This week saw me click over three years as a user on the Twitter platform,  how time flies.  It’s become part of my everyday business life and an essential part of my personal growth and network development.

This blogpost is not going to be one of those “reasons to be on Twitter” blogs, hopefully the world is over that one.  I do however want to share some outcomes, experiences and learnings that have come to bear over the last three years to encourage others: -

Early Days (Followers 0).

• A bit random  Not really knowing how best to use the platform.
• Not having a genre.  Tweeting all sorts, business and personal.
• Following anyone that would follow me back.  No particular selection process.
• Bit too focused on numbers of followers and how to acquire more.  A zero sum game.
• Used the basic web interface.  Found it frustrating and missed so much good content.
• Exchanged messages with a lot of people that I knew who had early adopted it – it meant I got to know a few people better.
• Sent too many Tweets.  Didn’t realise that if you “machine gun” tweets out, it adds nothing.

Mid Term (Followers around 1,500)

• Switched to Tweetdeck –  it all made a lot more sense.
• Set up search columns.  Realised the tool is much more powerful than just following people/follow backs and could be used as a live “google search” on the terms I wanted.
• Saw the potential for personal learning (following great people and their insights), following journalists (trends) to see what is new in technology.
• Realised that it’s better to create a genre for my account.  Business, Leadership, Innovation, Environment, Sales, Marketing, Trends,  Social Media.  Keep it focused on those elements, less about me, more about them.
• Accepted that followers is about engagement and influence.  People will come and go as there tastes/jobs/lives change.  Follower numbers are fluid, as I follow/unfollow, people will follow/unfollow me.
• Realised it could be used to effectively drive traffic to websites and blogs –  providing the content has been filtered, is of good quality and enriches your audience.  My blogposts are my own unique thoughts, not content from others.  The more people see it and agree with it, the more likely it is they’ll stick with you.
• Started unfollowing people.  Realised that there is no benefit to having Twitter followers if you have nothing in common with them or  never interact with them.  Otherwise, they are just meaningless numbers.  Actively began to disengage with some followers, happy that my follower numbers may reduce – they didn’t, they’ve continued to grow.

Now (Followers around 3,600)

• No focus on followers – just on good content to share.  Review everyone that follows me to see if I can learn anything from them.  I don’t target followers, have a number in my head or see it as any kind of popularity KPI.
• Still a big focus on personal learning -  Seeing what’s hot, new, changing.  Using that to develop insight for personal development or company direction.
• Supporting Corporate and Personal Reputation.  Being accessible as a business leader within a large multi-national brings opportunities to our door first.  Great outcome as you can have first refusal on exciting initiatives.
• Filtering.  Using search columns and interesting people to see great stuff and share it.  I don’t send anything out unless I have personally read it and see it of value.
• Network Development.  Twitter is my trawler net of contacts to meet in person, then add to my Linkedin network.  My ratio of Twitter followers to Linkedin network is around 6:1 and continues to grow.  That’s where I can distinguish who is an “associate” relationship, rather than someone I consider to be of longer-term value.
• To develop insight around individuals or businesses.  To start/develop conversations with people to assist in the development of intelligence for business development purposes or opportunity engineering.
• To stay in contact with people in my wider network and underpin relationships.  A chance meeting becomes much more meaningful when you can refer to something that has recently happended to the third party.  I use filter columns in Tweetdeck to track important people, like a “live” electronic little black book.
• Housekeeping.  It’s important to regularly review who has gone inactive, what your last 10 Tweets say about you if someone looks at your feed (delete stuff if you think it stepped outside your genre), thank people for RT’s and mentions, review the profiles of people that follow you to ensure that they fit your desired  intention for your Twitter feed and – more importantly – keep the feed going with some regularity and frequency.

Created by: Online Schools

I’m a big fan of Infographics. An infographic being a highly visual way of presenting data or facts. This one has just hit the net and it’s really worth a look, to give you some sense of where the internet is at right now.

Business to business social networking site – Linkedin - hit a new landmark today, by signing up it’s one hundred millionth user.  They created this infographic to make the occassion, which tells the story pretty well.  You can read their blog about it here.

Of all the on-line networking sites, Linkedin has stood the test of time.  Based upon a business model of being the ultimate feeding ground for the recruitment industry, it’s evolving its business model beyond straight recruitment and much more into connecting people with wider products and services.

Of the 100M users, there are around 1.3+ billion connections between members and around 79 million job transitions/changes have been tracked by the site.  That’s one hell of a database, so you can see why that would be of value to marketeers.

Beyond just storing your profile and connecting with people, many folk don’t ever really unearth some of the real benefits that Linkedin can bring a B2B organisation.  I’ve previously blogged about Linkedin maps visualiser and researching customers/competitors, two features which most people are amazed by, when you mention them.

In addition, you can create closed communities for customers, common interest groups, get questions crowd-sourced answered, aswell as do the obvious, find new people for jobs.

It’s an out and out B2B platform. Most small businesses don’t realise how powerful it can be for search.  Set up a company page, add your products onto it and then get users of the products to provide endorsements.  That sort of information is loved by the search engines.   If you want to take it to a really sophisticated level, you can start to point products at people with specific job titles, highly targeted.

If you check the infographic, you can also see, that the platform is primarily used during the working day, or on mobile devices – post work, indicating that it’s seen as a serious tool, particularly in America and Europe.

It’s no surprise to me that Linkedin continues to grow. I find it a great platform for researching and keeping track of people.  Most people I know only do the basics, profile and connect with people that they might know.  That’s often where it ends.  However, with a bit more time invested, you can get an awful lot more from it.

I think Linkedin will continue to grow unchallenged by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.  It does a completely different job, in a B2B environment.  Their user subscriptions will continue to grow as they expand into new markets and I’m sure it won’t take them too long to hit the 200M mark.

Small businesses. Got a product or service which is unique or some specialist knowledge? Yes?  Are you writing a blog? Yes (finish reading here).  No (read on).

Blogs are a powerful tool.

More powerful than most small businesses might imagine.  Google will love you. Google loves new content, which is unique, rich and gets better results for its searchers.  The more specialised your blog, the better.  So if your knowledge or product is quite specialised, you will get found more often and go higher up the search rankings.  The more you post, the more visits you get, the more quality visits you get, the better you begin to rank in the future.  Simples.

People trust authentic, well written blogs more than they do adverts. Sharing expertise, offering knowledge, solving problems is what it’s all about.  Don’t forget that the second most popular search platform on the planet is Youtube.  Creating Vlogs (video blogs) is another great way to drive traffic to your site and grab a high ranking.  If you look at a standard google search page nowadays, you’ve given the option of web, images, blogs and video, each one offering different results.  Use your unique photos and ensure they are tagged, that way people searching for images will also be drawn back to your site.

Getting Started

I’ve previously posted my top tips for bloggers, check it here.  One tool that I’ve used since then is Google Wonder Wheel.  A brilliant way to establish what the key search terms that people are using.  Here’s an example relating to road cycling.

The Power of the Wonder Wheel

In the search term you can see the term “road cyling blog” and the search results will appear underneath as normal (guess what at time of writing, my cycling blog is ranking #1 on Google – proves it works).  If you look at the left hand navigation, look underneath shopping and hit the link which says “Wonder Wheel”.

What this then reveals are the top alternative terms that people use to get that result.  As you can see, terms like “road cycling blogger” and “cycling training blog” appear.  The trick is to then use these terms in future blogposts.  Not all of them, couple at a time.

The more you click on each of the spokes, the further it drills down, so you can really get to the nitty gritty of your subject and the phrases people are using.  This is powerful stuff and will really help you to match your future content, to the search terms people are using.

Keep it Short and Sweet

Notwithstanding this post, which is a bit longer than I would normally write.  If you keep your blogs, short and snappy, with original content (don’t copy and paste someone elses, use your own knowledge and expertise) you’ll be surprised at what impact they can have.  Often large Corporate sites don’t have content which changes regularly, this is where you can steal their thunder by posting up to date news/reviews and thought leadership.

Another example.  Last week top bike brand Boardman launched a new range in London.  I got wind of this, quickly researched the new range and got a blogpost up.  For the first 3 days I was #1 on Google for anyone searching for the new model “Boardman Road Pro Air 2011“.  It’s dropped down to about #4 now as the big cycling sites with massive traffic kicked in, however I’m still there – front page on general search but #1 on blog search.

My point is.  Without a lot of effort, you can intelligently drive more traffic to your website, by blogging.  More traffic means more impressions, more impressions should lead to more conversions if your sales funnel is right.

“That was Easy.” This red button was the physical manifestation of an advertising slogan that office superstore giant Staples ran.  They ended up giving away millions of these little red buttons, which said the words when pressed.  Great, simple campaign.

Later this week, I’ll be delivering a keynote to a marketing conference in Manchester.  I’m focussing on convenience as one of the features of something I call the “expectation economy”.  That is, the changing face of why people buy from key platforms.  At home, Amazon, eBay, i-Tunes, Google and Facebook consume the bulk of our face time and are becoming our de-facto on-line shopping malls/social/search platforms.

They are shaking the on-line world down as they continue to consolidate, throw their net wider, provide new and additional services which makes life easier for people.  As an example, in September last year, Facebook started to sell credits in stores in the USA, in the same way you could buy mobile phone credit.  A potential game changing moment. Right now, they can only be used to buy apps or other in-game stuff, however it’s only a matter of time before Facebook becomes a fully blown trading platform in its own right, then what’s going to happen?

Inevitably, they’ll scoop up a process that is currently being transacted somewhere else. They’ll find a way to integrate into their social sphere.  They’ll make it easier for buyers with one-click.  They’ll make it mobile.  They’ll make it easy.  They realise that people are busy, moments are being maximised, the more folk can do on the move or with a mobile in their hand, the better.  Upgrades, last minute stuff, gift certificates, movement of money, you name it, I bet you’re going to see it at some point in the near future.  Perhaps Facebook credits may become a new global currency?

Ever heard of the concept of Top 3 box? This describes your prospective customers shortlist which they will be walking around with in their head, when making a key purchase.

In times gone by (not that long ago), a multi-million pound branding campaign would be needed in order to be one of those top 3 on the consideration list.  Today, if you work at proximity (using social media), you can ease yourself onto that list by being around at the very moment when the customer may be close to purchase, by listening.

This gives smaller businesses a crack at the title, particularly niche and boutique brands.  Outside of work, I’m a passionate road cyclist.  I worked with a bike brand to launch them on social media and we increased consideration of their brand from 25% to 90% through regular engagement.  Doing a consideration survey, there were a staggering 25 brands on the unprompted consideration list, so this was quite an achievement.  A stack of the other brands weren’t even using social media platforms - pretty poor when the audience is so engaged with the sport.  Some of the larger brands were simply broadcasting, with little real interaction. #fail

By always being around, you’ll be front of mind.  By being front of mind, you will be part of the conversation and ultimately the consideration.  Don’t be too pushy, be helpful and chatty buyers will resonate towards you.  You can then ride off into the sunset with more customers.

If you work in a large business, the e-mail daddy is still outlook.  Now it has been said that Microsoft arrived very late to the party when it comes to all things social media and I think that’s borne out by the number of developers now working on plug-ins.

Two that I’ve recently been evaluating for Outlook are Twinbox and Xobni.  Twinbox is a plugin which forwards Twitter messages into your Outlook client.  It’s pretty handy as you can set it up to forward your replies and direct messages straight into an Outlook folder, with an appropriate alarm to let you know they’re there.  I’ve found this to be worthwhile as you are pro-actively alerted to messages which are specifically for you, rather than have to check into another Twitter client. 

Xobni (who I was recommended to by the uber digital brain David Edmunson-Bird at MMU who you can follow on Twitter here)  is a great plug-in.   It indexes your contacts and then sucks in their latest status updates from Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook into a small frame which sits in your Outlook desktop.  It’s pretty handy, as you can quickly see what’s going on with someone, without having to jump in and out of multiple cloud platforms.  It also drags together all of your recent activity, e-mails, attachments and common contacts.  Everything is a click away.

The view of your network is becoming 360 degree.  Small plug-ins like this continue to allow you to be front of mind, to be more efficient, to respond quickly and be relevant.  I’m sure they’ll be the first of many and I’m also sure Microsoft will be pretty happy that someone has got their back.

I recently completed a short interview for Sales website, Salestarget.co.uk, which you can read here (note that I’ve been photographed in Starbucks – those that know me won’t be surprised).

You forget just how much you’ve done sometimes, the experiences you’ve had, the tips and tricks you’ve picked up, people that have passed through the business, how it all started.

Starting out, twenty odd years ago, selling was a different game.  For me, it was a Vauxhall Cavalier, a bag of 10ps, a wallet with the business cards of all my key customers in and a lot of miles listening to the radio.  Relationships really mattered and much more was done by phone and visits, than e-mails and long arm support.

I’ve previously blogged about something I call “Real-actionships” which is how business still does ultimately rely on relationships, human to human contact.  Social media channels allow you to stay front of mind more, no doubt about that, but to win business, relationships still matter.  See this blogpost about Social2facial too.

Linkedin have just launched a new tool called visualiser.  It takes your network connections then cleverly groups your connections visually, based upon connections that you have in common.

From the clusters that get generated, you can quickly understand the myriad of connections that exist between your contacts, whilst also getting a graphic visualisation of the types of people you are connecting with.

For example, this is my map.  In the blue area, I can identify these relationships as being people I know in the Manchester/NW area.  Orange is connections from the office equipment industry, green is industry connections in the I.T. space and pink staff or colleagues.  The larger the node, the more contacts that individual has.

By clicking on any one of the nodes, you get a quick profile of the individual aswell as a quick visualisation of all the people that you are both connected to.  It’s a great way of quickly establishing who you have in common, across industries or regions.

Infographics are becoming de rigeur in helping us process information in today’s time strapped, data driven world.  I think this is a pretty cool new tool that will help you take stock of your network at a macro level. The more you play with it, the more it makes sense.

Personally, I limit my Linkedin connections to people that I have met or know in person, otherwise it becomes a bit of a zero sum game, thousands of people you don’t know.  Quality over quantity any day for me.

I’ve got the Mr. Sheen out on my crystal ball, given it a good clean, stared deeply into it and seen the future.  Saturdays lottery numbers are 7, 9, 22, 28, 35, 42 – buy a ticket now!

Seriously, thought I’d have a go at laying down some thoughts about where I think the world is moving for 2011.  In no particular order (and they may change as this is my first bash after thinking about this on the way home from work last night).

1. Crowd-forcing. Inspired by Crowd-sourcing.  The crowd pulling together to pressurise/threaten brands through negative on-line chatter and peer pressure.
2. Digi-paranoia. Fuelled by the Wikileaks scandal, people will become more paranoid about their on-line breadcrumb trail.  They’ll protect more of their digital assets, through pre-approving and using trusted platforms.
3. Talent thaw. 2010 has been a tough year for finding good people, the hatches were well and truly buttoned down and movements frozen.  As confidence returns, we’ll start to see the talent market thaw.
4. Life caching. As micro-moments continue to be recorded in the cloud by mobile devices, we’ll record/upload more data electronically than at any other time in mankind (despite paranoia trend, sheer qty of GB/TB on the web will make 2011 a record year).
5. Friend Filtering. 2011 will be the year of quality over quantity.  New social media start-up Path hits this trend, limiting your network to just 50 key people.  Competitiveness for this new inner-circle will drive new behaviour and take us back to “Face Friends” who matter, rather than Facebook Friends by the thousand.”
6. Centre-fall. De-volving from the middle, whether that be government or big business.  Applications in the cloud will allow businesses to challenge their conventions and methodologies of working.  The drive to competitiveness and the desire to see people take responsibility, will mean the hub will become less important than the spokes and rim.
7. De-cluttering. Removing things that crowd out our thoughts/consume our time (see next point).  Prioritising those things that truly add value.  Marketeers need to take note as traditional methods of interruptive marketing are becoming less and less effective, particularly in B2B.
8. Time poor war. Time continues to be the worlds most scarce commodity for the masses.  Time improvement tools just mean we are working more, not reducing work-time spent pursuing happiness or joy.  Generation X are kicking back against this as the last generation which may rescue the lost generation of “Y”‘s, before the values of deep friendship, downtime, family time are confined to words in wikipedia.  Hyper-tasking will be the new multi-tasking.
9. Relevancy. Staying relevant in peoples lives.  Having just the right amount of interaction.  Choosing moments.  Keeping an acceptable proximity.
10. Social Media Revolution. Wider business will take more notice of social media channels for conversations and relationship generation now all the glittery buzz is dying down.  It was never designed to be a transactional channel but a way of generating proximity, feedback and conversations with individuals.  As new business becomes harder (less public sector expenditure to cushion your overhead), new conversations and contacts will be key and more businesses will get moving with new conversation channels.
11. Trust and Transparency. A continuing theme for me.  People are more willing to trust a strangers view than a big brand ad when it comes to products and services.  User generated content will continue to grow exponentially, more people will blog, leave content on sites like Tripadvisor and Reevoo, use electronic platforms to distribute buzz (+ or -).  2010 was the year we’ll all remember for Wikileaks.  Wikileak yourself or your business, compare that with the messages you send on your marketing materials and ask yourself are the two things consistent.

What are your thoughts? What would you add?