A way-back play-back. I am converting some old articles to blogs but I can’t even update this one. Read on and see how much has changed (or not) in less than four years.

Thursday March 26, 2009 Rapport hosted a seminar called Social Media Success! with Scott Stratten, Un-Marketing.

Rapport’s interest in hosting a seminar on Social Media was to introduce this somewhat new-to-mainstream tool to our clients as another means of executing their brand. We had almost a full house with people from wide range of businesses. Faith did a brief overview on social media and talked about how important it is to make it work with all of your marketing materials. Then, we learned a whole lot about Twitter from Scott Stratten.

In a nutshell…

Scott prefers Twitter over other platforms for many reasons:

• the open-door nature (don’t have to ask permission to connect)
• encourages natural relationship building before a ‘friends’ commitment
• authenticity of the posts due to 140 character limit
• ability to reply easily
• potential of the retweet
• easy to follow or un-follow whomever you want

Tips on making it work for you:

• personalize your home page background
• write an interesting profile
• don’t simply put links to your site or blog in a tweet
• don’t ask people to buy from you
• interact by reading other tweets and replay or retweet
• negative tweets are just not interesting and won’t get you followed
• check out strangers who follow you, could be interesting
• don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t put on a billboard that millions of people including your mom would drive by
• you don’t have to be brilliant in every tweet, but….
• try to write something re-tweetable everyday

How to keep it all straight:

Tweetdeck organizes who you follow and strings of conversation. Use sites like Twellow (Twitter yellow pages) to find Tweeters in certain industries or in your area. Visit sites that monitor your popularity through things like retweets. You don’t have to follow or reply to everyone that follows you

The most important thing to remember is the idea with all forms of social media (LinkedIn, FlickR, Twitter, Facebook, etc) is not to ask for sales, but to build relationships.