Posts for January 2009

Professional networkers, Tweet your heart out

To the business social networking virgin, Twitter can seem more than a bit baffling. People you have never heard of appear on the screen and sooner than you can decide which cheesy profile picture to upload, they are updating you every five minutes on their tea consumption and toilet usage.

However, there is more to this Twittering malarkey than meets the eye.

As Mark Sinclair of yourBusinessChannel explained to the BHP team in an insightful training session two weeks ago, Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool for small firms such as ours. Select carefully who you will follow, and you will soon have a strong network of contacts with whom to exchange valuable information, professional or personal, and in doing so communicate your business’ message.

People are naturally interested in the human side of a business, especially where small businesses are concerned – and Twitter allows you to introduce yourself as a person first and foremost, and as a business person second. In a nutshell, Twitterland is a networking event without the awkwardness of deciding how to balance your canapé while shaking someone’s hand. And if someone is boring you half to death, you just stop following their updates – no stilted excuses necessary.

You can respond to other people’s ‘Tweets’ (to the Facebook user, this is the equivalent of a status update; to non-Facebook users, this is a short comment about what the person is doing or thinking at a certain time) simply by writing your own Tweet and placing an @ sign in front of their name before your comment. It takes patience to build this kind of relationship, but then isn’t that true of any relationship?

In Stephen Fry’s words, Twitter can be used to benefit from the ‘collective wisdom and insight’ of ‘fascinatingly good people’, although it can also be the sounding-board for many a banal observation. Fry told the BBC how he gained advice within seconds on how to deal with an unruly bat he found flying around his house, simply by adding the question as a Tweet on his Twitter profile.

So, persevere. Who knows when you might need a fellow Twitterer’s advice on something extraordinary, or when they might need yours?

If you build it ... will they come?

There’s not much point in putting an enormous amount of effort into creating a website if nobody uses it. Early on in the development of the Marketing Donut the ugly topic of keywords and search engine optimisation raised its head.

Ugly? Well, it makes me think of those sites you see all too often that put all their effort into SEO instead of actually creating good content. And investing in ‘artificial’ SEO does seem a bit like betting that the guys at Google aren’t that smart, which might not be the best way to make money.

The Marketing Donut tries to steer a middle course. We’ve had a long, hard look at the search terms people might use when they’re looking for marketing information – and we’ve made sure we use them in focused articles on various marketing topics. But for us, content is king – if there’s a choice between optimisation and quality, then quality wins every time. It’s the quality that’s going to make the Marketing Donut worth linking to and push the site up the rankings.

Together with the marketing campaign for the site, it should be enough to start the ball rolling. If it turns out that we aren’t getting enough traffic, then we’ll just have to look for some more advice on search engine marketing. Now, where would be a good place to find that?