Scars On 45 on Twitter

I went to go see a band play last night called Scars On 45.  You may have heard them on Gray’s Anatomy and they have a couple of songs out now that you may be hearing on the radio. Well, I am letting you know now that you should plan on hearing a lot more of them over the coming years.  They have the ability to be a break out band.

The reason that I am writing about them today is that in chatting with Chris who is their Drummer slash Social Media manager, I told them that I would give them a hand with getting the word out and this is the first part in doing that. We are going to follow their Social Media popularity and hopefully we can show you how to crush your Social Media like we are going to for Scars On 45.

Here is one of their songs.

And this one…

So, what we are going to do here in the next month as a goal is quadruple their Twitter followers. 

And then get those fans to help us get the word out about the great sound they have.  So make sure you go follow them on twitter at www.twitter.com/scarson45 and you can follow and like them on Facebook @ www.Facebook.com/ScarsOn45 and of course, here is their official Website www.ScarsOn45.com

Below is where they stand on Facebook.  Make sure you like and follow them and follow us as we show you what Social Media can do.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson

How is that for some stats?   Now I am extrapolating here, but I suspect that the numbers are about the same for Facebook as well.

So, if you want to get 20.000 real followers you need to get about 50,000 followers.

Do with this info as you will.

Cheers,

Andrew Easy Anderson

This extends to all Internet “Xperts” as I like to call them. Same for offline ones too! And I am not just talking about the newbies here. Everyone is a clown when you first start out, even me. Yes, I blew up clients and myself several times. But you dust yourself off, repair the damage and learn and improve.

But the vast majority of the people in Social Media right now do not know their rear end’s from first base. And I am talking the Big Boy PR firms and the like.

Got to love Gary Vaynerchuk and I could not agree with him more.

And this is a continuation…

And finally this response to some of the feedback from the first video.

Cheers,

OK, having a Social Media Manger seems to be in Vogue these days.  I have seen the ads for some of them with absolutely ludicrous requirements.  I know I have been laughing my ass off just reading the want ads for them and you can bet Gary Vaynerchuk is as well.  I want to share some of the joy with you here.

First off, the biggy seems to be a Journalism Degree or even better yet an MBA.  Really?  How or why that one is relevant is beyond me and actually it is totally irrelevant as I will show you.

What they should be asking is, do you have the ability to communicate in 140 characters or less and do you send out a minimum of 1,000 to 5,000 texts a month? This one is obvious as Twitter is a huge part of social media.

Here at two sample out takes from ads that are laughable.  These are from a REAL ads… LOL

Completion of an advanced degree (e.g. MA, MPH, MJ, MBA) and six (6) or more years of relevant experience

* 7+ years traditional media experience working for industry-leading company with significant media budgets in the area of digital marketing.

Wow, since Twitter has only been around for 3 years and Facebook did not really get going until about 2007 tell me how you pull off that 6 or more years of relevant experience ?   This is not traditional media either. Can you say Clueless?

A High School Dropout And Grandma Are More Qualified Than An MBA

There were more like this but this is an example of why most companies Social Media SUCKS.   Give me an 18 year high school dropout that has 20,000 followers on Twitter and Texts all day or or 72 year old Grandma that has a huge circle of friends that she stays in touch with and they are going to be more qualified than a dooffus that has spent the last six years learning from text books that were out of date 3 months before they went to print from professors who don’t know what the word profit means.  Yea… cool… let me hire 5 of them please. ..NOT.

Both the high school dropout and Grandma have better suited skills than the MBA by far with proper supervision.   They know how to communicate on a one on one basis and have practical experience doing so.

Old Media Skills Will Get You Killed In Social Media

Social Media is a whole different ball game and unfortunately most companies are clueless as to why. This is not traditional media and the skills used in old media will get you killed in Social Media.

This is about one on one interaction. It is direct marketing pure and simple and there are very few really good direct marketers out there. Which is why most Ad Agencies suck at Social Media.

But, if you are clued into this, that is good news for you!  Because it gives you the ability to clean the clock of the clueless out there.  Social Media gives a single Mom who is running her business out of her bedroom the chance to go up against multi-national companies and win!

This gives a single Mom who is running her business out of her bedroom the chance to go up against multi-national companies and win!

Seriously, if you know how to engage your customers via Social Media,  you will win out against the MBA’s and especially the Ad Agencies that are running Social Media for their clients.  They don’t get it either. But Ad agencies as a whole is a complete other clueless story.

There have been some notable disasters recently where Interns and other silly people have been turned loose on Social Media for clients and cause huge problems because they were clueless and yet had the power to cause a public relations disaster with one little Tweet.

Don’t Fall Victim To CTS

The Red Cross, Chrysler, and Kenneth Cole have all fallen victim to the Clueless Tweet Syndrome or what I am calling CTS.  CTS is bad, very bad.

Which brings me back to my main point. If you are a small shop, spend a couple of weeks figuring out a Social Media game plan and then use common sense and you can and will beat the big boys.

If you can afford it, hire a really good, and I do mean good Social Media consultant and outsource your Social Media to someone that actually knows what the hell they are doing.  You can get a real expert team for less than it costs to hire a single Social Media person and you can hit the ground running the right way.  For less than $2,500 a month you can get an expert team in to do things right if you want a complete turn-key experience.  If you are small company, you can get started for about 10% a month or $249.  Well, at least that is what I charge.  Contact me here if you need help or have questions about your Social Media. I will give you a free 15 minute session.

With Social Media being a necessity and not an option if you want to stay competitive, if you get your act together here you can own your niche and it is a totally level playing field.  This is one of the few areas of life where size does not matter.

I am going to give you two qualifications that can really nail down someone that you may want to bring on board if you do decide to go ahead and hire someone.

If you are a regular reader, you know that I am friends with Marilyne Woodsmall who is the author and creator of Personality Language ™ and which is the most advance behavior modeling tool in existence.

Using Personality Language ™ testing you need to find someone under the Motive People Pattern that is an Affiliation Type and under Primary Interest pattern a People Type.

Those two qualifications should knock out 90% of the people out there and help you zero in on someone that can actually do the job well. And as to hiring, if you are going to hire someone internally, you need to be using Personality Language ™ testing.  It is by far the best set of indicators that I know of for sure.

But the bottom line is this. If you can afford it, find and hire a qualified Social Media consultant to set up your game plan and acquaint you with what you need to get going correctly. Then you if you want bring in your own people to manage it great. But, make sure the people you hire have real qualifications such as empathy, good texting ability, good communications skills, and know marketing as well as having common sense.  A tall order I know.

10 REAL Qualifications For A Social Media Manager…

1. Must be comfortable texting and show a minimum of  1,000 texts a month
2. Must have been on Twitter and Facebook for a year minimum and have over 100 friends and followers and been active on a regular basis
3. Must have good marketing and sales skills. This is important. Your Social Media in order to be effective must have a game plan
4. Must be empathetic and a good listener
5. Must be great at problem solving and thinking on their feet
6. Must have a pleasant personality and enjoy interacting with people
7. Must be creative
8. Must have a clue and common sense (there are some tests for this)
9. Must be positive minded and have a Move Toward rather than a Move Away From motivation pattern
10. Must be able to type

That is it, schooling, experience, and age do not really matter. Really…

Follow what I have listed above and you will be ahead of the herd and your competition.

Cheers,
Andrew Anderson
Social Media Consultant

PS Contact me here if you need help or have questions about your Social Media. I will give you a free 15 minute session and answer as many questions as I can.  This is not a sales call but just honest to goodness free info for you.  I want to see you succeed.

Cheers,
Andrew Anderson

Listen to what has happened at what I consider the best Social Media management tool and learn how you can use HootSuite to help you make more money, stay engaged with your customer base, and learn from the Secret Sauce that HootSuite is using that has lead them to dominate their market in less than a year.

Enjoy,

Andrew Anderson

Here is a link to sign up for HootSuite and get a free account or you can click on the image above or below. If you are a business, you really should look at signing up for the pro service at only $5.99 per month! It is the only way I use to manage my social media for myself and clients. I am also an affiliate too. Which as you know if you are a regular reader of mine, just how rare this is as I always drink my own Kool Aid.

Click the play button to listen to the interview or download the mp3.

HootSuiteInterview.mp3

Interview With Dave Olson Of HootSuite

Andrew: (Laughter) Yeah, okay. Hello, this is Andrew Anderson and I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the interview here, and we haven’t spoken in, gosh I think it’s been 8 or 9 months or so. And quite a bit has changed. Um, the one thing that hasn’t changed is I’m still a big fan of HootSuite. I still think it’s the best social media tool that any business can use out there. And, point in fact, I became an affiliate, so I think I’ve sold a couple of subscriptions for you guys and I’m also a paying user of them and as everyone knows, if I don’t like something I won’t talk about it and I will not use it. So, that will set the stage for Dave Olson here and we’ll let you rip. Um, so you guys since we last spoke, um, you’ve surpassed a million users I believe. Is that correct?

Dave: Yeah. You know, it’s been a wild year since we spoke last, and it feels like every week we’re pushing out some exciting announcement and even as equally exciting, we’re finding ourselves in the middle of world affairs and business successes and all sort of stuff. So, it’s a real wild ride. We’re up to about 1.3 million users now and adding at a great pace every day. And it’s also really exciting that these users are coming from all around the world.

Andrew: Wow. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. Um, one of the big things that has gone on, and I mentioned it previously is that you’ve gone to the paid model for your business customers. You still offer the free service, right?

Dave: Yeah. We sure do. In the basic plan which is free is, is really what’s used by 95% or more of our user base. Before we switched over to those premium plans, we looked real carefully at how people use HootSuite, the feature sets, the amount of networks. And we found that people either have a few, you know, maybe their personal Twitter or Facebook maybe LinkedIn. Or else, they have a ton where they’re clearly using it for business use. So, we kind of designed the packages to fit into those buckets. We first made some announcements about it at the end of last summer. Did a little bit of a very slow roll-out so we could really get some feedback from the market. Made some adjustments and finally migrated everyone with a month-long grace period and so on to make that decision and, ah, you know we had–of course, when you first roll out something like that, there’s going to be a few people who have some, maybe have a little bit of frustration…

Andrew: (Laughter) Get bent out of shape.

Dave: Yes, indeed. But for the most part, people were really excited. And the work that we had done building the community was folks like yourself, really paid off ’cause folks were coming out and saying, “Hey, you know, it’s $5.99 a month and look what you get.” And it allows them, I mean, you know, we’ve got to make a living, too, right? So.

Andrew: Yeah. No, it’s a deal. It definitely is. Of all of the roll-out models to the–what did you call it? Freemium or Premium levels?

Dave: Yeah, it’s Premium, yep.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s the best one that I’ve been involved with, you know, as a customer. And it was fairly painless and it wasn’t a mega amount of money. If you can’t afford $5.99, you probably shouldn’t be in business anyway. But if, you know, it was $19.99 though or $29.99, I would have had to think about it a little bit, you know? So.

Dave: Yeah, and there’s certainly some upgrades and we really tried to put into that a-la-carte model so if you wanted to build a team out, well, there’s an additional charge for that. You can opt into some elevated support times if that’s something that’s really important to you. But at the same time, um, you know, that 95% of the people are using our free basic tool and finding everything that they need within that. Um, and even the basic matches up great against any other tool out there by any measure. Um, you know, obviously we take really good care of our entire community–both with adding new features, adding new networks and providing that really top tier customer support. All of those things are so important to us.

Andrew: It is. And I think Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, has talked about it and about the thank you economy about keeping your customers happy. Which you would think it’s common sense. But you guys do a particularly good job of it which is, you know, amazing because I think the norm is really service these days in so many areas.

Dave: Well, it’s interesting because we have this weird role of using HootSuite to promote HootSuite. So it feels a little recursive sometimes. But the same things that I tell people about, you know, you’re out selling widgets, this is what you should do with HootSuite, we do the exact same things in here in-house. We send out hundreds and hundreds of twitters a day, personally following up with people. You know, anyone who follows our Hootwatch account which is kind of our media and backchannel announcement list or else my personal account can see that throughout the day, we’re always finding people who are doing neat things, turn their friends onto the products, writing great blog posts. You know, we really try to amplify the success of our users as, you know, as reflective on the good work that we’re doing.

Andrew: Right, and do you want more followers on your personal thing? Or do you want to keep that quiet?

Dave: No, that’s fine. I, ah, DaveOHoots, and we also have a number of different Twitter handles. Of course, there’s the @HootSuite but another neat thing that we’ve done since we spoke last is we’ve really gone big on this internationalizing–for lack of a better word–where we’ve built out Twitter accounts and we’re providing support and monitoring, at least community building, in several different languages now. Particularly in Japanese and Spanish. We have everything that we’re releasing as far as our case studies and info sheets and marketing materials is going out in Japanese and Spanish as well as English and usually on the same day.

Andrew: Wow, that’s cool. Very cool.

Dave: Yeah, it’s pretty neat. You know I did–I’m sorry to interrupt there–but ah just before the holidays, we did a big announcement in Japan and I was there, skyped in through Skype video chat to a media briefing room back in Tokyo, and I’m there coming in from ah my house with the video cam because we had to coordinate hours and seeing, looking back at all these Japanese reports, they’re in this media briefing room and the next day, seeing us written up in Japanese in these major newspapers in Japan. Ah, we certainly get, we have a lot of fun with that and really savor the opportunity to go there and build. And Japan, in particular, is an under-realized Twitter market. If you ask people what was Twitter’s high watermark of most tweets per second, um, we’ll say, you know, it must have been the Super Bowl or maybe the Oscars the other night. Or even the World Cup football, you know the soccer tournament? None of those are the high watermark. The high watermark of Twitter ever is 4 seconds after midnight on New Year’s Eve in Japan.

Andrew: Really. Wow.

Dave: 6,000 tweets per second. Now, to put that in a relative sense, the high watermark of the Super Bowl was 3,000-4,000 tweets per second. So, you know, at 4,000 tweets per second, Japan crushed that and this is like a whole other tech economy that a lot of folks don’t even realize really exists. And 140 characters in Japanese. That’s like a small novel sometimes.

Andrew: Really. Wow. Um, the–and I’d also heard, and I think this is relative to Facebook, that they have fewer friends but they communicate more with them. Have you guys seen that to be the case? Or is that just something I heard?

Dave: We don’t see near as much activity on Facebook in Japan as we do with Twitter. But we’ve also noted that the big social network in Japan is one called “Mixi”.

Andrew: Really.

Dave: And that has Facebook-like domination. You know where Facebook dominates most markets, Mixi is absolutely the dominant social network in Japan and, as such, we added it to the, we added it to the dashboard so now besides Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Ping, etc., now we’ve got a Mixi which is big in Japan and we’ve also added Ning recently, too, which is a little experiment that we’ve been doing with the Ning community. So, we’re really now, we’re trying to branch out and find where those passionate groups of communities where we can tap in and give them something that they really need to help them do their work.

Andrew: Cool. Yeah, so you got Mixi in the mix now. That’s interesting. What’s their user base? Do you happen to know? Or rough estimate off hand?

Dave: Oh, it’s tens of millions.

Andrew: Oh, it is. Wow.

Dave: Yeah, and when we launched that–the blog post–I got a lot of reference linked into some stuff so you can learn more about how social media is developed in Japan. And actually this year at South by Southwest, ah, we’re hosting a panel called “Big in Japan” that kind of, we brought together a few different cross-cultural business people from Japan and North America to talk about how do you localize for Japan? How do you outreach to that market? When do you know it’s the right time to go in there? What are the expectations in the market? ’cause it’s been a fascinating experience for us, for sure.

Andrew: Um-hmm. Well, I wish I was going to be out there this year, but not going to be able to make it. The most–I’m going to go back here. How does it feel to have, you know, as many customers as you do now? Did you guys project this? Was this in your realm of possibility? What was the viewpoint back in April of last year?

Dave: Well, we certainly put a lot of, um, importance on listening to our users and building the tool that we know we can build. And we here have, you know, we have an outstanding team of people who come in with ideas, and we go from idea to execution very rapidly. So, it’s more driven by that if we build the best thing, the thing that we know we can build, then people will come and come on board with it. You know, we’re here using it that too so we know what the people out there want. We listen voraciously to customer feedback. And our development team just doesn’t know the meaning of the word, “Oh, no, I don’t think we can do that.” And they rock stuff out in record time. So, really, we’re so focussed on getting that next integration getting that next release out that that’s kind of our focus. You know, that one-game-at-a-time kind of thing rather than looking at the broad breaststrokes. That said, you know, we’re lead by a real visionary thinker who’s always coming in with some other way to, ah, you know push something amazing out and, you know, that’s some of the examples you mentioned with the affiliate program. The Crowdsource translation program which now Twitter and a few other companies have hopped on board and released very similar programs. Our Hoots with University program. You know, we, we’re always launching something. And it’s really based on that user feedback and where we see a need in the market.

Andrew: Oh, cool. So your focus is on the product and the customers take care of themselves basically. I mean the growth.

Dave: Ah, yeah. I certainly would do things to encourage that along. But, it’s, you know, we don’t do traditional advertising, per se, or now we have a business sales department here that helps that along but did the users kind of take care of themselves? We really put a lot of effort into once people sign up for their account to make sure that they get onboard and really engaged. You know, it can be a little intimidating if you’ve gone right from Twitter web and all of a sudden, you’re looking at HootSuite because there’s a lot of power in there. And it can be like sitting down in a jet plane cockpit of you’ve never seen it before. So, we’ve added a lot of resource to kind of help people get over that learning curve and get up to speed quickly.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, I guess from a little bit different standpoint having been involved in the startup, you got any advice for other startups out there that are, you know, growing fast or they’ve got a great product and, you know, what you’ve learned with the growth thing that looks like a real hockey stick.

Dave: It does. And it’s not just because we’re Canadian.

Andrew: Yeah, although that doesn’t hurt, huh?

Dave: Really, kind of from a personal standpoint in making sure that, you know, remember why it is that you got into this game and, you know, write down those things and kind of leave messages for yourself to look at six months later so you kind of remember where you came from. Because, you know, it’s not an easy life doing a startup. It’s a lot of late nights and it’s a lot of hustling. There’s a lot of change to get stuff out and get stuff pushed out. So you have to kind of take care of yourself in the sense that remember why you’re doing it. But, from a business standpoint, absolutely take fantastic care of your customers. Make them into your stars. Listen to everything that they have to say. You know, we try to reply back to most everyone and, ah, but we certainly listen in to everyone.

Andrew: So, you guys are in the catbird seat as far as social media goes. Where do you see social media heading? I mean it’s, it’s got a major impact these days on a lot of things, and I’m not sure that people realize just how big it is. But I want to get your take on that.

Dave: Well, I think that very soon, we’re to the point that people stop calling it social media and it’s just media. It’s just–everyone has this, this ability to amplify. So I think that the power of these web tools is just starting to be felt because regular folks, you know, folks who aren’t geeky or early adopters, or whatever, as they’re coming on board and they don’t have preset notions about what these tools can do, I think that’s where you see the really exciting things. I think you’ll see companies engaging with their audiences in a more authentic manner with creative kind of advertising.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: You know, we’ve seen with the Twitter promoted tweets, I think you’ll see a lot of creativity in that space where there’ll be kind of special offers, geo located offers and that kind of thing. With what we saw recently in Egypt, which was a stunning story for us when we came in one day and we saw 7,000% growth in Egyptian signups and traffic in one day.

Andrew: Wow.

Dave: Basically what happened is when Twitter and Facebook were first shut down, word quickly got around that you could still get out to those networks through HootSuite and so for 36 hours, we were the outlet for a lot of this conversation which was amazing for us to watch and something that you could have never possibly predicted.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: So I think the one thing that I can say for the future is that it’s going to be very different than what we’ve seen the last couple years where it’s more, um, people who have the ability to speak to one another in all sorts of different ways. I mean, you know, you and I, we have Twitter and Skype and phones and emails and that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of people who are going skip a lot of those steps and go right to the social media, and they’re going to be able to do amazing things from a business, political, social realm that we can’t even think of.

Andrew: Right. Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t realized that you guys were the outlet for that. You know, imagine that they didn’t report that on the news. Go figure.

Dave: Well, we actually got quite a bit of coverage about it in itself and part of that was, you know, we were so fascinated with what had happened that we released an infographic. We also did an infographic for our million-user threshold where we kind of broke down for social media geeks to see what percentage of messages go out through Twitter versus Facebook versus the other networks in what media and kind of our growth patterns. But we did the same thing for Egypt where we kind of tried to articulate in some way our impact. And it wasn’t to put ourselves in the story but it was, I mean, we couldn’t help but feel an affinity with these people when the tweets started to turn to, “They’re using flags as bandages now.” You know, that’s–and they’re sending these messages out through our tool that’s made by this group of developers and marketers here in a little office in Vancouver and we’re having impact in world affairs. It was a pretty incredible feeling, and we just wanted to share that with the world in the form of this infographic.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, well I’ll have to put that on the site, too. But you gotta remember, I live under a rock when it comes to news, and I’m also involved in a startup, too. So, I don’t have a lot of free time. (Laughter)

Dave: Yeah, if it hadn’t impacted us so directly, I definitely wouldn’t have been as well informed. And now we’re seeing the same thing in Libya. And so we start seeing the internet as this, ah, as a very heavily wielded political tool in a lot of ways. So, it’s fascinating to watch and I think the next year or two, it’s just going to be wild as the tools evolve and the understanding of what these tools can do moves away from the cynicism or the self-referentialness and becomes more and more mainstream.

Andrew: Right. Um, I guess in, I’d like to get one or two of the newer tools or techniques, you know, that HootSuite can give a business the ability to use now that, and I know it’s come a long way since the interface, you know, 8-9 months ago, um, do you have any high points there that you might, someone that’s new to HootSuite from a business standpoint that might be relevant to them?

Dave: Sure. From a business standpoint, there’s two that jump out at me right away that I think business users would really love. In the last 6 months, there’s been a lot of conversation about influence. I mean, of course, you love all your followers equally. But, from a business standpoint, you want to reach out to the people who have a big reach first and foremost to help amplify your message. So, we’ve integrated Klout into the dashboard. Klout, that’s with a K. They have an algorithm that measures people’s reach and influence based on who follows them, how many times they get re-tweeted, you know, what kind of clicks they get. Basically, their realm of social influence. And then they assign a score to each person. Now, I don’t want the social web to turn into a popularity contest, but it’s a great way that within your HootSuite streams, you set a search stream for, you know, profit coaching or something like that, right? And then you start looking down and you can move a little slider bar across and it’ll drop off all the people who are under that certain level of Klout so you might find the ten people in your network that have high Klout scores that you want to outreach first to with some kind of special offer or to put an advance notice of some message or something like that. Also, on each person’s little popup profile card, you’ll see their Klout score.

Andrew: Okay, yes. Go ahead.

Dave: The second thing that I think is really handy is Retweets. Retweets are obviously a really powerful way to build your network, amplify messages and kind of do a favor back for the people who are in your network. And now we’ve added a way where you can choose which Retweet style you want to use on the fly. So on each tweet, you can choose the old school RT style where you can put in some more notes and add, “Wow, I thought this was a great article” and Retweet, etc. or you can do the new web native style that’s similar to Twitter web and you can choose that on the fly. So whichever one you like, you can choose them, and you don’t have to be stuck with one choice. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, one of the other features I like, and I don’t know how long it’s been there–it’s seems like it’s been there forever, but–is the ability to manage conversations you have with individuals and they stack up so you don’t have to go searching for them.

Dave: Yeah. That’s super handy, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of volume and managing like, you know, monitoring brand sentiment for example. You can see well, like why is this person saying this? And at first, it can, you know, be a little disorienting but as you start to expand the conversation and go back to find out where that comment came from, it really puts it in context, and context is everything in understanding what people are feeling.

Andrew: It indeed is. So, I know you’re a busy guy there and I don’t want to take up too much more of your time but anything else you want to throw into the mix?

Dave: Ah, well a couple things that we love to see people doing is if you write a blog post or have some tips about HootSuite that you’re sharing with your audience, let us know, and we’ll include your blog post in our user-created tutorials, give you a nice link back, and share your news and share your site with our audience. Ditto with any kind of media articles. We round those up and put them in news roundups. WE also tweet them out over a HootWatch. So, there’s a couple fun things if you want to engage with us a little bit more. And if we see you doing neat stuff and helping other people out–learn about HootSuite–we might even send you a HootKit which is a little envelope of stickers and pins and tattoos and other cool treats.

Andrew: Okay. Well, that’s cool. And then what’s the best way to just go to the–is there any particular Twitter name that they should follow to do this? How do they get in touch with you guys?

Dave: Well, just check out the blog, and it will give you all of the hints and clues and stuff. But if anyone has any questions, DaveOHoots is a great way to get started. If you have Help questions specifically though, go right to HootSuite_Help and we’ve got some fantastic technicians always all day long that just answer any questions via Twitter. So we’re definitely eating our own dog food and I tell you what, it’s pretty tasty.

Andrew: (Laughter) That’s pretty good. Yeah, you know, and any of the business owners out there that aren’t using HootSuite, I can’t recommend enough and for all the reasons that you just said, Dave. Plus, there’s tons more that once you get used to it–which won’t take very long, you know, within 5 minutes–you should be up and running on most of the, you know, some of the really good features on there and then, you know, you can always dive into it. But, you know, it’s the only way that I could even imagine managing, you know, all of the Twitter accounts we have and keep sane at the same time.

Dave: Well, all these folks out there who are going to sign up for your business account, I encourage you to do it through Andrew’s affiliate link.

Andrew: Well there you go. Thanks for the plug!

Dave: Let’s get this guy some beer money. Right?

Andrew: There you go. So, I’ll have to check and see what the sales are. But, yeah, maybe I could go buy a beer here soon and if not, maybe I’ll buy you one next time up in Vancouver. So, alright, well Dave, thank you very much. Thanks. This is an interview with Dave Olson at HootSuite–the best social media product out there for business that I can think of for sure. So, thanks a bunch for chatting with me, and we’ll get this up on the blog here and hopefully a couple people will read it and start using HootSuite and make their life a lot easier.

Dave: Sounds great, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to chat with you again.

Andrew: Okay, take care. Bye-bye. And that’s it.

For those of you that know the answer, it is easy and for those of you that do not, you really need to pay attention here.

It is simple. The answer is just two words, Social Media…

Because of Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites out there, good news and bad news is going to not only travel fast, but in volumes and with ease like has never been seen before other than perhaps when our grandparents lived in small towns and everyone knew what was going on almost immediately.

With the advent of mobile devices having instant access to the Internet, potential customers and customers alike will be able to instantly find out if you are worth spending money on.  And if you suck at customer service, you will not survive period.

Those businesses that do have great customer service, will thrive and wipe out their competition in a relatively short period of time as their competition dies on the vine wondering what the hell happened to all of their customers.

This is especially true for Brick and Mortar companies. And for those those that still don’t have a decent Website or a Social Media game plan, they are going to be history in short order.

While it is true that you may end up facing some undo pressure from the customer, who let’s all just say it out loud, is an Asshole from Hell when they go on a rant, most smart customers will recognize them for what they are and they will be ostracized and their opinions will not be held in high regard.

So, if you have not gotten off your duff and gotten your Social Media program together, then you really need to get your act together and quickly and beef up your customer service. Because good, bad, or indifferent, news really is going to travel like lightning and you need to keep an handle on what is being said about you and your company and respond to it and fast.

But the best defense is truly a good offense and that is simply treat your customers well!  If you have not seen this yet, here is a 5 minute introduction to Twitter.

Cheers,
Andrew

This is the latest from Nielson.

Now I am willing to bet they specifically did not ask about surfing for porn. LOL  And I am being serious here in that in other non-scientific studies at least for guys and an increasing number of couples and women, surfing for porn was the highest time usage of the Internet. But that is probably not too PC. 

However, since most of you are not in the adult entertainment industry, do you see those numbers?  I mean look at them.

Do you see why I keep telling my customers to quite being stupid about Social Media?

As I have said time and time again here, if you are not in Social Media, there is a very good chance you could go out of business and if not that, you are losing a significant portion of your business to your competition that is using Social Media.

And if you are my clients competition, please keep disregarding Social Media!  

Even if a business is using it badly (which 99% of all businesses are) they are still going to do A LOT better than you.

So, get your Twitter account set up and your Facebook account set up and then look at all of my posts on how to use it and if you have the money, hire me and you will blow away your competition.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson

PS.  You can Go Here to read the whole report.

I will be doing another video soon on some specifics that I mention in this video.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Andrew “Easy” Anderson

If you are looking for complete Twitter management or just want to jump start your targeted followers, I can help.  This can include Geo Targeting (a fancy way of saying by location).

You can now get at 1,021 targeted followers for only $79 as an introductory special. This includes scheduling and sending out your Tweets for one month.  Get your Social Media and high gear and learn how to not only get new customers, but stay in touch with existing ones.

If you aren’t aboard yet, you need to be now. Social Media is as necessary as email. That is unless you want your competition to clobber you and eat your lunch.

I can also help get you set up with a management account to make it easier for you to keep track of communications with your followers.

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,

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