Continue reading »]]> Day 7 | May 17, 2011 | 36 Twitter Followers

Two more Followers added since yesterday on my quest to gain 1,000 relevant twitter followers. Seems like every time I tweet, I get more followers. This is good.

But how do you decide who to Follow back?

At the moment, I’m following only 57 people on Twitter. Yet sometimes it’s difficult to stay on top of my Twitter account given that many of the folks I follow are far more active that I am. Yet, when I check out my new followers, most are very relevant to my space. And you should follow them back, out of courtesy, right? I’m sure that Ms. Manners probably has an opinion on this, but I’ve always been one to try to figure it out myself, so here goes …

Must Follows
First, let’s talk about who you should follow – the “Must Follows” in your world. I did a little research and found some good articles that cover this. Here’s one called, Who Should You Follow on Twitter? written by @LisaBarone. The basic premise of this piece is that you want to follow five types of people: Customers, Competitors, Local Media, Trendsetters and People that amuse you. I agree – especially with the last one, “people that amuse you”. I’ve found that “all work and no play” certainly makes Twitter “a dull boy”. In fact, I recently started using Twitter Lists to help me deal with this.

Twitter Lists Are My New Best Friend
Twitter Lists are fantastic. They let you group the people you follow into lists. You can click on any list and get only the tweets from those people on that list. I have a few lists now that help me organize the Tweets from people I am following. One list is for “Social Media News”, another for “Competitors” and a third list is for “Friends” and people that I find really interesting. You can even make these lists Private, if you don’t won’t others to see who you have listed. If you’re not familiar with how to setup these lists, check out this article, How to Setup Twitter Lists.

Should I Follow Back?
Now, on to follow backs … Should you follow back everyone that follows you? When I started on Twitter, my initial approach was to automatically follow everyone that followed me – just out of courtesy. I quickly realized that this was a train wreck strategy. So many people seem to have the spam mentality of simply following everyone and anyone, in hopes of getting a follow back. I had zero interest in the content that most of these folks were sending out there – telling me about their breakfast, where they were going and how tired they had become of their boyfriend. Really? And, I seriously doubt that they cared too much about my Tweets.

My Follow Back Strategy
So my approach is pretty simple. As I get new followers, I click on their Twitter profile. I checkout what they’re all about. If they’re involved with something to do with Technology, Social Media or face to face marketing, I keep reading. Of course, to keep it interesting, if they have something to do with the UFC or some other personal interest of mine, I’ll probably follow them as well – gotta keep it interesting.

Sounds pretty basic, right? But just writing this down made me take the time to review my own personal Twitter profile. I realized that the types of folks I am targeting as followers probably would have dismissed me if they followed this approach. Here was my old Twitter profile:

My Old Twitter Bio Profile: Outer Banks (OBX) based technology guy, occasional surfer, and full time Dad

Although personal and genuine, it really doesn’t spark much interest for those that are looking to follow people that are serious about using social media tools. So I changed it to:

My New Twitter Bio Profile: Social networking guy that has helped others win with Twitter but ignored his own account for the past two years. Now blogging about my journey to 1K followers

Next, I check out their last 10 Tweets. If there isn’t at least one interesting Tweet in their timeline, I’m bailing.  If they do have something interesting to say, it’s likely that I’ll follow back. And, if they are real interesting, I’ll add them to one of my Twitter lists, based on what they’re tweeting. So again, looking at my own account, I try to make sure that I have a good mix of relevant Tweets that are going to be of value to those that are following me. I guess this keeps me on track and helps me stay focused on Twitter.

So I was curious to see how I measured up against the people that I follow on Twitter. I wondered if the folks that I followed, followed me back. I figured that there is probably a tool out there somewhere that would help me do this, and, sure enough, here’s what I found:

FriendOrFollow.com

This cool site will analyze your Twitter account and tell you how many of the folks that you follow, follow you back. In addition, it will also tell you who follows you, that you don’t follow back. And, to put icing on the cake, they’ll then show you who you follow that has followed you back. This is nice – an easy way to periodically check in with your account and see what’s going on … (I’d ask for a Follow from @FriendOrFollow for this nice plug of their product, but I notice that they have over 5K followers and only follow 7 at the moment!).

Here Are Some Links That I Found Helpful:

Who Should You Follow on Twitter?
How to Setup Twitter Lists
FriendOrFollow.com

Thanks for reading. Please comment here and follow me on Twitter @cavoom

Continue reading »]]> Day 6 | May 16, 2011 | 34 Twitter Followers

Cool – up 6 followers … But more important than that, I’m starting to get some good feedback from people in the know. We received our first comment on this blog over the weekend from @DentonSolutions. Turns out, they saw my Tweet about Google Analytics and asked a question about how I was deploying it. I explained that I had added Google Analytics to this blog site, and was hoping to learn more about the activity that was driven from Twitter. Turns out, @DentonSolutions is also doing a bit of experimentation of their own with Twitter. They are conducting a listening campaign with  their “The Great Twitter Experiment” . They are focusing on listening rather than promoting themselves on Twitter. I checked out the site and found it interesting – especially about how they plan to measure it’s success. What made it even more interesting for me was that they do indeed practice what they preach — more on this later …

It seems that “listening” is a forgotten art that is quickly making it’s way to the top of the social media best practice list. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Social Media Success Summit. A common theme from several of the presentations has been that listening is where you need to start. From there, you contribute and then gain from good, helpful content. And, the more informative / helpful your content is, the more likely that this content will be distributed, or Re-Tweeted.

One of the presenters,  David Meerman Scott @dmscott, shared a few great examples of listening coupled with the importance of timing. He demonstrated how organizations like Eloqua took advantage of social buzz that was going around about an Oracle acquisition in their space.  He explains that Eloqua provided content on a blog site that helped people understand why this space was so strategic. And, even though Eloqua was not the company acquired, they ended up getting a good amount of press coverage about this acquisition. Further, the company went on to secure additional sales as a direct result of their online efforts.

Another interesting presentation that covered the art of listening was from Michael Stelzner @Mike_Stelzner. Mike shared his social strategy of promoting SocialMediaExaminer.com. Really interesting. He talked about how important it is to listen to what your audience wants and then provide them with helpful content – without promoting yourself. He used this strategy extensively to promote the site and the Social Media Success Summit.

So back to @DentonSolutions … the company I mentioned earlier that is taking a “listening” approach on Twitter … After listening to what I was trying to accomplish with this blog, they sent me a link to a great article: How to Build Your Twitter Tribe. It’s a good  article that was of interest to me. So guess what? Here’s a company that is listening, they are helpful to what I am trying to do, so I decided to follow them.

Here Are Some Links That I Found Helpful:

The Great Twitter Experiment
How to Build Your Twitter Tribe
SocialMediaExaminer.com

Thanks for reading. Please drop me a line here and follow me on Twitter @cavoom

Continue reading »]]> Day 3 | May 13, 2011 | 30 Twitter Followers

Friday the 13th — not a bad day for me — two new Twitter followers since yesterday! Whoo hoo … Welcome new Twitter followers. Hope that you will join in here and share your Twitter wisdom with the rest of us …

So maybe I’m doing something right here? I don’t know, it’s still too early to tell. I guess the only real way to answer that question is to put a measurement system in place. I’m putting some time into this blog (about 30 minutes a day at this point), so I figure it would be nice to be able to measure how much activity we are seeing and where in the world it is coming from …

My tool of choice for web measurement is Google Analytics. As most of you techie, power-users know, Google Analytics is a great measurement tool, and it’s free.  I already use it for my neglected and poorly maintained website (maybe that’s my next project). It’s pretty simple to setup – all you need is a free Google account. You tell Google Analytics your web address, and it creates some code that you can drop right into your web page HTML. You need to put this code on every page you want to monitor. You can go here to learn more if you are new to Google Analytics.

Luckily, I chose a nice template on WordPress that had a built in Google Analytics plugin. All you have to do is enter that code that Google analytics gives you, and it places the monitoring code on every blog page created. But WordPress also offers some nice plugins that you can use if your template doesn’t have it. It was tricky to find, but, eventually, I found the settings, and was able to configure it without much trouble.

Check it out. I installed Google Analytics yesterday, and now I have some stats. I think that you have to wait about 24 hours before you start receiving data. Here’s the info from yesterday:



Pretty cool – 6 visits, 21 pages viewed and about 3.5 pages per visit. A modest start, I know, but, hey, it’s progress. It can even tell you where your page views are coming from – your “Traffic sources”:

Looks like most of my traffic is coming from Twitter, at this point, and that is good. There’s also a setting to adjust that will remove all the hits coming from your specific IP address. You can see that two of the vistits were from “direct”, which is probably from my own browser. I’ll take care of that later on this evening …

Here Are Some Links That I Found Helpful:

Learn the basics of Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Plugins for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cavoom
Installing Google Analytics Code: http://mashable.com/2011/05/24/how-to-use-google-analytics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Continue reading »]]> Day 2 | May 12, 2011 | 28 Twitter Followers

Still only 28 followers – no change from yesterday. Not that I was expecting much to happen yet. I just started this blog yesterday, and I haven’t even posted a link to it on Twitter. This post is pretty basic, so for all of you power users out there, you can skip over this one or, better yet, please comment and tell me what I’m missing …

Step one for me was to setup a blog. I did this because, as you probably know, your messages (Tweets) are limited to up to 140 characters on Twitter. While it’s ideal for posting messages from your mobile device when you are out and about, it does make it difficult to be descriptive. In addition, the blog format gives us the ability to share an online conversation — giving others the ability to comment freely and provide their feedback. This is something that I really hope happens here as I’ll need all of the help I can get.

So I chose to use WordPress for this blog. There were a lot of great choices out there (Blogger.com, Google, etc.), but I chose this one because I noticed that LinkedIn has a WordPress Application. I just clicked on the app in LinkedIn, and now this blog appears on my LinkedIn Profile.  Pretty sweet – especially since most of my social networking has been done on the LinkedIn platform to date (I do pretty well there with 700+ business connections).

In addition, my LinkedIn account will display my latest Tweet, automatically. Check it out:

 
Back to the Blog. It took all of about 15 minutes to setup. The most time consuming part was selecting a “Theme” — the layout and options available to me. Because this blog is intended for pretty short posts, a few pictures and some social plugins (like the one to the right where it automatically displays my Twitter activity), I chose this template from the thousands that are out there.  It could not have been easier. Let’s see how well it works …

Starting today, I’ll post a link to this blog on Twitter.

Here Are Some Links That I Found Helpful:

How to Setup WordPress: http://codex.wordpress.org/New_To_WordPress_-_Where_to_Start
Plugins for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
Connecting Your WordPress Blog with LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_applicationId=2200

Follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cavoom

Thanks and be sure to post your comments here …

Continue reading »]]> Day 1 | May 11, 2011 | 28 Twitter Followers

Yikes.  I’ve been on Twitter for a year and have only 28 followers. How sad. Especially since I’m a technology guy. Everyday, I help world class organizations leverage technology and social media platforms to better their business. Unfortunately, I’ve neglected my own Twitter account: posting random messages, forwarding along interesting links and mostly just following others.

This is a problem that I’d like to fix over the next 12 months. I suspect there are others out there just like me – interested in leveraging Twitter to share their thoughts, ideas and views – yet not really experiencing a lot of social success yet. So here’s the plan. First, I’m going to set a goal:

GOAL: Gain 1,000 relevant Twitter followers over the next 12 months.

Along the way, I’m going to blog about my exploits. I’m going to share everything that I’m learning. Everything that I try — stuff that works, and stuff that doesn’t work. I’m going to share all of this information here and on Twitter. My hope is that I’ll succeed and learn a bunch along the way — sharing all of it with you. I also hope that you, and everyone else that reads this, will contribute. Let’s see what really works and put it to practice …

Follow me on Twitter