Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

vacation during August

I will be away on vacation from July 30th to August 16th, so sorry - no posts during that time - have a great summer!

Twitter for Business

My previous post mentioned tools from "The Twitter Book". Here are some business marketing tips from the book. The main points 1-20 are from the book - the annotations are my interpretations...

1. Listen first - if you do nothing else at least use some of the tools mentioned in my previous post to track what people are saying about you

2. Have clear goals - is it for acquisition, loyalty, revenue generation, thought leadership...?

3. Integrate with other channels - make sure messages are consistent with your blogs, social media etc, consider the role of Twitter in your mix

4. Start slow, then build - dip your toe in the water, does it work for you?

5. Figure out who is your twitterer - who is passionate, knowledgeable, patient...?

6. Reveal the person behind the curtain - don't hide, who is writing it? Show who you are in the profile section

7. Manage multiple staff twitterers - if more than one of you is tweeting, then co-ordiante and think about the role of each of you, also link to each other to get more followers following each of you

8. Coordinate multiple accounts - at least know what your colleagues are saying and don't contradict, promote their offers if relevant

9. Make your brand findable - call your account by your company/brand name - put your personal name in the profile

10. Be converstaional - ask questions, invite replies, ask for suggestions...

11. Retweet your customers - if they have something valuable to say, then credit them and share it

12. Offer solid customer support - give advice & tips on common or current issues

13. Post mostly NOT about your company - talk, don't sell, be a thought leader

14. Link to your own sites - if you have some valuable insights / research / white papers on your web site or blog, then link to them

15. Make money on Twitter - copy Dell - promote offers and deals, maybe set up a separate twitter account for these commercial offers, keep the thought leadership separate

16. Communicate problems and resolutions fast - retweeting means word travels fast, see how quickly photos of the plane in the Hudson river were around Twitter

17. Post personal updates - even if it is a corporate account, post some personal opinions / news, but not your vacation photos! It is not Facebook

18. Engage journalists and PR people - follow your industry opinion formers and hope they follow you, also follow HARO

19. Follow people who follow you - it is good manners!

20. Use Twist to monitor topic frequency - see my previous blog post for more and a link on this one

Twitter Tips & Tools

Just read a great little book - "The Twitter Book" by Tim O'Reilly & Sarah Milstein. It is practical, simple and pragmatic. It also has lots of useful tips and suggests loads of free tools.

Here are some highlights, I have been updating my Twitter feed with Twitter related stuff, so you can check that out too. My twitter name is njbaggott.

First tool is Twhirl - I am now using this to manage my Twitter account - makes the business of sending personal messages, retweeting etc much easier

Twist does the same job as google Insights for search only on Twitter, just put in a name, word or phrase and Twist will tell you how many times people are using them on Twitter. Great for looking at trends. The example on the link abovew shows how the word "Flintoff" has been used more and more as the Ashes cricket takes centre stage in UK sport.

Tweetstats looks at any Twittterer and provides some useful stats on post frequency, content etc. The example is showing a Tweet Cloud for Will Carling's Twitter feed.

There are some great tips for using Twitter for business in the book too and i'll probably post those later if i get the time....

Google's free web tools

Thanks to Dave Chaffey for reminding me...

Here is the Google Agency Toolkit page that lists all of the tools that they offer for free. Insights for search is the most well known and useful, but a good range here to try...

Bing is here...Microsoft's new search engine

Microsoft has launched a beta version of Bing. It is their new search engine - designed to take on Google.

It is early days, I did a quick search, looking up Nick Baggott and found the results to be much more out of date than Google. Whereas all of the Google page are recent sites or articles about me - my blog, my web site, twitter feed, facebook page, IT Toolbox, Microsoft Partner network etc (all current and live), Bing was headed up by by Chemistry blog and chemistry's web site - I left Chemistry 2 years ago now. So, on that small test, it is not as accurate as google.

However, I do like the "related searches" column, which helps you find what you need quicker. When searching for "Reading" it had a related search for "Reading FC", then when you click on that, the related searches were "Reading FC tickets", "Hob Nob - the RFC fan site" etc. This could be useful.

What Bing needs is users and it is chicken and egg. Until you get users, you don't get a good consumer experience and vice versa... 

By the way, Bing is the sound your mind makes when it solves a problem i.e. aha, bing! I have found it - apparently!

Microsoft's brand new answer to Google's Insights for Search

Microsoft has just launched a new tool that plugs into Excel that allows you, not only to count how many people are searching for your brand (or your competitors') on Windows Live Search, but also to learn more about them.

It uses your Microsoft Live ID (used to be called a Microsoft passport) to add demographic variables. Everyone that has a hotmail, or MSN Messenger or Windows Live Spaces account, will have a Live ID, so the sample is pretty representative.

As the number of users is lower than Google, then i would recommend using Google to define absolute numbers, but if you are a big enough brand to show up on the stats in the Microsoft tool, then this a very useful free tool.

The neat thing is that as it is an Excel plug in (and is free) then you can take the data and manipulate it, graph it, rank it, combine it etc.

Why not check it out for yourself (proving you have Office 2007 as it doesn't work on previous editions - but you can download a free trial copy of 2007 on the site).

It has a vanity URL and is called "let search make you smarter" at the moment.