We all know that the best way to treat social media is to engage. I see so many people still broadcasting. There is a fine line, as I certainly use Social media to tell people about certain events and even on this occassion (by no means all) I have let my Twitter ‘followers’ know about this article.

My problem is when someone sends you an encoded link ( I do this ) and that link is an affiliate link (I do not do that). In other words people are just tell selling – i.e. they are not talking to you, they are not bothering to engage, they are just promoting an affiliate link.

Just in case there is any doubt: The way to do it is to invite people to do something that sounds like it may, if even in small fraction have some good, valuable, useful content in it.

The essence of social media is to extend a hand to help people out, to share information, to educate, to enable a two way communication. Not ‘tell sell’.

I appreciate that my way may be more time consuming. For my part, reaching, through engagement I have made genuine friends and developed some serious business relationships this way. I would love to hear from people who have succeeded both ways. Maybe both is correct???

It always makes me think when I see ‘tell selling’ in action – “there goes someone who does not know what they are doing”. Or is it me? Have I got something to learn. I would love to hear of your results because I bet there is something I am missing here. I am always willing to learn. In pursuit of success, glad to be wrong even.

This is an area that I really do not fancy testing, as it just feels wrong. Tell me your experiences?

For more top tips in Affiliate Marketing, come visit Affiliate Top Tips.com

Tougher to do business in, but a better place. It all started a few months back with Tweetlater, now known as SocialOomph rejecting the automation of identical tweets and just a few weeks ago the update of user terms and conditions in a mass email sent out to all account holders. It would now seem that this email was a kind of early warning and that failure to follow Twitter ‘Rules’ could result in an account being suspended and in the worst case deleted.

You may wonder why it would matter. It matters if you are a genuine account holder and you have tuned the account for business development – or just enjoy talking to many followers. To lose a long list of followers would be quite a loss, not to mention that the name of the account may be precious and of course, for some, a high number of followers infers bragging rights.

As can be seen by the graph below the more followers you have the more tweets people make.

So now we know the main changes and some of what affects the quality of a twitter account, what can we do? – In a phrase – tweet more often! It seems that not only should your tweets be unique but the majority should be conversational and not include any links.

The acid test to me is that your tweets should ideally be RT’d (re-tweeted: forwarded by others). I am pleased to say that on many occassions our ‘offer’ tweets, those that contain links are RT’d across the Twittersphere.

These are technical considerations but where does that leave the time poor business man who is interested in Tweeting for fun whilst building up their network. Well I am pleased to say, still in the game!

These ‘rules’ are my suggestions based on my opinion and experience. Indeed, as we concluded with SEO and Pay Per Click, we can conclude that there are certain ethics appropriate to Twitter marketing that should be employed for best practice.

Twitter account holders needing to be more inventive and creative is not such a bad thing and in my opinion should help the market place. Twitter account holders need to create more offers and tweet more often.

So to help, we have compiled a database of 2800 ideas, quotes and jokes and set up a twitter account where we will twitter one idea, joke or quote daily. You can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/dailytweetideas or simply check in for some instant inspiration.

For clients we deliver a unique set of 3 jokes, 3 quotes and one idea per day – plus bonus information – only useful to subscribers… It is possible for you to simply retweet the ideas and in the case of quotes and jokes that is all you can do. The objective however is to provide a joke, quote and an idea in order to spark your creative juices in order to lead you to use the quote, joke or idea as a stimulus to create a unique twitter blog post, standard blog post or even as I have discovered, to create video content.

Of course, quotes and jokes by definition are worth repeating and are not unique by and of themselves and simply retweeting is a possible option, but not the best one. The best outcome would be for them to work as a conversation starter that will lead to ongoing relationship building.

The intention is to ensure your twitter account is original and has varying tweets, some with links, the majority – 85% without.

The safest thing to autotweet is a quote. It is harder to autotweet a joke as jokes can have many meanings and often offend as well as entertain as a number of comedians have found out. The joke above, will no doubt offend some of the French, although not intentioned, it serves as an example that could cause some offence.

Jokes are not always good for business either. Everyone will have a different opinion on this, but in my opinion, a light hearted approach with serious intent generally works well.

With regard to tweets with links, we need to get more creative. Often I find we are limited to what we can tweet as Clients usually have a limit of ideas and offers we can tweet about.

I have created a mind map dedicated to digital product development that you can download and use as the basis for creating digital proposals to attract enquiries.

It is intended that this mind map is only available to fee paying clients, so I can’t give you all the answers here. You can sign up as a Tweetmaxi client and you will get access to this and a ton of other resource material.

Most of the ideas outlined requires clients to do nothing apart from watch their in-box and let us know how they would like the content delivered.

If you would like us to help you further with idea development please note that this is a chargeable service that we are happy to provide if you want more help.

However, on balance, the truth will out and the truth has outed, probably in part because of social media, I will test that in a moment… The key issue as I understand it is the main founder of FaceBook stole the code from his employer. Now, he was unwise to do that as it is not an ethical foundation to a business and it seems he has paid the price.

This is only half the reason I am posting. You see, this whole scenario has happened to me. Staff have left and lied and have been discovered to run off with clients. They have seduced other members of staff and set up in competition and this has been, to put it mildly a very expensive waste of time. They have willingly and knowingly signed lengthy contracts agreeing that they will not do this, yet gone ahead on the basis that they might find a loop hole? Why would they even consider this as a reasonable course of action, they must not be thinking clearly.

I have written to all those involved and left it to them to make good. They have decided not to make and they are calling my bluff – to see what I would do? So now I have to make the decision to proceed, I have all the evidence, I have given them the opportunity to make good…

I have to admit, when things happen as personal as this, it makes you think much more about the best course of action to take. Did they mean it, was it an accident, would it have happened anyway and what is the real cost? Does it matter?

Whatever the reasons, it has certainly cost and at the end of the day it was their decision to break the terms of our agreement. But when I read about actual cases and we start to see just how much compensation has been won and also how embarrassing it must be to the people who committed the crimes. It is a shame that their careers have been ruined because they could not maintain a basic agreement that they entered into as adults. It has to stop, I have to take a stand, I cannot continue to help others, for those people to then bite the hand that feeds them.

In the case of FaceBook the cost has been the shame through the public notifications that have occurred and millions of dollars have been awarded against them, I understand. In my case I have seriously considered cancelling my account with FaceBook. I know I am not alone, we could be witnessing the demise of FaceBook.

Ultimately I have decided not to cancel my account with FaceBook and this is why I feel comfortable writing about it. They have paid the price, the quality of the software is not in question, just the ethics of the team behind it – heavy stuff – for them – not me. They have to work that one out for themselves, there is no one else to blame. Ultimately the law has won through and those whose invention it was have been rewarded as they should have been.

Also I have to say I like the application. I have recently been talking to my first born via FaceBook, after 21 years of separation, so to give that up is not something I am in a hurry to do.

I must admit to finding it difficult for the people that I had personal working relationships with to knowing and willingly break their trust with me. Their actions demonstrate their true selves and demonstrate their immoral and unethical attitudes to the world – their problem has become mine. It does not have to stay with me, there is a just world out there. It is they who are caught with their hands in my till. I have already paid the price – upfront! Now it is right that they will pay the price for their actions. We need laws, as the final protection when ethics, morals, common sense fail… I am very sorry to say I just feel that we have no choice in the matter the choice has already been made and there is a well trodden path to the law courts with many companies winning their cases for this kind of disloyalty.

I just read two excellent descriptions of the word FEAR – False Evidence Appearing Real or False Education Appearing Real, the latter describes the kind of people that perpetrate these crimes. They clearly cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. They cannot determine for themselves how they should behave, so ultimately I, like we all actually have to do as law abiding citizens have no choice, we have to go with the law.

There is a further issue to this. I have noticed in my conversations with other people about FaceBook that they are cancelling their accounts, but in spite of doing this FaceBook are keeping the information. FaceBook are continuing to display information after the person who supplied it has decided that they should not have it any more. They feel tricked. I feel tricked, I have become the unwitting victim of their betrayal. Is it right that I should constantly watch my back whilst trying to move forward, I dont think I can afford that, indeed it would blight all our lives if we had to live this way.

Indeed there have been a few reversal of terms and conditions recently at FaceBook it would seem. They should be ashamed, there is something wrong at the heart of these people for them to think that they can get away with it – it is a warning to others including those that “will do no evil”. I think that they should jump up and do something to make good, but it seems neither are about to do that. No doubt they would be afraid that it would amount to an admission – as they probably imagine it is someones else fault. Or it could be that FEAR coming through again.

I think we might be witnessing the fall from grace of some very interesting software, that definitely has the ability to work very well. The same for the people who used to work for me and who I have no choice in pursuing, I have a family to protect, not least of which are the current staff, friends and clients of my businesses. Watch out all those that work with these type of people in the future, I am glad they have left!

It is obviously a sad reflection of society that these cases exist and are very real. I have to meter it though with the fact that this is not the behaviour of the vast majority of service websites as it is not the behaviour of most employees and partners.

I know I am not alone, it is with some irony that we are able to match online corporate behaviour with offline human behaviour. It is interesting to note that when you are caught with your hands in the online till that you are reported offline. That ultimately there is no escape for the immoral and that people do get the justice that they deserve and that  online and offline, at times, merge.

I would like to know if any other have had any difficult experiences like these, as I think that they should be out there in order to remind people this is not how to behave… I would also like to know if and how such situations are resolved. What can we do to protect ourselves. What can we do to ensure that things like this never ever happen again?

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans, over 800,000 people have viewed Durex videos 2m times. Later in their post they talk about “the theme of sex being a proven winner on YouTube”. It works for me.

As well as the reader numbers – which is tv quantity of traffic if ever there was,  more than “400 blogs have seen fit to link to the ad or comment on it in some way. That’s pretty good buzz on the cheap”. Plus the sensors can’t really stop it – or I and probably more that 400 others are likely to be arrested…

If you are arrested by my opinion I think it is funny and very definitely toilet humour. It is also product centric and it has succeeded in getting the message into the public eye. Would I like to commission something similar, yes I would. I would love to have the opportunity! In my dreams – it is just a matter of time until our video team pull something like this off.

But many marketing conversations are all about achieving results where we try to work out how to best ‘sex it up’. The key top tip here, something we  discovered once we invested in our video production unit that when we undertake video projects more gets said in less words. We already know that video’s embedded in posts get watched more often…

Admittedly there are other just funny videos that work well, and not all brands lend themselves to sexual reference. But if this is an extreme, what is the other extreme? a big gorilla selling chocolate? How was that humour? Sexual?

Your opinion?

The key mantra seems to be that it is not spam if it is not overt. Apparently the purpose of business is to make money. Therefore if Corporate online promotion is overt, all advertising could be considered spam.

Is it just big business? I got that link from a twitterer that I follow, who then went on to bookmark some sites that were set up by freelancers in her technorati account. If you are watching, I started out as a freelancer – bookmark Weboptimiser!

Then there are the success that spam has brought. Don’t get me wrong, I have never knowingly spammed, but I have sought, encouraged and created links. Here is an article from searchenginewatch on SEO spam, where Eli Feldblum describes how some of the big social media sites have benefited from Spam.

I did not write the comment, but I can see both sides of the story here. I also hate receiving a ton of email every day – literally over 500 emails a day that are just rubbish. That is email Spam. However, my email client does an excellent job of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. So yes I personally suffer from Spam, but I get over it, every day, easily. WordPress blogs (like this one) have software built in as standard to gaurd against blog spam. So if I turn it off, I will get more spam… I can deal with that too!

Apparently Email spam slowed down recently when a major spam ring got busted. Although I am genuinely sorry to hear of people suffering from phishing, it seems ironic that the same thing that helps so many people can cause some to get arrested. Brit humour?

Today’s key point: At the end of the day I think it comes down to personal responsibility coupled with understanding. I literally discuss personal responsibility with my seven year old son. He understands it! If you are aware, cognisant and feel comfortable in the way you manage and consider spam, then all well and good. If you knowingly abuse, then you deserve what you get. This applies everywhere to everything…

I was fascinated to find Eli’s article. On rummaging around I found some other guideline links: check out Yahoo, Altavista and Google webmaster guidelines (all refer to SEO spam). Is PPC spam a new definition for click fraud? I would be interesting in expanding this, not because I want to teach people how to spam, but more to explore the boundaries and help clear up the debate on what is in and what is out…

I recently read Stephen Dennys post Social Capital: Social Media, The Science of Influence, and How to Blow it on Twitter which I think describs the feelings and sensations that bad use of twitter can engender, I like the idea of how to blow it, rather than black and white spam or not spam. I think the concept of opt out is as important as opt-in. Oops, just lost all my followers.

If you are still reading, I recommend this book by Robert b.Cialdini -Influence – the psychology of persuasion… Now as it happens I should be pretty annoyed with Amazon… I ordered the book by following someone elses link and later, received both a soft copy and a hard copy! paid twice, once expensively! However, all is forgiven, I have one copy – the hard copy (the expensive one) for all to see in the office and one – the soft copy – I read at home. Thanks Amazon. Enjoy!