My New BFF: Guy Kawasaki

Okay so maybe he doesn’t consider me to be his new best friend but I swore I felt a connection. I did get to shake his hand and joke with him. Actually, he joked and I laughed. I met him at the Search Engine Strategies NY Conference that covers all the cutting edge SES strategies. Kawasaki was just one speaker of tons. I wrote this while waiting to hear from Ariel Bardin from Google talk on launching a new adwords interface. But yesterday it was “all Guy” and that is truly a beautiful thing.

This is the post I wrote for my marketing blog for the NJ State LIbrary and wanted to share it with our readers here. Enjoy! -Nancy

I’ll admit that I’d been on the fringe with Twitter- using it for conferences, rolling out special event messages, etc. But after hearing Guy in person, I am totally psyched to use if for marketing! Essentially he believes the best way to market with Twitter is to get lots of people following you and he covered 10 ways to make that happen. Some are a bit entailed but you have to realize he spends his entire day monitoring his sites- something most of will NOT have the time to do.

So here goes:

Using twitter for marketing
Remember - “Twitter is just a tool”

He started with the saying, "Nobodies are the new some bodies. On Twitter everyone gets their 140 characters."

Guy came to twittering late but now that he’s here he believes it is most powerful tool since TV- you can reach millions and it’s free. He calls it a true democratization of marketing.

1.Forget the A List
Use the “bubbling up” philosophy – you don’t know who the best evangelist is going to be for your product. Allow them to find you. You don’t have to ignore the big guys- but they won’t make you, it is the person in the community, the person you don’t know but who loves what you do that will bubble up for you.

2. Defocus- you never know who will carry the banner for you so be open to every possibility.

3. Get lots of followers. Twitter is a numbers game; you need lots of followers so people can bubble up. Guy spent some time arguing his theory over the “Twitter is about relationships” theory.

He explored the question of whether you should you follow everyone who follows you and answered it with a resounding, “Yes!” I loved that he felt it was inherently arrogant of someone to think that anyone would want to follow them were not good enough to consider following them. Of course, whenever Guy says something like that there is always that sparkle in his eyes that les you know there’s another piece to what he’s saying. Sure enough, while he may give the courtesy of following everyone, he uses Social Too to allow him to track only the tweets that matter to him. In all fairness he also follows everyone because it enables people to direct message him, In fact he ONLY deals with @ and directs.

• What is the goal and how do you measure what you are doing? Measure how many times you are retweeted. RETWEETIST measures how many retweets you get “Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery.” So it’s not only the number of followers but also how many times they retweet you. Another tool he mentioned was Twitalizer lists the “most influential people on Twitter”

3. Content
You’re going to love this one. According to Guy the best way to get people to follow you is to create interesting content. But it doesn’t have to be your content, as a matter of fact; he advocates that you find interesting content on the web by using sites like Stumble Upon and Alltop.

His system: He finds a link, goes to Adjix where the link will be shortened, adds a little teaser like, Hey, check out this neat site and Adjix ends it for him. Adjix will even track how many retweets he gets. He says there’s a person for every interesting tweet and proved his point by tweeting about peanut butter. Sure enough in a matter of seconds, it was being retweeted! Of course I think he probably has more success than the average person due to his celebrity but it does make sense of will probably work for us mere mortals in a lesser capacity.

I just signed up this morning and have found it an incredibly easy way to forward all those great articles I'm reading without having to write a long blog post. Love it!!!


4. Monitor what people are saying about you.
Create a dedicated search on Goggle. –He has an ongoing search for guykawasaki or alltop-allyop.com. Want Guy to follow up on your Tweet? He will, try it!

5. Copy what people are doing/best practices
Start at Twibs- tracks what people are doing on Twitter
See what they are doing and copy what they are doing!

GREAT EXAMPLES:
Comcast Cares- monitors whatever people says and answers
Libraries could do this very easily- find out what people are saying and offer response.

Jet Blue Airline- it’s not the CEO but is someone at the company –They are promoting short-term sales- deal of the day!

Cirque Las Vegas- keeps up to date information about shows. Another possibility for libraries is to Tweet new titles, programs, etc.


6. Use Twitter Search to find people who are talking about your keywords– this is where you really kick in.
1. Twitter- simple search. “library” ongoing then tweet if you can answer.
2. Advanced search “and” or” miles, within zip code If you are a muffler company and search within 50 miles of zip code great direct marketing. For the best SEO-enter the box " within x miles". You can convert 1 out of 10 tweets by using that feature.

7. Get the right tools
1. Tweet Deck: First column all direct messages, 2nd column searches, 3rd search for SEO. Hit magnifier glass; add search then makes another column
LIMITATION- can only be in one account at time- so Guy uses Twirl
TWIRL- monitors 2 accounts- direct messages- monitors search under Alltop subtract retweets.

Narrow focus by subtracting what will give you false results.
Choose not to put all stuff in one account so you don’t burden
Push links verses spam- would prefer Tweetdeck if could use multiple accounts if he could see all responses in one pane.

Tynt- the greatest lie is, ”its only one line of java script” adds to
When people copy your text, it adds a link to the original source. That is a beautiful thing- adds to more traffic, gets content and link.
Tynt tracks how many paragraphs were copies- very useful.

8. Squeeze the trigger on Twitter- the height of squeezing the trigger for Kawasaki is twitterhawk. He says it is a truly interesting thing- can set up searches that automatically create tweets that respond to it. (Yes, it might be a little too Black Hat for most of us but the other limitation it that it costs 5 cents for each sending.

9. Make it easy to share
Alltop- shares this – they create a twit for you. Highly recommends that you have a link so people can share directly to Facebook and twitter.
If you give too many choice I think people get overwhelmed”

Twitterfeed
Put in an rss feed and account will automatically feed to your twitter.

10. Take the heat if you use twitter as a tool. Kawasaki hinted that he's been called a certain four-letter word that rhymes with "kick" many times during the presentation. It does make sense because he likes to push the boundaries and for many who like to play the "follow the rules” game, his actions might offend. So Kawasaki has a three-letter response he likes to send those who like to say he's a scammer or worse… UFM.

It stands for: Un follow me :-)

Everyone loved him and several times since the talk Twitter has been on overload, which just validates how much on target he might just be.