 months of using their Twitter profile because they’re not sure what to create a list about. Some local businesses use lists to support local cultural stuff or to promote their partnering companies, support local emergency authorities, etc.. Some national organizations use them for listing need-to-know organizational contacts or store locations. Whatever the reason you use lists, just make sure you’re respecting the privacy of any individuals who may want to remain anonymous. Private consultants can use lists to show personal breadth of interests, but corporations, government agencies and other orgs should probably just keep it official and PR-friendly.

That’s it. Have questions? Just ask. If you’ve already tried some of these tips out, let me know how these worked for you (or didn’t).

[tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”]

–About the Author:

Mark Brimm is Digital Marketing Director for Interface Communications Group and SocialLabsMedia.com, as well as Founder of Marcana and co-author of AdWords University: The Complete Guide to AdWords. He is currently writing a forthcoming book on social media strategy.

How To Twingle With the Tweeple

[tweetmeme=”MarkBrimm”]
What’s twingling? It’s mingling on Twitter. Lots of people are tweeting on Twitter these days. And lots are NOT, even though they have an account. The reason? Stage fright, lack of a feeling for the medium, who knows.

It’s bad enough if you’re not an internet person, but many are downright intimidated by a social media platform like Twitter, where everything is instant–and who can blame them? Here’s a few tips that should get even the most bashful Twitterer up and throwing down tweets in no time…

Tweeting is supposed to be a way to network professionally one second and personally the next without batting an eye. Casual exchanges are what Twitter are all about. If you’re natural and off the cuff, people trust that you’re not reading from a script, which would make you a “bot” (a robot, or a program, usually selling insurance, porn…if you’ve ever been in a chat room or gotten spam emails, surely you get what I’m saying here). Tweet as if your grandmother or boss might read it, but with enough of the real you that you could make people laugh and get a feeling for the real you just from reading your updates.

Next, you’ll want to avoid repeating yourself. This is crucial if you have something to promote. It’s okay to promote your junk several times a week, but a daily grind of that, as Chris Brogan has said elsewhere, makes you “that guy” and you don’t want to be “that guy”, right? To avoid overkill, restrict yourself to a few tweets a week that blatantly promote your stuff, unless you can tie it into a blog post that has value other than just to sell something. And try to avoid copying and pasting a previous tweet…you need to be original in each tweet. Forget about the possible SEO implications in spamming people repeatedly with the same exact message and accompanying product link, think of your followers. You’re building trust, remember? Trust on Twitter means likable and (hopefully) a source on your topic that’s worth hearing.

This next bit is for businesses. Listen to me carefully: …give stuff away.

That’s right. Twitter is the place to give it away…now! Before someone else beats you to it. It can be anything from blog posts to PDF reports and ebooks to discounts on what you sell, freebies, contests, branded t-shirts and coffee mugs–whatever you think makes sense to walk someone down the purchasing aisle. But keep it real. Even if you’re doing business on Twitter, it should be fun and natural, like an in-person interaction.Since you’re now on your business soapbox, use hashtags or goodness sake! ( example: #CelticsTickets ) Hashtags are a way of notifying Twitter applications that someone is talking about that thing you want to promote, and directs them there. This can work for topics and whatever. It needn’t be business-related, and probably shouldn’t be as a rule, just to avoid being “that guy“.

The thing about social media is that its social, first and foremost. Mingle, add the people you connect well with (don’t bother to ask them first), network, joke, but you may want to keep it PG-13 if you’re smart. You never know who’s watching.

Once you get your legs, you may want to use monitoring tools like HootSuite to help you monitor not only who’s talking to you, but who’s saying what about you or your brand. Respond immediately and directly and try to keep your customers or prospects (or friends) engaged and happy with your company/you. The flip side of this is to prevent PR flubs that could really cost a big company lots of headaches! Friend-wise, the stakes might also be high if people are using twitter to connect family or friends and you’re in the clan.

People who more or less follow these guidelines will naturally get more followers, even without all the software or careful monitoring of their following tactics (which are all perfectly well and good and reasonable). Once you have the hang of it, check out my article on how to go in depth by master some wise tweeting habits.

Still here? Get out there and twingle, cowboy! [tweetmeme=”MarkBrimm”]