• Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
• Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
• Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
• Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters

As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).

Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.

In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.

Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.

Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?

On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.

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Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into 4 categories:

• Informational: Some useful stuff that your audience is interested in, whether it’s marketing their products more effectively, tips on losing weight, or improving their relationship with their partner.
• Entertainment: Something to break the monotony of working in real life or on the net. A link to a funny youtube video or clever banter (like between @Oilman and @MrsOilman – I met Oilman AKA Todd Friesen at the Affiliate Summit, at the same time, Mrs Oilman seems really cool)
• Community/Relationship building: What’s the point in having people follow you, if you’re not talking to them or getting to know them?
• A combination of two or more of the above

One of the reasons why I’ve done more communication with people who’re interested in reading my blog over social networks like Facebook and Twitter, compared to using email marketing, is that the conversation is more real-time and dynamic in nature. (It doesn’t hurt that conversion rates are several magnitudes higher too).

If you’re not already using twitter, whether it’s to get feedback or to start a conversation (having a goal or outcome helps…), then perhaps it’s time that you should.

And as for the follower benchmarks you’re hitting, please paste it in your excel spreadsheet and time/date stamp it if it makes you happy, that’s one bit of information the twitterverse can do without.

Also, check out this recent post on enhancing your twittering efforts from a guest TechCrunch post by Digg founder and Twitter investor Kevin Rose.

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter.

Obviously blog spam in the form of useless comments would be posting “Need Russian bride? Visit this website, good price, many selection. http://……ru”

That ends up in the spam bin immediately. (If it hadn’t already been filtered out by my Akismet or Bad Neighborhood filters).

What isn’t as clear are response like “good post”, “interesting” and “I will read this”.

I’d use a simple “letters to the newspaper editor” test – would you realistically expect a comment to be published if you mailed it to the editor of your local paper, responding to an article in the paper?

If you wouldn’t then, why would you choose to post it in a blog comments section?

Is it merely to see your name in “web print”?

Even if the intent is to post an obviously off-topic comment in hopes that someone will clickthrough to your affliate link/phishing site, the effort is wasted.

Even if the blogger doesn’t wipe the comment off with a click of the “delete” button, who’s to say that any reader will click on your link, even if the anchor text is “SoCal Beach Bunny”?

Social media is a double-edged sword, you can easily establish yourself as the leader in your space through the power of blogging and participation in community sites and forums.

At the same time, if you are facing a serious credibility challenge, web 2.0 can be equally ruthless in exposing every blemish, scar and imperfection in your “social media” campaign.

Although I don’t fully agree with Jason Calacanis’ arguments that the Internet is being polluted with affiliate spam, I do think of my blog as my virtual home and like to “curate” or censor out the junk that doesn’t add value to the blog reading experience.

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For ideas on building a sucessful blog-based business, check out my Secret Blog Weapon program.

Though it’s a social medium, success in Web 2.0 is ultimately about building a long-term relationship (personal or business) with your readers and your community. And that’s going to pay handsome dividends.

Anything else and you’re just fooling around.

As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.

In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.

So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.

Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?

Here’s an example of what I mean:

My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.

How do I decide if I approve a friend request?

First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.

Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?

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If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.

A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.

Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.

Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?

The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?

I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.

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So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?

The love dance doesn’t end once you get in the “inner circle”. If anything, that’s when the work begins.

My focus remains to bring value to the table.

What’s “value”? It’s anything useful that will help the other person – perhaps a relevant blog post, report, video that relates to the person’s interest (personal, business or otherwise).

That’s what search engines do their best to replicate, don’t they? Serve up appropriate results.

Any relationship will improve if “stuff” going in, improves the relationship.  If you focus on improving the relationship, you can expect good things to come out of it.

What’re some no-no’s when it comes to building a relationship?

Here are 3 top cardinal sins to avoid:

• Being Irrelevant:Being accepted into a “friends” group means that there is some commonality between you and me. Serving me irrelevant and unrelated information or offers (even if it’s a highly profitable affiliate offer) will kill the relationship some, especially if it’s way out of what I focus on.
• Pulling Favors Too Quickly: Whether physical or virtual, there’s a comfort zone related to what people are willing to do. If we just became friends yesterday, and you send me an email asking to mail all my lists with your offer, I would probably do it if it was compelling, and I believed in the product or service. Asking someone to do something for the sake of doing it (even for the “highest payouts” reason often cited) is a bad practice in my books.
• Following Up: UFO marketers are really irritating. And they really should get their email systems fixed. When they need something from you, they send emails leading off with “Hey buddy! How’s it going? Here’s an offer you want to look at”. And when you send them an email, you don’t get a timely reply (and sometimes don’t get a reply at all). I have a blacklist, it might be good to stay off it. If it’s a consolation, Donald Trump talks about being stood up in his book “How To Get Rich“. How do you deal with these people? Just ignore them and move on, says the Donald.

Being a successful social marketer is not a difficult task. What makes it difficult is when marketers forget some of the simple rules and get themselves into a world of unnecessary difficulty.

The unfortunate part is that these troubles were likely of their own making.


Friday Podcast 12 Oct 2007: The Web 2.0 Face Off