It’s true! Having provided training for major brands to one man bands I am offering significant insights coupled with practical implementation on how to use Social Media to drive business to your enterprise. I am aiming at a cross section of individuals, I explain more in this video:

To apply, click here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/396D8V9

One thing that amazes is me is how so many people are not adjusting to the way Social Media works.

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

You might find this video irreverent – well, to some, that is what short cuts are…

This Video was fun to produce although it has a serious message. I was marooned in Miami on my way back from Costa Rica.

Apart from the really nice people that I met, I found I was hearing the same stories, stories of business failure and difficulty. I also heard yet again how at least one of these businesses was saved. A familiar story to me, but I realise that so many people have not heard it so it is worth recalling.

On this occassion I also had the wonder of some fabulous backdrops. Also I found just a little bit of footage on YouTube that you just might recognise

I find myself ‘marooned in Miami’. Whilst here, I am keen to meet the people, to be a culture vulture and basically breath all I can Miami whilst here… You know, I am getting a bit of sun, squeezing it in…

Well, I told everyone where I was and how I was stranded as a result of the Icelandic volcano erruptions. Rjon responded with an email lifeline to let me know I was not alone and there were friendly natives in the area.

First thing: I checked out his website and it is top of the range. RJon arrived in his huge car with his wife Alee to pick me up. We had an afternoon of lunch and brainstorming, so much fun.

Before our meeting up I had just got off the phone from a client who has had 300+ visitors in the last 8 weeks all from a Tweetmaxi Squeeze page. Great case study, 11 opt-ins. That’s 3% and out of those at least three have led to further conversations. Huge value. So I was buzzing with excitement and it was great to explain this to Rjon and his wife.

Before we move on, let me Introduce you to Rjon in this short video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We had a great time, talking about all the latest in Social Media. What we were doing for our clients and all the successes they are having as a result.

Now you would not get that if you were nothing but authentic. The numbers are small, but when the quality is high, the results can be big.

Wow! Long story short: Lunch lasted all afternoon in the warm Miami Sun. It was all business – we even talked about running an impromptu seminar on Friday, to take advantage of me being in town – and I this would help them develop their business too.

Now I have introduced you to Rjon let me whizz through his site for you too. One look at his site and you will see why I had to meet up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rjon’s site is such a great example of a squeeze page built for professional services – it is based on a WordPress theme. No wonder he is the Happy Lawyer.

Well it turns out that Coconut Grove is Miami ‘village’ – you know the cool part of town. I have landed on my feet here. Some one made the comment that I seem to have the habit of being able to make lemonade out lemons. Don’t you just love that phrase – all american.

Can’t wait to get back, but meantime it looks like I have a gig brewing for Friday, here in Miami. Then, hopefully I will get on the plane and head back or no doubt, they will have me run another, maybe virtual next time, but great to be here in person, fantastic hosts.

BA, take your time.

I had the great pleasure of listening to Jessica Jackley at Undergound 6, in Washington DC this weekend and she explained how Kiva has been able to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Take a look at Kiva where you will see through an through social media working toward providing real support for people suffering the effects of poverty being helped by Social Media.

The site itself deserves inspection, rather than a description here, the best thing you can do, is visit the site – and you can follow their success and fun on Twitter @kiva

Kevin Weil over at Twitter is reporting that they have a measurement Tweets Per Second. Right now they are showing over 50m Tweets per day! I make that more than 2 million Tweets an hour!

When we look closely at the TPS (Tweets per second) chart it reveals that about only six months ago the number was less than 10m Tweets Per Day, just half a million per hour.

By anyones count that is massive growth and just goes to demonstrate that you have to be in it to win it.

But of course, there is more to it than that. The TPS (Tweets per second) measurement does not account for Tweet deliveries which are a much much higher number because once created, each Tweet is delivered to multiple followers.

Then there is search, monitoring and so many other ways to measure and understand growth. watch this space folks.

Quix puts Bookmarklets on Steroids. Google Analytics for WordPress author Joost de Valk gives us Quix.

Quix is the latest in a generation of bookmarklet tools. Looking just like a bookmark on your browser, the tool offers integration with your Social Media and favourite bookmark software as well as SEO and Webmaster insights on any site you visit. It even offers a ruler, so you can measure things on screen, should you need…

It is easy to install and if you ever get stuck you just type in help and it takes you to a page that shows you all the commands that you can use.

Even I managed to install it, it costs nothing and has to be a hit! Find out more: Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids

Just in case you were still wondering if ROI – Return On Investment from social media was possible, this short video gets straight to the point.

The Video features loads of well known brands from Ford to Dell who have all used Social Media to generate sales and grow their businesses – using lower marketing budgets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the author of the video, Erik Qualman asks, “Why are we trying to measure Social Media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches ever facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics”

“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in Social Media. The old media parading was Pay to Play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to Play to Play.”
Alex Bogusky, Co Chairman, CP&B

“No more Spray and Pray” Gary Jennings, Weboptimiser.

“Think of Twitter as the canary of the coal mine” Morgan Johnston, JetBlue Airways

My favourite quote, apart from Garys is from MacDonalds, “our head of social media is the customer”

Recently, as you may have noticed, Twitter has introduced some quality changes that seems to range from deletion of mass accounts and the suspension of accounts that appear to contain the wrong type of tweets. For a long time we have known that Twitter is capabable and active in suspending poor accounts but more recently there seems to have been more activity by Twitter that all adds up in our opinion to make Twitter a better place.

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.