Brian Basilico: Follow You … Will You Follow Me and Changing of the Guard

Tweet Me – Tweet You

Recently, I attended my biweekly Congregational Church of Batavia networking meeting and listened to an awesome speech by Eric Michelson (a friend and partner in biz) who runs another group called Fox Valley Computing Professionals. His speech was on Twitter. People loved it, but were darting out at the end because there was another seminar that they were late for on how to use Twitter. All this buzz about social networking leaves people wanting more. Most of the speeches I hear are about how to do it, why you need to do it, why everybody else is doing it, but rarely do I hear how to make it work for you! One of the replies to my earlier post on Facebook was a request to do something on Twitter.

It’s fairly simple to understand how to use Twitter. You go to twitter.com, you create an account, you find your friends, you follow them, you ask them to follow you, and then you start posting tweets. This video will give you a broad brush overview of what Twitter is and how to use it.

Even though it started out as a way to stay in touch with your friends, every day people are finding new uses for Twitter. One biggie is news. The day that Michael Jackson died, I jumped on Twitter and there were over 1,500 tweets per minute. Almost every major and minor newspaper posts links to their news stories via twitter to drive you back to their website. That’s one way that people use it as they search for topics that they’re interested in and it will show you all the most recent tweets on that subject. So if you want to find out the latest on the iPhone, search for it and you will see hundreds of tweets a minute.

One of the biggest challenges is knowing what to say, what not to say, and when to say it. One of the biggest turnoffs in any social marketing circle is the repetitive commercial for… “I have the best thing in the world and you need to check out my website now.” Another pet peeve is people who constantly post quizzes or games that they’re playing, or posting 5-10+ messages in a row. It’s about having a quality relevant message that people want to hear or are interested in.

Businesses are finding Twitter a unique way to market themselves, but it takes a few things to really make that successful. First and foremost, people have to be following you in order to get your message. If only your friends are following you and none of them are interested in what you sell, then you’re talking to the wrong audience. But there are some innovative ways to get people interested in what you do and what you have the sell. For example I often post about playing golf, and whenever I do that, I get a bunch of follower requests that are either interested in golf or selling a product or service associated with golf.

There are bunches of cool tools like TweetDeck and websites that can help you find and monitor people that will be interested in what you’re selling.

The other key component in any social networking for business is creating a plan, and then having the time to execute that plan. I spend upwards of four hours a day on social networking just for my business so I can communicate, learn, and have some fun. I am in the process of creating a service that will do all of the above for small businesses… create a marketing plan, find people who need to follow you and entice them to do so, and then post information that will garner you the desired result.

Changing of the Guard

One of the hardest things about being a geek is keeping up with all the technology and trends, and figuring out which ones are relevant and which are simply fads. One specific trend is the slow but certain death of the desktop computer. Laptops, and now the new NetBooks, are quickly outpacing desktop sales. Another piece in the puzzle is smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre. People are finding it less and less important to be tethered to any computer when they carry around a mini computer in their pocket. And these things are just getting cooler by the day. As a matter of fact. I often use my iPhone to use Twitter and Facebook or read updates!

Last week I downloaded free software from GolfLogix that turns my iPhone into a fully functioning golf GPS system. While standing at the first tee I could see that the first bunker was 185 to the left, the water was 215 to the right, and it would take 363 yards to drive the green. That’s just nuts … not so much that I had all that information in my hand, but the fact I didn’t have to drop $200-$500 to purchase a standalone GPS. By simply downloading an app, I can pretty much do anything one of those GPS’s could do (It does cost $40 a year to download courses but the stand-alone ones charge $30 a year – so it will take 40 years to make that a bad deal!).

It’s just incredibly convenient having an iPhone that when I’m in business mode… I can answer e-mails, surf the web, and answer phone calls. When I’m in musician mode… I can tune my guitar, pull-up songs on iTunes with lyrics and more. When I am in golf mode… I can search for a course, book the tee time, track my score, and check distances for any shot on the course.