This is why you need to make use of Social Media.  And guys, if you were not thinking about catering to Female clients, you are nuts!

And yes, MySpace still rocks if that is your demographic. But Twitter seems to rule if you want people that make over $100,000.

It is why we push it with our clients. Contact me if you want to learn how to super charge you Social Media for as little as little as $70 per month.

Can you really afford not to?

Not sure where to start, check out the Blog post, Twitter Explained in 5 Minutes.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson

Here are 2 Twitter Rules that you must use on Twitter if you want to be successful on it.

Rule #1 Try and help, don’t try and sell.

Rule #2 See rule 1.

Cheers,

This is an interview that I just did with Dave Olson over at HootSuite which is one of the best tools you can use for Social Media and your business.

They just released a team collaboration tool to manage a Businesses Social Media that frankly, just totally rocks and you need to get it.  I allows you to have several people use your Social Media and collaborate while limiting permissions.

Below the interview, I have  a video showing you what it can do.

If you are using not using this great Social Media tool (and it is free) and your competition is, at least you will now know why you are losing your customers to the them!    I am sure the blog will get hammered so be patient while the audio loads!

You can download the interview here in MP3 format.

Below is a raw transcript of the interview.  I wanted to get this posted ASAP.   HootSuite really gets it unlike so many companies out there.  Keep an eye on them for sure and go get HootSuite for criminy sakes.  Here is a link,  HootSuite.

Hope you enjoy this!

Cheers,

Interview of Dave Olson with HootSuite by Andrew Anderson.

AA is for Andrew and DO is for Dave of course.

A.A: I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the line here, and of course this is Andrew Andersen. Dave, you want to introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are and what you do?

D.O: Yup. My name’s Dave Olson, and I work for HootSuite as the community director. I oversee all the marketing and support related task as well as spend a lot of time out just spreading the message to our passionate user-base.

A.A: I happen to be one of those passionate users, which is why we’re having this conversation today. I’ve noticed that you’ve got a really cool product that is honing in on businesses, which really need to use Twitter, and I’m just gonna kinda let you go off on your riff and tell us about HootSuite, and tell us why you think Twitter is good, and go for it.

D.O: What HootSuite tries to excel in is using Twitter and other social media platforms within groups – It’s all about the teams for us. And really, from the very first iteration, HootSuite was built to solve the problem of how do you manage multiple Twitter accounts with multiple editors. It kinda came out of that agency background. But as we built this product, we’ve listened to users and really saw where the future trends are leading, which is more social networks – people don’t just hang out on one. It’s not either or with Facebook and Twitter, it’s both in most cases, especially so in marketing. But now we’ve taken it a step further to create a context of owner and team members. Which allow groups to control their different social networks at a very granular level where they can have owners, advanced team members, and basic team members – they can all be created ad hoc so you can create a group around a topic, a project, a client account. All without revealing confidential password information which is really great especially considering the transitory nature of a lot of work environments where you might have interns or people moving on, people changing jobs, changing departments, and so on.

A.A: Right. And the value of that account is becoming higher and higher as more people depend on it too.

D.O: Oh, absolutely. We find, by listening to what people are talking about out there – and I spend a lot of time on the road talking to agencies and enterprises, and consultants and so on – they really think of HootSuite as a destination. This is their dashboard that they open up first thing in the day, even before their email, to listen to the pulse of what people are saying about their pertinent brand names out there. It’s tremendously important, and I would say, to businesses who aren’t using Twitter yet, even more so that talking to the people, it’s even more important to be listening to what people are talking about right now about. They’re talking about your brand even if you’re not listening. If you’re not involved in the conversation, you’re not getting in front of potential PR disasters, and you’re not out there prospecting and gaining more customers by being out there, listening to the people, and responding and reacting to their comments. [00:02:58] your own company, but certainly your competitors as well

A.A: And it can if you’re out in front of it, and I just wanna give a real brief example: I had made a Twitter comment, I’d used a product that I wasn’t happy with. They’re well known, I don’t wanna mention them in here. I made a Tweet about it, and I wasn’t being mean about it, I’ve learned never to do that because I have problems too, and I don’t know any company that has these issues but they had seen the Tweet, I had the CEO and their VP of marketing get a hold of me within 15 or 20 minutes of that and take care of the problem. I was amazed. And I’m not sure if that could have happened without Twitter and everything else

D.O: No certainly not, and I think where Twitter is really powerful is in its limitations. The whole ‘It has to be a short message’ allows you to digest these little dim sum sized morsels really quickly and respond and react to them. When sending an email, which just gets lost in the shuffle and people write an email and there’ll be 6 different topics in there – so it’s like “Oh geeze, I can’t respond to all of this”. But if you can fit something into 140 characters, usually it can be answered in a fairly straightforward manner. So it kinda creates this back channel into the offices all around the world of these people who [00:04:15] are very difficult to get a hold of.

A.A: Right. You’ve nailed it ‘round the head. What happens is it’s the ultimate in direct marketing. You have to be very precise, as you said, to get your message out there so that it’s understandable.

D.O: Yeah, and I think direct marketing sometimes has this connotation that it’s very indirect, it’s kind of spreading the message too far and wide. Now with Twitter by setting up a listening column and HootSuite for example, where you can listen for everyone talking about llama feed because you’re in the llama feed business, And every time you see someone saying ‘I have to go feed my llama’, or something to that effect, you can be chiming into them saying “Hey, I’m interested in your llama’s too. [00:04:56]. How many do you have?” When it comes time for feed, they’re more likely to contact you. Although I don’t know what the shipping cost is for llama feed across the country, so I should probably come up with a better example – maybe fly fishing.

A.A: It doesn’t matter what it is though. It doesn’t have to be a world away. That conversation could be taking place right in your community, and you would never know about it without twitter.

D.O: Yeah, absolutely. People do forget about the power of – and you see this a lot with tweetups and such where it’s local people. People that might be working just down the street from each other, or hanging out at the same coffee shop, all of a sudden are able to build relationships because they have this Twitter tool, this social media tool sort of bridging that divide of awkwardness that sometimes is between we human beings.

A.A: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obviously added a few zero’s to your guy’s bottom line. It can do that for anyone else too. I know it has in mine, in my consulting business, and everything else that I do. It’s absolutely added a complete zero to our profit this year.

D.O: Bear in mind too that HootSuite is a free tool. While there’s a premium version of the mobile versions for both Android and iPhone at $299. There’s also free versions for Android, iPhones, there’s the web version which is free, enjoy it. And there’s also three flavors of standalone applications that a lot of people don’t realize. People that are accustomed to using a standalone Twitter or social media tool, and they prefer that rather than running it in the web. There’s some versions that you can run it as a standalone application too, and at this point there’s no cost for any of those.

A.A: And $2.99, you don’t mean $299, right?

D.O: No, no. Although if you do want to pay $299, we’ll make sure that we spend the money to feed the developers tasty beverages on a Friday.

A.A: Ok. You’re talking about 2 dollars and 99 cents.

D.O: That’s correct.

A.A: Ok. Just wanted to make that clear for everyone else. What’s amazing Dave is, and we had this in our brief, previous conversation – I don’t know what your numbers are as far as penetration of people actually using Twitter for their businesses. But in my own experience in dealing with clients, I would say it’s really less than 3-4%, if that high, are really using it to their full advantage. It’s kind of amazing.

D.O: Yeah well a lot of companies get on and they don’t think of it holistically involved in their whole marketing and outreach in public media relations strategy. They think of social media as the red headed stepchild that’s sort of stuck in the corner. Sometimes within companies, they sort of randomly assign someone to manage this stuff. But really, this is just another tool in your marketing tool kit and once people start understanding the power of listening and talking in almost real time. It gets over that ‘Oh this is just a fad’ phase real quick if they do it right. The problem is a lot of people sign up for an account, they’re just using Twitter Web and they’re spending their time thinking about what to write rather than how to listen. When they do write, it’s talking about something like – maybe sending out a coupon offer, and they’re talking about themselves, when really you have to be out there building relationships which means talking about what other people are interested in. It’s not about being transparent; it’s about being translucent and sharing the interesting bits about you and your company.

A.A: Very well put. You guys definitely have a handle on it. It’s a powerful medium and I think that if a lot of companies would spend half the money that they spend on PR and advertising, and put in a social media like Twitter and everything else, they would get 10x return they’re getting now.

D.O: [00:08:46] return with spending 10% of the money. When I talk to people who are heavily invested in this kind of traditional advertising forms. I’m like how many people converted because of that billboard ad, or how many people converted because of that radio ad? And those numbers are really hard to quantify, whereas using Twitter and using HootSuite specifically with our onboard statistics, you can see immediately what Twitters generated clicks, how many clicks there where, where the people came from, and kind of the long tail of that – well there was a whole bunch here in the first couple hours, but look at that, it kept on going for another week. How many people re-tweeted that message – it’s real easy to find out. You can very quickly and efficiently generate metrics to justify the success and adjust your campaigns to fine tune them based on what you find is really working and what your audience is responding to. With a billboard once it’s up there, you can’t go in the next day and say “what we meant to do is”- you can’t do that.

A.A: Absolutely. As you said, you can track the links. If you set up your link to specifically deal with those people that were coming in from Twitter and the other social media, you can further leverage that as well and measure it. It just takes a little bit of common sense to get that put together.

D.O: Yeah, and if there’s some analytic stat geeks listening out there, they probably have discovered our custom URL parameters. It’s one of those features that we added, that we’re really excited about. This maybe 2-5% of our total user base understands or cares what this is. But this allows you to attach a whole bunch of information to your shortened URL that will tell you specifically what campaign, where it was sent from, who send it, and so on, so you can really slice and dice and compare – well what kind of conversions did we get from Twitter messaging as compared to Facebook messaging as compared to Myspace messaging, and you can slice and dice those statistics by campaign, which is a great way to turn in reports to your client. Or else for your internal use to hone your tactics. It’s a really powerful tool.

A.A: Can I rephrase what you just said? What he basically just said was “It’s gonna help you make more money”.

D.O: Yes. And spend less money to make more money.

A.A: Exactly.

D.O: And spend more time chilling out because rather than experimenting over and over and over again, you figure out real quick which platforms are working for you, which time of day is the best time to send messages out. You’re not caught in a spiral. You can adjust each campaign very specifically and very deliberately.

A.A: Very well said Dave. I know that you’re in on a tight schedule now. Do you guys track those metrics that you just spoke about? And do you guys have some ideas for that? You don’t have to give me all the information now, maybe perhaps we can talk again because I’m sure the audience is gonna be interested in this.

D.O: In other words, do we eat our own dog food?

A.A: Yes.

D.O: Absolutely. Like this morning when our new release came out, I had everything staged from yesterday to blog posts and the releases, and the videos and all the stuff goes out at a certain time. All of us here in the office, the developers included, released it, because it’s kind of a big deal, they’ll be able to keep an eye on all the conversation and all the chatter going on about HootSuite. Various terms about it, certainly we look at what people are clicking through, where people are coming from, and so on. Mostly the main thing that we look at is the sentiment. Who’s excited about it. Who’s talking about it. Who’s sharing it with their networks. What people are writing about it. We know about that kind of stuff in real time because we pay very close attention to it.

A.A: Good deal. As far as I can tell and as far as my use, it is the best social media product that I know from a business standpoint. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys, and I wanted to get the word out there. Great job on the new release there, it’s a fantastic tool. Everybody that’s listening or reading this definitely needs to go and get it. And the price is right, Dave.

D.O: The price is indeed right. And if anyone out there has ideas for features that they’d like to see added to HootSuite, we have a feedback channel: feedback.hootsuite.com

You can go there and put in your ideas for new features. Plus you’re allocated a handful of votes so you can go apply to other features that other uses have suggested that you’d really like to see on HootSuite as well. It’s another tool we use to pay attention to what the community cares about and where the passion is. I encourage you to use those tools.

If you need a little help getting started, check our help desk. There’s all sorts of ways to get in touch with us to get a helping hand to get you rolling with this tool.

A.A: I can attest that HootSuite is very responsive. I’m definitely impressed.

D.O: We try our best anyway.

A.A: Dave listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to have this chat. I know it’s gonna help a lot of people get their act together with social media, and hopefully get a bunch more users for an absolutely fantastic product that I can’t say enough about.

D.O: Appreciate the call and to all the HootSuite users out there, we truly appreciate your support of our product. And to all that aren’t out there using it, give it a try and I think you’ll be pretty happy.

A.A: Alright, thanks a lot Dave.

D.O: Bye for now.

A.A: Bye.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Cheers again,

Understanding Twitter in 5 minutes:

• Why you need it for your business

• What it is

• How it works

• How you can make money from it

By: Andrew Andersen

In order to help you understand Twitter, you just need to understand and think about it as the ultimate direct marketing tool because Twitter users voluntarily sign up to receive you messages or your tweets.

I’m not gonna mention any other special jargon, we’re gonna bring it down to the basic terms so you can understand the power of Twitter and why you need to understand it and start using it immediately.

This poll and survey was just taken about 3 or 4 days ago and I want to read something of it for you. Are you more likely to buy since becoming a fan or follower? Now, 67% of the Twitter respondents said yes. Are you more likely to recommend since becoming a fan or follower? 79% of the Twitter followers said yes. So if someone’s following you on Twitter and you have a Twitter account and you’re tweeting and sending out messages, 79% of the respondents said they’re more likely to recommend your product or service to someone else that they know.

Those are huge fantastically large numbers and if you follow through with it and understand Twitter, you can make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even in some cases, millions of dollars from it if you use it correctly and understand what’s going on with it. I wanna dive into it and show you the components of it. This happens to be Drayton Birds Twitter account page, and I want to explain a couple of things that are going on here. He’s done it correctly in that he’s got a picture of himself because people aren’t interested in logos.

They want to follow other people. And they want to put a face to that brand. He’s got his phone number, his email address, and his website, which are all requirements for a Twitter page if you’re doing this for your business. Some of the numbers we’re gonna look at here; he is following 283 people, which means in this time line here, 283 people will show up there. And he has 411 people that have voluntarily signed up to get everything that he sends out to them.

Now this is huge, it bypasses spam filters and secretaries and everything else. They will get his messages showing up on his Twitter page.

Now this is one of my twitter pages and you can see here, this is the time line that we’re talking about, and these are the messages from other people. This person here is not following the rules and sending out a bunch of tweets and what happens is I’m gonna unfollow this guy and so he won’t be able to do that anymore. That’s the power of it. If you put out great information, you’re gonna get a ton of people to follow you voluntarily because they can opt out at any time.

This happens to be my Twitter page, and I’ve got 12,969 followers on it currently. And that means whenever I send anything out, I’ve got almost 13 thousand people that have the potential to pay attention to it and have voluntarily signed up to get my information about my products and services and what I put out there. Now It’s not just one way communication, you can do 2-way communications with Twitter.

This is a tool called HootSuite, it doesn’t matter, I just want to show you that you can do this. And we’ll talk more about this later and explain it to you. Basically, this is a 2-way conversation I had with Patrice, and I responded to a message that she sent out that said

“I’m gonna choose wisely who I follow. I hate my time line being flooded with stupidness.” – Patrice

So what she’s saying is if you’re stupid, she’s gonna unfollow you. So you gotta make sure that you use common sense when you’re doing your marketing. It’s the way to use twitter. And common sense marketers need Twitter, and Twitter needs common sense marketers. And if you think of it as a direct mail campaign and send out timely information that’s helpful and people wanna read, and it can solve an issue or problem for them, you’re going to do fantastic on Twitter.

What you wanna do is connect it with the rest of your information that you have online, if you have a blog like I do, I’ve got my Twitter counter here and it says “Follow me on Twitter”. So when people read my blog they can also follow me on Twitter. Now you don’t have to have thousands and thousands of followers to make money.

You just need to get started and connect with those potential clients. One of the things that you need to be aware of is I don’t claim to be the worlds best Twitter expert or guru.

What I do know is how to get Twitter to help make you money and if you follow what I just told you, you communicate correctly with them, you get your account set up and you only give out good common sense marketing information, you’re going to do fantastic and you can pick up a customer every week, every day, every month and it just will snowball.

Hope this helps. We’ll talk to you soon. Andrew Andersen signing out.

Best viewed full screen. How to unfollow someone that is not using Common Sense.

People that sign up to follow the Twitter Challenge will get the videos and updates at least a one or two days in advance. So, sign up and you will be given a special link to get them before everyone else!

Common Sense Marketing Using Twitter Video 1.

This is the first in a series of video of the Common Sense Marketing Challenge on how to use Common Sense Marketing with Twitter.

In it, I layout the Framework for you to use Common Sense Marketing to get more customers and connect with the ones you already have. I also layout the new ground rules so that your business can succeed using Twitter and other Social Media as well as, take some the mystery out of the whole process if you have been baffled so far or less than happy with your results.

Please let me know your thoughts and if you are doing any of the above. Also, you can follow this at www.CommonSenseMarketing.org.
Cheers,
Andrew Anderson

The Cobbler Who Wears Flip Flops

That is exactly how I feel these days.    Have you ever been there?  Have you just been so busy with clients and other people you don’t have time to work on your own projects?

While I have been mostly concentrating on some totally mind-blowing SEO / Traffic systems I am integrating into a new software project I am about to share with you,  I am slowly putting this site together so that it is an “appealing, take action kind of site” and not something the cat brought home.

If you have watched my Massive Online Profit videos, you are seeing a small sliver of the kind of things I am working on.

So is www.21to21.com better than a lot of sites out there? Sure, but it is only about 85% there and it will be much, much better.  What it does not do is really showcase any of the Web Design skills I have or that are in house.   But as I said before, I have been mostly using it for SEO / Traffic research and will continue to do so but, it will get better looking here shortly.

I am not sure if I mentioned this, but I am using the Beta Version of  LaunchBox Pro software that my partners and I have been working on for about 8 months now.    While it may not be apparent yet, it is by far the easiest, most powerful Website / Blog building platform I have ever used, with nothing even coming close.

It allows you to basically build out custom themes and layouts within the WordPress Dashboard without ever leaving it.  Plus you can have totally customized squeeze pages, optin pages,  and sales pages built in about 25 minutes. So you will never have to purchase a customize theme or wait a week or two and drop $700 to $3,000 dollars or more, let alone having someone build out a new sales, squeeze, or optin pages every time you need one.  And then once again, wait a week or two and spend a bunch of money.

We are putting in every SEO / Traffic getting tool that we know of.  Even those tools we don’t normally share with anyone except clients that pay us big bucks.

It allows anyone with ZERO tech skills to build professional looking blogs and sites that make money.  You do not need to know how to program.  Just cut and paste. Although, our primary clientele have been Web Designers and they will be using this in droves because it will cut down design time by a factor of 5. It is so easy though, anyone can use it.

You can end up with a site on par with sites like the New York Times, National Geographic, Nokia, Wall Street Journal, or a host of other big name sites that have moved to WordPress as their Web application, all on your own.

If you are interested in finding out more and getting the inside scoop when we make it public, go here and do a quick sign up.  You will be glad you did and I will give you a hint, you will be able to get a 75% discount off of the regular price, which is so low already, you will just have to go look.

Anywho…  I am slowly getting my products and services page together and I should have one of my other programmers or Virtual Assistants do this. But… I usually don’t let them mess with this site because I have so darn many experiments and tests going on at any given moment.  Plus, it is kind of my own playground.

But for the time being, it looks like this cobbler will be wearing Flip Flops for a while longer but I actually had time to play with some design work today for a whole 15 minutes. Did I mention I got to bed at 4:00 AM.    I love it!

And I am picking up more SEO and Social Media Clients.  Boy, are they in for a pleasant surprise as I just tested out some very cool systems.

Hope you are having fun out there and making tons of profit.  They usually go hand in hand.

Cheers,

Flip Flop wearing Andrew Anderson