I have a serious question. I’m hoping to be enlightened. I need to know what is up with RTing your own compliments. I see it regularly in the twitterverse from the big and the not-so-big alike.

Here’s my thoughts on this:

1. It is not ok for you to tell people that you are awesome, talented and a great person.

2. It is perfectly ok for me to tell people that you are awesome, talented and a great person.

See the difference?

Why do I feel this way about RTing your own compliments?

1. I guess I think that talk is cheap. That actions speak louder than words.

2. That if you have to tell me you’re amazing, then perhaps you’re having to do this because you’re really not. At least it isn’t evident in your day to day life.

3. Perhaps I prefer people who are confident and humble. As opposed to arrogant with an overactive ego.

4. Perhaps I’m just completely misguided and need to be set straight.

How do you get people to talk about or tweet about you?

Change their life! Do something for them. Make an introduction. Share a cool article. Write about something that’s of value to them. Figure out a way you can (easily enough) positively influence their life. It’s not hard nor does it have to take much time.

If I had to build a case for the other side, defending RTing my own compliments,  it may look something like this:

1. It’s PR. I want to raise my awareness to people beyond my first degree connections. (when you use someone’s twitter handle in a tweet, everyone who follows the tweeter and the twitter handle in the tweet, gets to see the tweet, thus exposing you to more people)

2. I’m giving the other person visibility too. The above idea works in reverse.

3. There is nothing wrong with telling people you’re great. If you are. You are. People should know.

4. Never thought of it this way before…

5. Ok. I can’t think of any other reasons good enough to go here. Maybe you can help me? I would really like to understand the flip side. From where I stand, I can’t see it being a good thing.

So, is it me, or do we all think that RTing your own compliment is something for the DO NOT DO list?

Teens tweet. Teens don’t tweet. Sobering Twitter stats. Great Twitter stats. How to make money. How to auto tweet. How to be a chump and get unfollowed immediately.

These are just a few of the many posts I’ve seen recently talking about Twitter. But so what? Here’s my ten cents on all things Twitter. I’d welcome your thoughts, ideas even your disagreements.

1. To enable face to face conversations. Sounds like industry jargon to you? Don’t buy it? Too bad. Thanks to the search functions (and my ability to precision stalk) I have been able to find, follow, make brilliant connections for others as well as develop relationships with some of the smartest, brightest minds in my industry. I’d even say that I’ve made a couple of really good industry friends, thanks to twitter.

2. You don’t have to search for it. It can find you. I used to monitor content, conversations and topics by simply using the search function or # tag function within Twitter. That works but isn’t nearly as effective as using the search function on TweetDeck  – A great friend of mine @KeithBurtis <yes. we did discover each other via twitter. Yes we are great mates. Yes we have face 2 face convos, and even meet for drinks when we can> pointed this out to me recently. I’ve never looked back. Looking for a job? Imagine if every tweet that has the word “Job” in it came directly to your Tweet Deck section?

3. Change the world! Yes - I am crazy enough to believe that I can change the world for the better. I do it in a lot of ways, but I also do it through twitter. My @kilos4kids project raised awareness for Rodney Stafford. It was an experiment where I could only control one variable. @dannybrown <Yes. I met him on twitter. Yes he is a great friend. Yes we have had several face to face convos and even meet for drinks when we can. PS! He lives 15 minutes drive from me too!> Anyway, @DannyBrown has been featured in Marketing Profs for his brilliant mind that is helping to change the planet for the better. Check out @12for12k

4. Follow me or else! What a load of bollocks! This is such a chumpy thing to say, tweet about or do. Honest to goodness people! I follow a lot of people that don’t follow me back but I don’t get my knickers in a knot over it. Why? Because they’re smart people and I get value from their thought process, links, tweets, or conflicting opinions on something. Furthermore, did you ever consider why they haven’t followed you back? It’s not always about you my friend. Mind you, if you’re tweeting up a storm threatening to unfollow those who don’t follow you back… well…

5. Listening in on live events. Hashtags people! Get to know them. Get to love them. Make them your friend.

6. Spammers! MLMers! Affiliate Marketers and any other chumps on twitter broadcasting your crap all over the place. Stop it! Stop it! STOP! The Successful people in this space all live by the law of sewing and reaping. <this rule doesn’t apply to celebrites… and I’m pretty sure there may be another exception out there> PS – @Spam finds the spammers and other chumps annoying the rest of us on twitter and disables their accounts. If you come across a twitter handle that needs to be outed… do us all a favor and tweet an introduction to @Spam. Eg. “@spam – meet @Spammer”

We will respond if we think you actually give a damn. I am one of those people who absolutely gets the law of sewing and reaping. I live by it. I work by it. It’s manifest in all that I do. I think I have a tendency to expect the same in return. My friend @keithBurtis has articulated a golden rule for this space. Wanna know what it is? Check it out here.

7. Auto Tweeting! (sigh) there are definitely two trains of thought here. I clearly support only one of these. Here we go – I believe this space is successful because it’s real. It’s human. Therefore, I do not auto anything on twitter. I don’t autofollow because I don’t know if your tweets are going to just stream me garbage or not. So I’ll go to your profile and check three things: 1. You have a profile pic.  2. Scan your last five or so tweets to get a sense of who you are. 3. Your profile/ web link / blog link etc. This all takes time. When I do follow you… it’s because I think you’re smart and that we are likeminded and perhaps that I could somehow support your effort, work, profile. If I don’t follow you… and you choose to unfollow me. Great! I’m not in it for the numbers. @BrandBuilder and @kethBurtis we’re tweeting about this very thing. It’s quality not quantity. 30,000 chumpy followers means squat. 1,000 smart, good quality followers is far more valuable. If you follow someone and want to get on their radar faster? DM them. @ them or go to their links and read up on them… show them why they should stop everything and get to know you better. Some lousy affiliate marketing message broadcast or MLM scheme is not going to cut it!

8. Teens don’t tweet! So what? First of all the leading authority here is @Carol_phillips and her site www.millennialmarketing.com is brilliant. Teens use social to further bond their friendships. That’s why facebook is ideal for them. Twitter has a lot to do with promotion, networking, making connections and business. There are exceptions… and I personally follow a ridiculously smart group of children on Twitter. @PencilBugs is a smartypants.

9. Pareto’s Law! 80/20 people! Why does this surprise everyone… 80% of people on twitter may not be for you. So what!? 20% are. I don’t feel like I need to belabour this but seriously. My 20% on Twitter? I’ve been able to get them jobs, introduce them to business partners who have since gone on to do great things. Helped someone set up his own gig. Found a publisher in San Fran for my mate in England – guess what I got a few months later? A copy of his published book… although not with original publisher. But my point is this. You don’t need 30,000 chumpy followers to be able to achieve great things. My modest 1000 and some followers allows me to change the worlds of many of my twitter connections which by default – enables me to change my world. HAH! You see how I just brought that round?

10. I get to learn! Lots! This space is in the midst of a massive evolution. I learn loads from the people I follow, their shared links, their thought processes and profiles… but I also continue to learn about technology, social everything and more. If you can make a point of following the virtual cookie crumb trails you can discover worlds you never knew existed.

Twitter is valuable if you know how to use it! I leave you with this visual I first discovered in a ZigZiglar book – I believe it was called… See You At The Top. A gentlemen gets a brand new car but no key. He is later seen cruising through the town sittig on top of the roof of his car… being pulled by multiple horses. The point is this… the car works fine. He just didn’t have the key to turn it on.

So I was driving home from The Hammer tonight thinking about twitter and business. Specifically, a business that I thought should not or could not benefit from using Twitter.

Side bar!

I found myself in an aisle at Wal Mart – desperately looking for one of those shiny happy blue people to point me in the direction of a individual size blender that mushes ice real good. Could I find one? Nope! Not a flamin soul for aisles and aisles. I thought.. damn… if Wal Mart were on twitter I could have someone tweet me the aisle number that houses the blenders.

Anyway, back to my original thought… is Twitter <or Social Media in general> for all businesses? Twitter is the evolution of Customer Service. Don’t believe me? Ask Ford’s Scott Monty. Or why not Zappos… who just sold themselves to Amazon for a mere $950million.  Social Media affords companies another, efficient, cost effective way to address customer concerns in real time.

So I guess if your business doesn’t give a monkey’s about giving good customer service, <please read Business Beware> then yeah, I guess Twitter isn’t something you should consider, explore or bother yourself about!

Oh! What’s that? Your customers are businesses… oh! so that’s why you’re exempt… ahh ok. So you deal with machines? Fair enough.

Seriously folks… I am putting a big fat double dare out there.

Here goes… if you think there is a business out there that doesn’t need to consider Twitter or Social Media in general for that matter… lemme know. I’d love to put myself to the test and see if there is in fact a company out there that would get absolutely no value from emerging media, capitalizing on market trends or tapping in to the evolution of society.

Go on! Think of one and post it here…. I’ll bet I can come back with at least two real tangible ways that demonstrate real value.

If you were seeing a computer for the first time… would you fully understand what it could do for you? What value it could bring you? Why it may be worth having one? No! You wouldn’t!

Why are we so prone to judging or dismissing things that we know very little about? It makes us look stupid when we do that! Case in point:

Johnny: I think paper maps are the best things ever… those stupid GPS things are just for chumps… I mean why would you want to clutter your car with some talking cheesy gizmo when you could just pull out your paper map from the glove compartment and find exactly where you need to go?

Jackie: GPS fits in the glove compartment too. Works similar to a map but appears to be far more efficient – you just type in your destination and follow the audible instructions… instead of driving while reading an oversized bill board from your lap.

Johnny: Oh! I thought the GPS thingy was just for finding restaruants. Cuz I have a phone book for that.

Jackie: Ummmm. No. It’s a little bit more than that!

Johnny: Oh!

First of all… we need to back up. 95% of all bashing  is stupid <unless it’s bashing Dubyah! That’s ok!> Have any of you Twitter Bashers ever asked a person who is an avid Twitter user… why they love twitter? what value they get from it? How it has changed their life? Why they would recommend it? <I didn’t think so!>

Excuse me if I think you may have briefly embraced a self righteous, holier than thou, I can’t think for myself, I like to be ignorant, and of course I’m always right,  kind of a mentality! Stop it! you’re smarter than that…

5 Reasons Why I tweet:

5. Professional life demands it! I work in marketing and advertising. It is my duty to stay on top of emerging media, market trends and the evolution of consumer behavior. The people I choose to follow on twitter are experts in their field, tuned in to information I need to know about or provide me with a great sounding board for discussing differences in opinion. Some of them just make me laugh!

4. Sharing something of value with others. Call it Karma, human nature, or <your word here> – I absolutely believe that you must first give before you get. I try to give a lot to my followers on Twitter. I recommend them. Make introductions for them to people I think they should know. I share information with them. I look for job applicants for my HR tweeps. I share job postings. I send them to resources that they may need to be aware of. Or warn people about the police hiding with radar guns at the QEW Dorval exit.

3. Meet smart people. I am connected to people I typically wouldn’t be able to connect with in real life. I seek out certain people who I think are amazing at life. I follow them, learn from them, share with them.

2. Breaking news… I’d even be inclined to say that I get breaking news from twitter faster than I get from the stockmarket. Yeah… that’s fast.

1. I’m social. 

So stop shouting the odds about twitter being a stupid tool for people. And it’s really not a tool for you to tell the rest of us when you’re at Starbucks. I assure you… nobody in my network tells me when they’re at starbucks… and if they do more than a few times… there is a great little twitter tool called “UNFOLLOW”.

Stop bashing shit you know little about! If it still doesn’t take your fancy… fair enough. But leave the rest of us in peace – we’re busy making this planet a far more socially responsible and happy one.

Yikes! It’s heee-rrre! Getting paid to advertise on your profile…

So my earlier blog about when will Kutcher be tweeting for coke got me thinking. In this space, 78% of people trust the opinions of their network. 20% of people trust advertising. So if Kutcher tweeted for coke… is that advertising? Perhaps… but does that matter. Coke may get far more bang for their buck by giving the people a reason to tweet about coke.

Eeeeee! So stay with me…. if brands could tap a community and do something that made life more amazing for those people… those people would probably tweet their little hearts out. Hmmm. So, the moral of the story is – Coke = Amazing at Life! No, I’m kidding. My point is this; what happens when brands discover the power of the people?

You have utopia*!

*Utopia is defined as a marketer who’s product or service doesn’t need real promotion because the consumers are frigging fanatics and propel the message amongst the people for the marketer.

I have been doing some digging… I registered for an account at www.TweetLater.com and took it for a test drive. I really tried to be objective with the whole thing but…

Here’s the situation:

1. Social Media and the tools within it require an authentic, genuine self.

2. People are busy, juggling multiple technology and anxious to respond timely.

3. Faser and easier could mean automating some of your online activity.

So… if you were to automate your tweets: “Thanks for following” or “Get rich quick and acquire 1million followers in 2 days” or whatever that auto message is… are you being genuine? I guess so. Are you authentic… not sure.

Where does that leave us? I like automation. I like duplication. I like being efficient. I am not sure I like to automate my voice in a space that demands authenticity. Are automated tweets benefiting anyone except you? Probably not. So technically, they aren’t benefitting you either.

So, the verdict? Automated tweets are probably not your best bet… timed tweets <tweets you program to deploy at set times> I love.

What do you think? Does Automation work?

So I  just had a thought… I wonder when we will start seeing celebrities endorsing products and services using Social Media… or is this already happening? Will this work? I’m thinking yes. Hell Barack Obama reaches out to me regularly… he proves that he gives a damn and sprinkles his fairy dust all over this space which most definitely will create a desire to follow, track and support what he does.

 Let me know if you find any celebs plugging products on twitter…

It will be very interesting to see what happens to this space now that some of hollywood’s finest have moved in.

Thoughts?

So flapping on flutter, the nano blog. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I have come ’round! Why not? I must remind us all <myself included> that we are in the midst of an evolution. Society, business and the rest of it is changing before our eyes. I think I recall one famous Computer guy scoffing back in the early to mid 1980′s because he couldn’t fathom anyone wanting a home computer.

So we have gone from blogging to micro blogging to nano blogging. I get it. It’s inevitable.

I do have a question though for all you science inclined readers – what the hell is smaller than a nano? Answer that and you can probably predict the future 12-18mths from now.

Wow! “People are too busy to tweet and read 140 characters.” Holy Shizah.

So.. your mobile device <that has a flutter account> updates your status automatically? Flippin heck! You walk into a Starbucks and your mobile device “flaps” what you’re doing and updates your flutter account.

Seth Godin! You said it! Small is the new big! or in this case… .nano is the new big! Argh… my head is spinning.

Would you open a flutter account and allow your device to flap your status automatically?

I have to go to work… but this brings on a lot more questions:

1. Some people use Twitter to udpate their life play by play -

2. Some use Twitter for business.

3. Flutter flaps about where you are… but a lot of us use Twitter to share emerging media, new trends, and talk about the evolution of consumer behavior. I don’t use Twitter to deliver paly by play of my life… I don’t want to. Nor do I think others want to read it.

So – will we see a flutter of people moving over to this nano blogging? Who will be moving over? Will Flutter work for business? Will Dell find a way to create an income stream from Flutter like it did Twitter. <PS. I believe they’ve hit $1m>

Must run… but this would be a great conversation to have. Let me know what your thoughts are on this once you see the link below!

http://slatev.com/player.html?id=18328570001

Just in case you were sleeping for the last little bit. HAH!