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!

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.

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.

I was chuffed to have the opportunity to connect with Ray on several occasions during his visit in Sydney.  Knowing Ray’s interest and expertise in the area of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing I invited him over to the Saasu office and introduced him to our CEO Marc.

Thanks for visiting us Ray and we look forward to seeing you when you’re next in Sydney.

Here is Ray’s excellent presentation delivered in Sydney for the AMPlify thought leadership festival entitled: “Why Enterprise Software Sucks and How Disruptive Technologies Converge to Change This”

]]> http://www.saasu.com/2011/06/20/disruptive-technologies-expert-r-ray-wang-in-australia/feed/ 0 http://www.saasu.com/2011/05/24/communicating-in-business-twitter/ http://www.saasu.com/2011/05/24/communicating-in-business-twitter/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 03:29:01 +0000 Tony Hollingsworth http://www.saasu.com/?p=9047 Do you use Twitter in your business? If not, why?  If so, how do you get the most value from it?

This is the first, in a series of posts, designed to share my thinking about business communications and how it is constantly evolving.  Twitter is being used by businesses to share great content, help their customers/community and build loyalty.  It can be a competitive advantage to your business.

Take for example the way we use Twitter at Saasu. Last week we celebrated a customer’s success with a retweet and reply, posted a link to a comprehensive Twitter resource, helped a customer with a question they had, and shared a new blog post.  Experienced users of Twitter will use the service this way.  It’s good to keep the “broadcasting” to a minimum and the “listening and engaging” to a maximum as a general rule here.

I often wish more of my customers were on Twitter. It’s an easy, cost-effective and efficient way to communicate with them and be memorable at the same time. Last week, Chris Brogan suggested we don’t need to wait for them to join Twitter, we can invite them! I like Chris’ simple point that “Twitter’s something you can fit into your business in between other things you’re doing.”

One of my favourite posts from Chris is about How to Listen for Opportunities on Twitter Even if you didn’t want to participate in the conversations on Twitter, these tips will have you observing the content that others are sharing and allow you to fine tune the content to your particular needs.

I’d be interested in your feedback – how do you use Twitter?  Do you want to but have doubts about your ability to fit it in to your business?   First 5 commenters get a 5 minute Skype call from me helping them get started!

Quote voucher code SAAS-WEB3 if you want an extra 10% of the 31 March early bird deadline price.

I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.

Saasu.com/about Word cloud by Wordle

Introducing Saasu BlogMech. It’s a place for new bloggers and those already up and running. An educational platform to assist you in starting, managing or improving your blog.

We don’t profess to be blogging experts but the crew at Saasu find a lot of useful information and ideas in our online travels. We want to be sure you don’t miss out by passing things on as we find them, saving you some research time.

Initial coverage:

• Blog Networks
• Feed Management Platforms
• Blog Feed Readers
• Blog Publishing Platforms
• Social Tagging & Marketing Platforms
• Blog News Services

The piece is an excellent primer for anyone that’s trying to get their head around blogging and social media for business. The advice comes from someone who has first hand experience building what he calls “global microbrands” for Stormhoek wine and Saville Row tailor Thomas Mahon.

One of the key pieces of advice, in my view, that he offers is point 5:

The growth will come, I believe, not by yet more increased efficiencies, but by humanification.

It’s an interesting dichotomy – one that I’m just starting to grapple with. I’ve been involved with the successful Earth Hour campaign, and one of the key challenges was “humanifying” what is in essence a large organisation – through both email responses and a MySpace profile.

The dichotomy is: how do you humanify and grow a company, especially when you have limited resources? How do you grow the resources to support the (when successful, ever growing) responses you get from a successful product or campaign?

Some of what Seth says in this post may not make a lot of sense if you’re not a regular follower of Seth’s blog. But I’ve heard the “early adapter” line before and it’s so true.

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us, recently acquired by Yahoo!, is a free service that makes it easy to save your bookmarks online. Once in del.icio.us, you can access them from any computer that is connected to the web. If you work on multiple computers (say, one at work and one at home), this can be very helpful.

To bookmark a site, you can use what’s called a “bookmarklet” – which is a special link that you drag to your browser’s bookmark toolbar – to bookmark a site with one click (more information on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets can be found on this help page).

Alternatively, if you are using the Firefox web browser, you can use one of two extensions to integrate del.icio.us into the browser – one from Yahoo! that replaces Firefox’s bookmarking system with del.icio.us integration, another that extends (rather than replaces) Firefox’s standard bookmarks facility.

When you add a site to del.icio.us you can label the bookmark with a number of “tags”. Tags, if you’re not familiar with them, are short text descriptions (similar to “keywords”) that you can use to categorise your links with. Rather than a fixed and formal set of categories, you can tag a link with as many free-form tags as you like – just use as many tags to describe the link as required.

As you add more links, you will naturally get more and more tags. del.icio.us allows you to then view all of your links by tag, or search them. This makes it easier to find tags in the future – rather than having to remember exactly where you saved the link (in one specific folder for example), you can look through any number of relevant tags, or use the search function.

What makes del.icio.us a “social” bookmarking tool?

When you go to the del.icio.us home page you’ll see a list of “What’s Hot”. This list is generated because del.icio.us can tell when a specific link has been linked by a number of people. Sort of like how Google uses the number of links to a page to help determine if it is useful and relevant, del.icio.us uses the number of links to a site to identify sites of interest in the current moment.

Although this is kinda cool, it’s not the only (nor necessarily the most useful/exciting) way that the social nature of del.icio.us can be used.

Each tag also has it’s own page. If you were looking for what people are linking to about, say, laptops, you can look at the del.icio.us listing for the “laptop” tag to find out what other people are linking too (or use the model name/number to be more specific – “MacBook” for example). If you use an RSS news reader, you can also subscribe to a specific tag or del.icio.us user so you can keep track of what’s being added without having to visit the del.icio.us site all the time.

When you add a link to del.icio.us you may also see that it’s linked to by other people. If you click on the “saved by X other people” link next to your bookmark, you can browse what those other people have linked to.

Additionally, if you tag something using the “for:<username>” syntax, that will appear in the “links for you” section of that particular user’s del.icio.us profile (you can see this as a link at the top of your del.icio.us profile page after you have signed in). For example, my del.icio.us username is “grantyoung” – so tagging something as “for:grantyoung” will appear in my “links for you” section. This is a great way to share bookmarks with colleagues or friends. Sending a link this way means that only the “grantyoung” user (me) will have access to the link.

As you can see, there are many ways that the collective value of using del.icio.us’ bookmarks emerges – all from individuals saving their own pages for future reference.

But how can I use it for my business?

The most basic way that del.icio.us can assist you in managing your bookmarks across multiple computers, or simply make it easier to find a bookmark through tags or search.

If you have multiple people in your business that use del.icio.us, you can check out what your coworkers are linking to by checking their bookmarks page (you’ll need to know their del.icio.us username – then append it to the del.icio.us URL. For example, you can view my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/grantyoung), or you could use the “for:” syntax to share links through del.icio.us, rather than sending emails. You may instead want to simply all agree on a specific tag that you use when you want to share your links – then everyone can simply watch that tag – rather than having to use multiple “for:” tags to send to individuals.

You can monitor tags related to your area business to get insight into what’s happening online, and even watch tags related to your business or product name. For example, to see what people are saying about Yahoo!, you can check the “yahoo” tag. Using an RSS news reader makes this even easier to check. You can use this as a form of market research – seeing who’s linking to you, and what people are saying about your business or product(s). (You can do similar sorts of research with blog trackers like Technorati, but that’s a topic for another post…)

If you are running an event (like a conference), you can suggest that people tag their links with a specific tag related to the event. For example, the organisers of the Web Directions conference suggested that participants use the “wd06″ tag. (You can do the same for other popular services like flickr and YouTube.)

You can also share your links via your website or company blog – there are a number of widgets and tools for various blog tools (like WordPress) that allow you to add your del.icio.us links to your site. There are other tools that will take a daily snapshot of your del.icio.us links and post them to your blog. Some tools allow you to specify a specific tag to link to.

You might use a widget like this to link to reviews of your product(s), to sites related to your area of business – to any site that you think might be of interest to your target audience.

Other services

There are services other than del.icio.us that have additional features to del.icio.us, such as ma.gnolia, reddit, Furl, and Google Bookmarks. del.icio.us, while not particularly visually attractive, is quite fast and is widely supported by other tools, and is my preferred choice. However, you may find one of these alternative services more to your liking.

The 5 (read Kathy’s post for the full details):

• Do NOT start at the beginning!
• Show, Don’t Tell
• For the love of god, DO NOT start with history!
• DO NOT start with prereqs
• MYTH: you must establish credibility up front