Social Media

Communicating in Business: Twitter Part 2

December 23, 2011 By Tony Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Earlier this year I posted on Twitter as a business communications tool. Are you using Twitter? You should! Here’s 12 reasons why.

I’m seeing many more of our customers and partners on Twitter this year, so I thought it timely to share more of my thinking on how Twitter brings business benefit. If I was to share with you only one piece of advice on using Twitter, my friend @Iconic88 best sums it up:

“The power of Twitter is in your sharing, not your selling” Mahei

— Iconic88 (@Iconic88) December 16, 2011

If you focus on sharing and being helpful on Twitter, the benefits will flow.

Twitter delivers competitive advantage

Your competitors, customers and potential customers are on Twitter too – are you listening for opportunities? There’s a lot of “noise” on Twitter however it’s very easy to “tune in” by setting up Lists and Searches to monitor updates and conversations. Twitter is informal in that its ok to just reply and talk to people where normally might feel uncomfortable doing so without an introduction. Offer help, advice or experience in your replies.

Twitter makes you more memorable

We’ve blogged before about the attention economy and the value of giving something rather than just selling. Twitter brings ever increasing demands on your attention so there’s a risk here. You’ll be more memorable if you’re helpful. Part of Twitter’s uniqueness is its 140 character limit which keeps a hold on how much communication you can offer per tweet. By being helpful and sharing your experience, you’ll be more memorable in the face of increasing attention demands on your customers.

Twitter builds relationships

Being part of the Twitter network brings you into contact with real people in real time – people you might not even have met face to face yet – a global network. These new types of relationships are valuable – questions get answered, recommendations get made, and trust is developed – people buy from people remember and your next opportunity could come from this. My friend Kate Carruthers put it really well in this blog post The idea of “Loose Ties over Time” is important as it demonstrates the ease with which relationships can be managed using Twitter for example.

Twitter helps you improve

We all want to grow and improve as individuals and this feeds into our business success. Using Twitter brings new ideas and thinking into your stream. You have to invest some time in following the right people. This depends on your business and interests. Use Search to help here – keywords for your industry, location and much more are available. Checkout the Advanced Search options. One of my favourites is the combination of links and hashtags to quickly find content of relevance. For example at the recent web conference LeWeb where many tweets are being shared, I want to find just the links, so I would search “#leweb filter:links” Note the hashtag use to filter to just those tweets.

Do you need help? I’ll be available over the holidays and would be happy to Skype with anyone who has questions using Twitter. Just drop a comment in here with your questions and I will be in touch.

Wishing you all the best for the festive season and success in 2012!

Filed Under: Social Media, Twitter

Business Success: Utility and Community

December 19, 2011 By Tony Hollingsworth Leave a Comment

Recently a photo-sharing application for iPhone called Instagram won “iPhone application of the year” as voted by Apple. I thought to myself “really?” because sharing photos is not exactly new. I’ve had an iPhone for a few weeks now (after spending years on Android I made the switch) and recently I installed the Instagram application to find out more.

Wow! The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to setup, and get started. It demonstrated great utility. Utility means useful or beneficial: it’s easy to get started and use, you’re sharing your experience through photos rather than just via text updates, photo effects can be applied easily (it’s effectively commoditising photo manipulation), and all your photos are stored onlne and are accessible easily. Great utility.

Next, it asked me about my other web presences – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and more. Immediately it connected me to other users I know through other connected media. It demonstrated a great community so you’re excited to find that others you know are sharing content using the application. This leaves you with the expectation that the content and experience you will have will be valuable and memorable. This expectation came true within moments of sharing my first photos as others immediately “Liked” and commented. You can view my photos here.

At Saasu these ideas of utility and community are ones we strongly believe in. We want our users to enjoy using Saasu, discover and realise the benefits for their business. They become our community and tell their own communities about us. We’ve seen this grow our business dramatically over the years and it’s allowed us to maintain fanatical pricing as we don’t advertise in the traditional sense.

Think about your own business in terms of utility and community. Are these areas you could improve on or learn on from the Instagram experience?

Recently at the annual “LeWeb” conference in Paris conference, the CEO of Instragram spoke about his vision for their company. I hope you draw us much inspiration from this as I did.

Filed Under: Ideas, Social Media

Dealing with negative comments

August 19, 2011 By marc Leave a Comment

Many small businesses, bookkeepers and accounting firms are blogging, using LinkedIn groups, Twitter and Facebook. So I thought it was high time to raise the issue of how do you deal with negative comments.

Our own business and personal blogs are the depth of our experience. We have been blogging for 10 years soon so we do have lots of practical experience but would love to hear your ideas on topic. We also have many clients in the industry that we have discussed this issue with so we bring that to the comment table also.

Mostly comments we get about Saasu are great. We also get comments which are frustration that we don’t have something, nearly always a feature, that customers want. We try to make the point that we are what we are. We don’t view these as negative comments, we welcome them unless the writer really starts to make us out to be a bad guy for not having built something yet. That’s akin to flogging a slave. The hardest people to deal with are the ones who are negative constantly, they often do this without full knowledge of the issue at hand. They often bring attitude and worst of all inaccurate assessments into the picture. So how do you handle this type of activity if you are a blogger, manage a twitter account or have a face book page?

We prefer to let people have their view, moderate in extreme cases only where they are outside the rules of moderation you set.

At the end of the day if you have lots of negative something is wrong with your business. It should be mostly positive (if you are a product and service business). Commentary types blogs invite debate so expect more negative comments. I find these comment streams really interesting to read so it’s great when the comments are left even if it’s just for entertainment value.

Laurel Papworth is one of the best people I have seen cover this topic and she has produced an excellent short video that highlights 7 ways to approach a negative person in your streams. It’s a guide so work out your own list and mixture.