The Hartsock Agency » social media marketing

The Sweet Brevity of a Tweet – 5 billion strong

Nettie Hartsock — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:59:00 +0000

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” (Mark Twain)

Twitter has just passed 5 billion tweets.

In celebration of that, I wanted to post some new tips for Twitter usage.

And if you’re not yet using Twitter, I would urge you to at least register your name because it will continue to drive opportunities for peers, partners and customers to connect and at some point you will have to come to the Twitter-dark side. And hey, it’s not really all that bad!

No one wants to know that you ate oatmeal for breakfast, but there’s alot of amazing people on Twitter that you might not otherwise ever connect with. Guess what? Those folks do want to know your insight and wisdom and who are you to not share it? Why not choose to use every tool you can to get your message out?

Are journalists on Twitter? Yes. Go to Muckrack.com and find them.

Is Twitter gaining over Facebook? Yes. Go here and read about it.

Here are 7 new tips for using Twitter:

1. Make sure you have a savvy bio line and that you include a clickable URL link in the bio itself.

2. Make sure you have your tweets connected to your Facebook account.

3. Make sure you do Friday Follows every Friday. #FF Use those to follow new people and champion people you follow.

4. Use your Twitter account to canvas your followers. Ask questions in your tweets and encourage people to answer them.

5. Always tweet a link out to your best blog posts. Don’t tweet something like, “Yet another brilliant blog post,” instead tweet out a strong excerpt from the blog post.

6. Don’t use RT (retweet) as the lazy person’s way to seem like you’re tweeting often. Use RTs sparingly and take special care to tweet out actionable insight from others you follow.

7. Tweet others as you would have them Tweet you. (Thanks Michael Murphy for that one.)

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eM+C’s ING feature

Nettie Hartsock — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:14:41 +0000

I’m a giant fan of Melissa Campanelli’s work and her story on ING’s social media usage is fantastic. Read it and learn how you can incorporate a social media strategy as part of your web visibility efforts.

Key quote from the story:

“While it’s difficult to quantify ROI from social media for the bank, Pieterse (head of brand communications, ING Direct) says the real value of social media marketing ultimately lies in building social currency for the brand.”

It’s always good to keep in mind that even though some of these social media initiatives can be hard to measure in the short run, in the long “long tail” run they actually still very much contribute to building online champions, viral forwarders and your Web footprint.

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Should Every Business Have a Blog?

Nettie Hartsock — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:39:25 +0000

Interesting opinion piece by Shel Holtz that now is the time for every corporation to have a blog. Very good stats in the piece too about the SNCR report on journalists using blogs. As a recovering tech journalist I can tell you that I definitely would have loved to go right to the source (a blog) instead of reading tepid, marketing blather in press releases when a new upgrade was rolled out.

But I don’t agree that every business needs a blog. Shel does have some very good tips on corporate blogging within the post though so I encourage you to read it.

And if you do have a blog no matter what size the business you really have to understand how blogs work, how to blog effectively and how to keep your branding consistent and congruent. If it’s a blog that is just set up to push out your corporate news and your take on issues in your vertical, then you have to be doubly careful to have a good process in place to ensure your corporate identity is not muddled. (And by the way, that’s much easier said than done!)

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Great piece on Microblogging

Nettie Hartsock — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:20:27 +0000

Great tips piece on all things Twitter, microblogging etc. on Burrelle Luce’s site via their January newsletter. Highly recommended reading!

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Actually You can Twitter your blog Entries…

Nettie Hartsock — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:22:07 +0000

I just read an article where the author recommended “not feeding your blog entries into Twitter because they are “typically too long,” according to the article.

Actually, you can feed your blog posts into Twitter, you should do it with some catchy phrase if the blog post is useful to your Twitter followers, and you can do this from your WordPress platform easily!

Here’s the link for the plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ .

By using TwitterTools you can add the option to send the feed from your blog to Twitter. Twitter actually uses tinyurl.com to reduce the link so of course it’s not posting your whole blog post (which would be too long) it’s just posting a blurb and link to the full blog post. Why would you not want to do this? (That is a rhetorical question.:>)

Here’s a sampling of recent blog posts I’ve also shared on Twitter and what they look like: (Notice, on the ones directly from my blog it says “New blog post…”)

buzzwords that need to be retired – love this list – http://tinyurl.com/73arv2 8:04 AM Jan 8th from web

New blog post: MarketingSherpa best enewsletters http://tinyurl.com/9m5rd4 9:22 AM Jan 7th from Twitter Tools

New blog post: If you pitch the press… http://tinyurl.com/ax5exj 8:47 AM Jan 6th from Twitter Tools

My recommendation is that if you have a cool insight on your blog that will help other folks (and is not an “all about me” post) that you should definitely tweet it so your followers can have the opportunity to go read it on your blog in full!

A good thing always to keep in mind as well is that even though there are a giant amount of Web 2.0 tools, only use the ones that will really be of value to you and make certain you’re not setting yourself up to be in front of the computer 24/7 just managing social media tools!

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Twitter, Social Media Explained

Nettie Hartsock — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:02:50 +0000

I’ve referred many a potential client to these two YouTube vids produced by the folks at CommonCraft.com , so wanted to share them with folks who might read my blog as well.

The first is “Social Media in Plain English,” and the second is “Twitter in Plain English,” you can hit both and get a good basic idea of how social media works and how to use Twitter.

Also, it’s the first week of December which means you should be actively coming up with a tips-focused article, blog post or press release that gives your top five tips for the New Year in your business arena. If you’re a book author and you’ve penned a book on networking, then why not do a release on PRWeb.com or Marketwire.com titled, “Five Ways to Boost Your Networking for the New Year.”

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PR and Marketing 2.0 Is Here to Stay

Nettie Hartsock — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:20:15 +0000

Great article today in BullDog Reporter on the importance of companies being a part of social media initiatives in terms of marketing and PR. Brian Pittman is a fantastic interviewer and this article is very insightful.

Speaking of 2.0 initiatives:

1. Does your company or CEO have a blog? If not, why not?

2. Is your company twittering? If not, why not?

3. Does your company have a Facebook presence? If not, why not?

And remember with all three things above, that having those is only the start. It’s a marathon on this “long tail” 2.0 race and you need to be ready to stay in the race for the duration.

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Gartner, Corporations and Social Media

Nettie Hartsock — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:19:12 +0000

Sally Falkow is a brilliant guru of all things PR and here’s a very interesting post she did on her blog about corporations and social media.

Excerpt, “75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies are eager to get involved in social-networking initiatives for marketing or customer relations purposes, but 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures, predicts Sarner. What are they doing wrong?

“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said.”

Sally is in the Daily Dog and her column is just extraordinary in its coverage and anyone who is on the corporate side needs to read her take and Gartner’s results on social media.

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