The keynote address from Guy Kawasaki, “Nobodies are the New Somebodies,” at SESNY 2009 was about how Twitter can be used as a marketing tool.
Here are the key points from Guy’s talk…
- Forget the A-list – it is vastly overrated.
- De-focus – you don’t know who will be your most important followers.
- Get lots of followers
Guy related how Robert Scoble told him to auto-follow anybody that follows him, and he uses SocialToo to do this. He never unfollows people.
He explained that the reason he auto-follows everybody is his lack of arrogance, and so that everybody can direct message him.
But then he went into a sanctimonious rant, which seems to be common with the preachers of auto-follow, that it’s somehow wrong to only follow certain people vs. all.
He went on to say that he doesn’t actually read the full Twitter-stream of those followers, but does respond to all DM’s and @ replies.
So, he follows everybody out of a lack of arrogance, but can’t be bothered to read what they are Tweeting unless it involves him? So why is that morally superior to following a smaller core of people and actually reading all their Tweets?
Whatever.
Some tools he mentioned to keep score of his follower tally: TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and Twitter Penis.
Guy cites a steady stream of useful content as key to continually bring on new followers.
One of his strategies is to go to StumbleUpon and Alltop to find stuff there to Tweet. He uses Adjix to shorten and track his URLs. In addition to tracking, it has a scheduling function and a Firefox bookmarklet.
This helps to get people to ReTweet posts, and he also uses Retweetist to monitor RT’s.
- Monitor what people are saying about you
Guy monitors the following query on Twitter search: guykawasaki OR alltop -alltop.com
- Copy
Watch what other companies are doing and emulate their success on Twitter. But how to figure out who to copy? See twibs to track what companies are doing on Twitter.
Some examples of good corporate accounts on Twitter:
@comcastcares
@jetblue
@amazondeals
@cirquelasvegas - Search
Guy talked about how he didn’t really get Twitter until somebody showed him Summize and the ability to search.
Examples of finding people in certain geographic areas for business leads:
scion near:10019 within:100mi
seo near:10019 within:100mi - Get the tools
TweetDeck, though he doesn’t like the limitation of monitoring one account at a time. So, he also uses Twhirl, so he can monitor and post with two accounts: @guykawasaki and @alltop.
He explained that @alltop is for him to spam and @guykawasaki is for him to push good links.
Also, CoTweet for companies where multiple people need to be in a Twitter account.
- Squeeze the trigger
He prefaced this one by saying it was bound to be controversial… TwitterHawk.com, which enables you to set up searches and then automatically post tweets to respond to other Tweets with your keywords in them.
He joked that it is the “ultimate spamming tool”. Not sure what the joke is there – that’s exactly what it is.
Guy gave an example where whenever there is a search for Britney Spears, he auto-posts to tell people to go to a page on Alltop about Britney.
He opts to manually approve the Tweets, so they don’t go to people that are Tweeting negatively about a given subject, because these posts cost $0.05 each.
Guy mentioned that Twitterhawk records when you’ve sent a Tweet to somebody, so you don’t send more than one to them.
- Make it easy to share
Have a link on your site to share content on Twitter – he has these on AllTop.
Also, he uses Twitterfeed to enable people to sign up to have his Alltop News Feed posts appear in their Twitter account. So far, 590 people have opted for this feature.
And Guy claims lots of people have told him that they have more conversations going on, because of his auto-Tweets, as they are more interesting than their own Tweets. Sad.
He mentioned that he got a custom setup from Twitterfeed, and thinks it is a good option if you have lots of evangelists.
- Take the heat: UFM
Guy finished with his perspective that if somebody doesn’t like your tweets, tell them: UFM = unfollow me.
And lastly, his take on spam is that if he does it, it’s clever marketing. If somebody does it to him, it’s spam.
LOL. Unfollow.
You can get a PDF of his presentation from gina@garage.com.
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I got the answer for you on that weight loss question 1st thing tomorrow morning before I hit the gym.
http://www.ShawnDrewry.com/theceo.php
Just like any panel sessions, I think that the most important thing is to take what you want and leave what you don’t want. I did find out several cool Twitter tools from this session and summarized them on my site.
I actually like to engage as many as people possible on Twitter, so I choose not to auto-follow anyone (for now) even though that may save me lots of time!
While my stack of money is certainly smaller than Guy’s, I cannot believe that he would stoop to such spamming black hat levels of social media practices.
In reality, if you are following everyone using a program like Tweetdeck to filter out the “noise” you are NOT really following everyone. There is no way that can follow 500+ people and be actively engaged in their world. Of course this is assuming you do anything other than sit on Twitter all day long 24/7. What a fraud!
If your goal is social interaction with your audience and If you are following 500+ people you have absolutely no business posture in your marketplace. In my opinion, there needs to be a certain amount distance between you and your followers. Do you see people respecting Brittney Spears? No. Wouldn’t you feel differently about her if all you saw was her music persona, CD’s, award acceptances and professional appearances? I believe their is respect to be found in NOT following everyone.
If you are a company sending out sales, promos, freebies and such the previous paragraph does not apply. Your goal would be completely different. Most likely purely commercial with barely any, if any, personal fluff. In this case we would expect you to follow everyone or no one without any illusion that you were listening to us.
Blessings,
Wendy
I personally got a lot out of what Guy said at SES 2009 and it is great to have a follow up to help remind me. I was in the back and it was so tight, note taking was impossible.
Thanks for the summary and the email for a pdf. Someone was videoing the talk and I hope it shows on YouTube- send a tweet if it does, please.
Your Message@Murray Newlands:
Which is why he shouldn’t auto follow everyone and preach that kind of fakeness.
Very interesting and revelling post Shawn. In fairness you probably could not physical ready the twitter stream coming from one hundred thousand people.
Your Message@Jon DiPietro:
I think Guy is most certainly a hypocrite for castigating people that don’t follow everybody that follows him, when he’s not actually following those 92k followers of his.
He has SocialToo set to pretend he is following them, but he never reads a single tweet from these people, unless it shows up in his search query.
Fine that he wants to do it that way, but lame to come down on people that follow a select group for real vs. 92k in fantasy land.
Guy is the least hypocritical person on Twitter. He’s completely up front about how and why he does what he does. It has nothing to do with moral superiority, or moral anything… it’s business. Period. That’s his point. He uses Twitter to self-promote and doesn’t apologize for it.
Yeah, hypocrite much? It’s a shame that he gives some good points laced with a lot of “my sh*t don’t stink” points.
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