Crush It! (6 page)

Though your fan page should always stay on a business-oriented message, some people use their personal profile pages to talk about their business, too. That’s entirely up to you and your DNA. What you do with Facebook (and Twitter, which we’ll talk about
next) should be an absolute reflection of how you live in your daily life. Experienced businesspeople already know that most networking and brand building is done in casual environments—at the ball game, at a picnic, while untangling the dogs when they cross leashes. If you talk shop at every cocktail party, strike up conversations with seatmates on airplanes, or hand your card out at your cousin’s wedding, then your personal profile should also update everyone who comes to you about what’s going on with your business. It’s just an extension of everyday life. You should occasionally mix things up, though, and let people in so they get a feel for your personality. It’s totally possible to include a healthy mix of updates, like “I love scrapple for breakfast,” with “Just sold my millionth unit,” or “In two hours I’m hosting an online seminar on interactive media. Who’s in?” The most important thing to remember is to be authentic, to be yourself. That authenticity is what will give you your greatest chance of success.

There are privacy settings on Facebook that allow you to compartmentalize groups of contacts and friends so that some can only see certain parts of your Facebook page, like the information page where you might put your professional history, and not others, like your status updates where you might mention you’re hungover. I’d love for you to ignore privacy settings because I don’t think it’s useful to place restrictions on your brand, but if it makes you uncomfortable to expose yourself to the world that much, go ahead and use the filter. There is an inherent business cost, but business costs should never trump personal costs.

twitter

By the time you read this, Twitter will have become a main verb—people will tweet just like everyone googles and xeroxes. Like Facebook, you use Twitter to put out content, albeit bite-sized—140 characters, max—and to follow other people’s bite-sized content.

Some people react to Twitter with disbelief. “Who the heck wants to know that I’m on my way to get a pedicure, or that I’m thinking fish sticks for dinner?” But the day I saw it I knew I was staring at the pulse of society; it was the most game-changing website I’d ever seen prior to Facebook. You think people are confused by it now? You should have seen people scratching their heads over it in 2007 when I first started using and talking about it. Here’s what I know: many people do want to know all the details about what you’re doing and thinking, they just don’t want to admit it. We’ve all got our voyeuristic tendencies; Twitter has just given us permission to cave in to them. But the fact that you can share your dinner preferences with thousands of people instantaneously is not even in the top five reasons Twitter is perhaps the most powerful brand-building tool in your toolbox.

First, it has incredible endorsement power. When someone re-tweets what you say, they’re saying you’re smart and worth paying attention to. That comes with a lot of value. The re-tweet enables anyone to spread whatever content they find profound or solid or funny or good throughout the world in a very quick and efficient way. Tumblr has the tumble option, which is similar, but Twitter is sizzling hot and mainstream and there are way more eyeballs on it. From the beginning it was developed to be
a mobile platform, so even though Facebook has an app you can use from your phone, Twitter has so much brand equity already in place as the on-the-go social network that most people use it first.

Second, it’s a press release opportunity, allowing companies and businesses to have a closer relationship with their consumer. It closes the six degrees of separation to one degree of separation. It’s also become a basic tool for industry leaders to let the world know what they’re doing and, perhaps more important, what’s on their mind. And it allows companies to respond immediately to their customers’ concerns. For example, as soon as I read somebody’s post that my shipping rates were too expensive, I was immediately able to reach out and address that person’s concern. We’ll be seeing more and more examples of companies reacting to a groundswell of tweets, such as when Motrin got hammered by mom-bloggers for an ad that they perceived as disrespectful of attachment parenting, or when Amazon fended off accusations of censorship via what the
New York Times
dubbed “tweet-rage” because a “cataloging error” erased thousands of books, many of them gay and lesbian themed, from its sales rankings and main search page. The thing is, though, businesses don’t have to, nor should they, wait until calamity strikes to pay attention to what people are saying. The real beauty of Twitter and Facebook (and all the other social networking sites) is that they offer a massive opportunity for every entrepreneur and business to keep constant tabs on what their customers are thinking about them. This kind of interaction with the consumer should be happening in every business every single day.

Third, Twitter is a research and development tool that allows
you to crowdsource. Who needs focus groups or even Nielsen ratings when you can simply tweet out the question “Are you watching
Poodles Dancing with the Stars
and should it stay on the air?” and get a direct response from your viewers? You can use Twitter to keep abreast of what your competition is up to, and their customers’ reactions, too. Saks recently opened a shoe department in New York and worked with the post office to assign it its own zip code. If I were working at Bloomingdale’s or Bergdorf, I would have been all over Search.Twitter (see upcoming information) to see what people were saying about this marketing program.

Fourth, it allows even your most mundane questions to become opportunities for conversation. Google and YouTube are reliable ways to get information, but they’re one-way streets. You ask, you get your answer, the end. You can send out e-mails, but then you’re limited to the immediate group of people you know. But if you tweet “Is there a PowerPoint expert out there?,” you’re reaching out to thousands of people, and the first thing they’ll want to know when they respond is what you’re presenting, and to whom, which opens up all kinds of chances to talk about what you do and who you are and bingo, you’re building brand equity. Twitter is a two-way street that takes you really far, really fast.

Fifth, it’s a great vehicle through which to spread your commerce-driven intentions. If you’re reading this book, you’ve got commerce-driven intentions—you want to build a brand, sell a product, find a job. Get those intentions on Twitter, and you’ll be amazed at how people respond.

The best use for Twitter, though, is to lure people to your blog. Make your 140-character tweets compelling and thoughtful
and quality enough to convince people to find out more about you and consume your content. You can post great content on Twitter—several people have used Twitter to incredible effect to build their brand equity—but because of the 140-character limit you have to tweet out a lot in order to have the same amount of impact with your content as you would with your blog. Plus, there’s always the risk of being perceived as spam when you tweet that much. I think it’s more efficient and effective to link tweets to your blog. Even those individuals known for their presence on Twitter have links to blogs. Chris Sacca is a master tweeter, but he does keep a blog. Granted, he only blogs about once a month. He hasn’t asked for my opinion, but I think he could build even more brand equity if he blogged every day. That would give people even more reasons to hang with him. To each his own DNA, however.

If you’re not using Twitter because you’re in the camp that believes it’s stupid, you’re going to lose out. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid, it’s free communication. That in and of itself has value, and you should take advantage of it. Use Twitter the same way you use your cell phone or a map or a GPS—it’s one more tool to get you closer to the people and places you need.

For a very low cost of entry and time Twitter allows the consumer to tell every person in his world what he thinks is cool or crappy or interesting. Do your job right, and eventually you
can be the cool, interesting subject that gets circulated, which will bring viewers to your blog, which will get the attention of people with deep pockets. Ten years ago it would have taken you months if not years to generate that kind of word of mouth. Today it takes seconds.

As of May 2009, when this book went to press, Search.Twitter.com is the most important site on the Internet. Search.Twitter gives you the ability to narrow in on the pulse of subject matter. For example, let’s say you work for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare, specifically for Advil. Go to Search.Twitter.com and enter the word
headache,
or enter the word in the search box on the right side of your Twitter page. You can now see that twenty people in the last three minutes have used the word
headache
in their tweet, including a woman named Jillian who writes, “Terrible headache. Someone hand me a sledgehammer.” You can click on the button that says “Follow.” If they choose to follow you back, you can now privately direct message (DM) her or publicly send her an @reply, with a message that might read like this: “Hey Jillian, I work for Advil and saw that you have a headache. Sorry to hear it. I’d love to send you a bottle of our product. DM me back with your address if you’re interested.” Most people will jump on the chance to get free product, and you have just cre
ated the most intimate experience with a brand anyone has ever known. If I do a search right now, I find that fifteen people in the last twenty-three minutes have said they’re thirsty. This is a golden opportunity for someone in the sports drink business, or the bottled water business, or the wine business.

But how do you avoid annoying people, or worse, sounding like spam? Everybody has a different idea of what’s annoying—I don’t mind hearing from someone interested in sending me free stuff that I can actually use. And remember that the only way you, the content provider, can contact anyone is if they choose to follow you—you cannot DM them otherwise. It’s the equivalent of extending your hand and allowing someone to choose whether to shake (you can certainly use @reply, but to me that’s like yelling, “Hey, you!” instead of offering a handshake; it’s just a little less polite). You also want to pitch your message in a very proactive, cool way. You’re not telling Jillian to go buy the stuff; you’re giving her a chance to try it if she wants it. You’re also not hiding your affiliation with your company and brand. If someone chooses to follow you, they’ll see on your profile that you’re a manager on the Advil brand. If you stay aboveboard and honest, most people will be willing to listen to what you have to say about your product. But the second you DM someone and they decide you sound slimy, they’ll un-follow you. Their bs detector is better than any spam filter you’ve ever seen. Don’t betray their trust.

If your blog is your home, platforms like Twitter and Facebook are your vacation homes. You can’t do long form content on these sites (well, you can, but it’s not effective and I don’t recommend it), and you need someplace that is a free place to do business where people don’t have to be members to see you. Your
content permanently resides on your blog, and you use these platforms to distribute your brand and bring eyes back home.

Though as you can tell I’m a huge fan of Twitter and Facebook, they are becoming household names and the competition there is already fierce, so I’m considering a new strategy. Why not explore some other Facebook-like sites even though they have fewer fish in their pond? True, the ponds are smaller, but their banks aren’t swarming with other fishermen, either,
which means you have a much better chance at walking away with a hefty catch. Some sites that I’m watching closely are the following:

• Plaxo, a professional site
  
• High Five
  
• Bebo, which is big in the UK and the third-biggest social network behind Facebook and MySpace
  
• FriendFeed
  
• Orkut, which is huge in Brazil
  

flickr

This photo-sharing site is definitely a pond worth fishing in. It has a ton of passionate users, though I’m not one of them for the sole reason that photographs don’t speak to my DNA. They do a lot for plenty of other people, though. Any platform that has loads of search capabilities is an important place to find market opportunity, and there are millions of people searching on Flickr. As with all content, you work the content on this site in two ways. You can post photographs so that when people click on them they find out who you are and then follow your link back to your blog, or you can click on other people’s photos and leave comments that intrigue people enough to link back to you. If your passion is something that photographs well, like birds or jewelry or hairstyling or interior design, it’s a place where you can do a lot of good damage. If I throw a wine party, I can post pictures of the event, which could pique someone’s interest. Or, if I put up a label of every wine I discuss on my show, I could
conceivably draw a lot more traffic to my blog. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s insane that I haven’t done this already. Anyone who cares about wine should be able to find me on Flickr, so I’d better get on that.