Image by Dom Dada via Flickr

I witnessed Twitter go from a mostly Silicon Valley “techy” type audience to it’s marketer inundation to it’s rise to fame and widespread celebrity adoption to well known internet marketers like Perry Belcher, Frank Kern, and just recently John Reese, calling Twitter quits.

I pretty much saw it all and tried or tested much of it. At least what I felt didn’t conflict with my own ethical judgements of marketing online.

Such an easy little idea whose 140 character limit was to simplify the way we communicate became a limitless array of information bringing along with it a slew of supporting tools and websites. For marketers it became an excellent testing ground for social persuasion and response experiments.

As more and more people used it, its uses and misuses also became apparent.

There were the debates on auto-following or not, wether auto-posting was disingenuous or efficient, wether google search could keep up with real-time searching, contests, a myriad of ebooks and courses on how to profit from it (of which I only endorsed one by the way), dealing with DM spam, and of course the occasional “I’ll retweet yours if you retweet mine” requests.

I for one can tell you that I certainly benefitted from the traffic, branding, and list-getting advantages of using Twitter. And boy was it convenient. Since Twitter was so widely adopted, it became a central hub of sorts where you could make one tweet and like Emeril would say, Bam! it’s propagated and syndicated to hundreds of other sites. Ah, the beauty of RSS.

Not to mention the fake ego boost having lots of social followers can give. (Hey, I’m not perfect. Even I fell for that one. )

And though I have seen a decline in response, interaction and real conversation, I don’t think we’re asking the right question.
It’s not about the death of Twitter, or the next Facebook, or will Buzz be a buzz kill for all.

If history has taught us anything, especially online, is that the only thing you can count on is change.

There will always be something better, something cooler, or a new fad and flavor of the week.

To me the question should not be wether Twitter is dead or not.

The question should be wether YOU should be using it for your business.

Actually the question should be wether ANY social website or tool is right for YOU?

And that’s going to depend on two things:
1. Know WHY you are using any social media site and be very clear about what you want to accomplish. Get specific.
Investors set ROI goals to determine if an investment is worth holding onto or not. EVEN if it is profitable, IF it doesn’t meet the criteria specified in the beginning, it’s discarded. Why? Because they understand the value of our most important resource – time. So, what’s the minimum number of sales acceptable to justify your time? How many opt-ins? You’ll have to know that. What numbers are worth your investment of time in social media?

2. Will this site move me closer to and directly support my current business goals?
If not, then ax it. Obviously, this question implies that you know exactly what you want out of your business in the first place. If you do, then this one question will help you eliminate so many distractions. I know it’s helped me tremendously. From who you give your time to, to what phone calls you take, what meetings you attend, what emails you read and respond to, which sites you spend time on, if you ask that one question through out the day you’ll be able to make split decisions on wether to pursue something or not.

I’ll leave you with some advice that I learned some time ago. If you master the fundamentals, you can take those skills and apply them to ANY venue.

Look at the people making a killing on Facebook. They honed their skills on Google PPC and when Facebook’s ad network was born, they
just applied what they had already mastered, adjusted to the new platform and bada bing bada boom! They were rocking and rolling again.

And like John Reese said on the topic:

“But when it comes to business, and for
making money, it’s about the FUNDAMENTAL
things that make business (especially
online) work…

- Serving a target market.
- Providing value to that market to
solve their problems.
- Lead generation.
- Building a list of prospects and
customers in that market so you can
follow-up, strengthen your relationship
with them, and also make offers that
generate revenue for you.

That’s it.  That’s what generates
millions of dollars.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

It’s not the hammer that matters, it’s the skill of the person using it.

The hammer is Twitter today, Buzz tomorrow, and it will be something else after that.

The point is that if you know your outcome and plan accordingly you just might find out that you didn’t even need a hammer at all.  What you needed was a saw.

If you are clear on what you want to accomplish and master the fundamentals, you’ll always know where to spend your time and why.

Leave me your thoughts.  Why do you use Twitter and other popular social media sites in your business?

Which have give you the best ROI?

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• Why I Quit Qwitter For Twitter
• To Follow or Not To Follow ALL Twitter Followers?
• Social Media Spawns A New Generation of Addicts

I wasn’t sure wether I was going to tell you about this or not, but since I’m on the front page as one of the featured videos, I figured I wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret.

Plus, how good a friend would I be if I didn’t tell you about something I personally reviewed and found to REALLY work.

If you’ve been around the online marketing world any length of time, you’ve definitely seen the hype by marketers surrounding Twitter and all the mumbo jumbo about getting tons of followers and following.

Well, I’ve done it all and this is by far the best I’ve seen.

You don’t have to have a bunch of followers.

You don’t have to follow tens of thousands of people.

You don’t need a product.

The truth is, if you learn the tactics to place yourself in the right place at the right time, you’re golden!

To see how it’s done, my friend Tom is giving away a  FREE DVD with 7 separate tactics that you can implement immediately without any extra software or services.

There really aren’t very many DVD’s left.  (Sorry, that’s my fault.  I should have told you sooner.)

So if you are interested at all, I would hurry.

Get Your Free Twitter Toolkit DVD Here

P.S.  I’m the one on the first video below the fold on the right.  Yes, the one with the terrible lighting and shadows.

P.S.S.  I haven’t forgotten about a free tool I promised to tell you about that I learned from Tim Ferris, the NY Times best selling author.  I’m loving it and hating it. You’ll see why.  Anyway, I’ll send that to you soon.   I just didn’t want you to miss out on this in case you were interested.

Get Your Free Twitter Toolkit DVD Here

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This is a fascinating video from TED by Clay Shirky on the largest increase in expressive capability in human history – the social web. It’s about 17 minutes long and worth the view.

Favorite quotes by Clay Shirky from the video:

“What matters is not technical capital, it’s social capital.”

“Tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.  It isn’t when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society.  It’s when everybody is able to take them for granted.”

“The moment our historical generation is living through is the single largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”

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If the front door doesn’t catch people’s attention, they won’t come in.  The headlines of anything you write – blog posts, email subject lines, ads, etc., are like doors.  It doesn’t matter how great the content is inside if nobody opens the door.  So your first job is to get people to want to come inside.  Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a blog post on 15 Ways To Rework Your Next Blog Post Title.

Obviously the article’s focus is blogs, but I think the 8 tips for writing compelling blog post titles are applicable to all headlines.  It’s really a small and basic lesson in copywriting.  For your convenience I’ve reprinted the first 8 tips, though I recommend you read Darren’s entire post here.

1. Communicate a Benefit – a title should tell readers something that they’ll ‘get’ by reading your post.
2. Create Controversy or Debate – not suitable for every post title but there’s nothing like Debate to get people checking out a post.
3. Ask a Question – in my experience posts with questions in the titles tend to get read more than others – they also are better at stimulating comments from readers.
4. Personalize Titles – for example: using ‘you’ in your post title (and post) can have a real impact and take a post from the realm of ‘theory’ into a more personal post.
5. Use Keywords – keywords that signal to readers and search engines what your post is about can help draw in significant traffic if you use them well.
6. Use Power Words – Not all words are created equal – some evoke a powerful response in readers – words like ‘free’, ’stunning’, ‘discover’, ‘warning’, ’secrets’, ‘easy’ etc all work well in my experience of blogging.
7. Make Claims and Promises – as long as you can back them up in your post – a big claim or promise can get someone’s attention.
8. Humor Titles – be careful with this one – funny can work great but it can also leave your readers very confused if it’s too cryptic…. or if it’s just not funny.

Reprinted from Problogger.net

By the way, all these tips are also applicable to Twitter.  Your Twitter tweets are really just headlines. Posting links to content with creative headlines you come up with is a great way to hone your headline writing skills.

Tracking however is essential to do this so that you can see which headlines get the most response.  Sometimes headlines I think are great end up flopping and ones I think are duds get hundreds of clicks.  So make sure you track!  My favorite tools to do this are Budurl and Hootsuite.

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A few weeks ago I got an envelope in the mail that really caught my attention. It was in a translucent envelope through which I could see the following card:

I pushed the other mailed aside and opened it at once.  I had to see who it was from.  It was from Enthusem, a company that makes sending personalized printed greeting cards as easy as sending an email.

I know of other options that let you send a single printed greeting card but what I think makes Enthusem really ingenious is that you can attach electronic files like videos, PDFs or web pages just like email.  The recipient gets a unique “Pickup Code” which they type online to see.

They even provide reporting that tell you when the recipient sees your online attachment. Which means your direct mail campaigns are measurable.

The cost is based on credits.  The more credits you buy at a time, the less the cost of sending a mailer. Although the cost is reasonable, I wouldn’t use it for mass random mailings. But if you strategically select customers, prospects, or colleagues, the return on investment could well be worth it.

This combination of the card AND the online attachment really make the difference.

Standing out is no longer enough, you also have to be memorable. I experienced it first hand and Enthusem is definitely both.

To give Enthusem a free try, click on the button below:

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In his latest podcast, Stephen Pierce gives out "5 Make Mo’ Money Tools To Make You Drool"

I haven’t tested all of them myself, but I thought I’d list them here and have you try them out yourselves. I have my eye on one in particular that looks promising.

Here are the five:

1. AdGridWork.com is a blog advertising network and link exchange.

2. iLikeToBlog.com is a wordpress plugin and also link exchange.

3. TweetBeep.com is the Google Alerts of Twitter. You can set keywords that you want to be alerted on, so you can jump in or follow conversations you’re interested in.

4. Twtqpon.com besides being the strangest and hardest to pronounce social media domain ever, it allows you to create coupons exclusive for your followers (or tweeps). The domain is supposed to be short for Twitter Coupon. Yeah, I know. Go figure.

5. Adcause.com This service allows you to place ads inserted between your Twitter feed. I tried a similar service several months back out of curiosity but decided I just didn’t want to turn my feed into a tweetboard (billboard). If you do decide to use it, don’t abuse it lest you annoy your tweeps and they hit the "Unfollow" button faster than you can say "Twtqpon".

So there you go, try them out and come back and let us know how they worked out.

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Last week I wrote a popular blog post about 5 tools that can help you leverage your time when it comes to managing friends and tweets on twitter.

One of my twitter friends jokingly said Twitter and time-saving in the same sentence was a contraction. I agree. That's why it's important to use the tools properly. Here is my post:

5 Time Saving Twitter Tools For Managing Your Friends and Tweets

My next article goes live today: Stop Chasing Ducks – How It’s Killing Your Online Business.

Follow me on Twitter to be the first to know when it goes live.

See ya soon!

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Just for fun. Try saying the title five times really fast.

Really though, a few weeks ago I decided to give Qwitter a try based on my friend Alejandro Reyes’s blog post : Qwitter – Catching Twiter Quitters.

Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message like this:

I figured maybe I could spot a pattern if there was a mass un-following after certain types of posts. There wasn’t. The un-followings were completely random.

What would be really helpful would be to have an area where people could submit a comment when they unfollow you. Then I could see some use. But, as it stands I quit Qwitter after 19 days.

I started resenting the messages in my inbox everytime I got a twitter rejection.

I’d rather see positive things or “You’ve got a payment” messages. Call me crazy, but that’s just me.

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I’m torn. Should you follow back everyone on Twitter that follows you?

I got on twitter on August 2007. None of my friends were on twitter yet and very few in my niche. So I started following anyone who had anything remotely to say that I was interested in. Plus I also followed the few “smores (social media whores)” or people with large numbers of followers.

Smores? I know, funny. That’s what Guy Kawasaki calls them.

Anyway, I had no clue what I was doing, so I just started following as many people as I could.

As my own twitter followers began to grow, and my status grew to “smorrette (Not quite a smore yet)”, it was just impossible to keep up with my twitter feed (a timeline of the tweets of those you are following).

Plus, I could no longer take the time to go to every followers page and decide whether I wanted to follow back or not.

So I started unfollowing a bunch of people that never tweeted, didn’t follow me back, had a picture I didn’t like, etc. Yes, a picture IS worth a thousand words.

Then, in came automation. I subscribed to Tweetlater which is a service that allows you to future post tweets or schedule tweets in the future, like when you’ll be on a plane or jumping out of one.

It also had two features I began to use. It sent an auto reply message to everyone that followed me and also followed them back automatically.

So, the number of people I was following grew to hundreds. And I was back to square one. Which was a completely useless and crowded twitter feed.

So I did the next logical thing which was completely ignore my public feed and focus instead on posting my own tweets of interesting links, sometimes completely useless mundane tweets, and replying to @replies and direct messages (DM).

This presented a problem though. There were twitterers and topics I was very interested in following.

But in order to do that I had to use twitter’s search function, which took time (not to mention was a huge distraction.)

Solution = I began to use Tweetdeck.

Tweedeck is an application for twitter that not only lets you tweet but also create groups of people to follow, set-up custom searches of keywords and topics, plus see all of your replies and direct messages all in one place.

So I’ve been able to segment the people I want to follow into different lists. For example, I have a list with internet marketers and another one for friends or people I know personally among other lists I’ve created. This lets me see only the tweets I want to see without having to weed them out of my public timeline.

Which brings me back to my question: Should you follow everyone back that follows you?

It seems that there are three things you could do, with popular social media “smores” split between the first two.

1. Follow everyone back.

There seems to be an unwritten rule of twitter etiquette, at least that’s what supporters of this tactic believe, that doing so is not only courteous but it also encourages goodwill between your followers and you and therefore people will respond to you more and everyone who follows them will see this, which leads to more exposure for you. Big twitterers like @guykawasaki and @scobleizer follow this method.

2. Only follow a select few.

Others believe you should only follow those you have a real interest in following. This keeps your feed manageable and although people can’t direct message you if you’re not following them, you can still see the replies sent to you.

It also gives your profile some exclusivity since you only follow certain people. Most of the well known internet marketers like @ed_dale or @masscontrolkern follow this method.

3. Follow as many people as you can as fast as possible.

This is one I definetely don’t recommend. It’s called Follow spam and it could possibly get your account suspended by Twitter. Follow Spam is when you follow a mass number of people, not because you are interested in their tweets but because you want to gain attention by generating views to your profile and clicks to your website. It’s the shotgun approach to twittering.

You’ll be seen as a spammer and possibly have your account suspended by Twitter. Some people have even created programs to automate the following which lets them follow thousands of people at the blink of an eye.

So there you have it. What do you think, to follow ALL or only a few?

Well, how ’bout for now just following one more.

You can follow me here: http://www.twitter.com/yisel

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There has been a recent surge of new twitter-ers, and with it lot’s of

people who don’t quite understand twitter just yet.

So here is a quick and simple list of some basic twitter do’s and dont’s.

DONT’s

1. Post only self-serving marketing and selling messages ALL the time.

2. Post Vague or general messages. One word – BORING. Would you really care

if someone is eating, or sleeping, or checking email? I didn’t think so.

DO’s

1. Be descriptive.

2. Tweet interesting, valuable, funny or thoughtful things.

3. Use @user to communicate and network with other twitterers.

4. Don’t follow people mindlessly. Follow people in your industry or areas of interest

that you would genuinely want to follow and have conversations with.

And most importantly – Be yourself! Show people your personality and what’s important

to you, and you will have more fun, make sales, and connect with great people.

What are YOUR favorite tips on using twitter?

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