Social Media Marketing, Twitter Lesson from Guy Kawasaki

7-13-09 Update:  Here is link to Guy’s blog where he published all of the links he discussed at this event.

This morning 600 people gathered in La Jolla (San Diego) to hear Guy Kawasaki talk about “Social Media to Market Your Business”.

Photo source: Adjix TwitPic

Guy treated us to a powerful tutorial on how he uses social media (and by social media I mean mostly Twitter) to build his new venture, Alltop.  The lesson was so valuable because he visited each social media site and demonstrated in real-time how he uses the services to search and to market.

A good time was had by all.  Thanks Guy and San Diego Venture Group.

Alltop is an online “magazine rack”.   Alltop compiles the top content sites in 600+ subject areas (food, wine, news, venture capital, football, art…)

Guy generously shared tips, tricks and strategies.  If you’re a small business or a startup working to grow your customer base by improving visibility, attracting attention and visitors to your web site, here are some cool ideas from the busy Tweeter who just published Reality Check: The Irreverent guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competiton.

He started with some of the networking social media sites:

Finding or Checking Out People On Social Media Sites

LinkedIn’s highest and best use is to see who is connected to your personal network of contacts.  A good tool for finding partners and doing background checks on folks you’re thinking about working for, or partnering with.  (Most of the 600 here today use LinkedIn.  Not so much on the Twitter users…)

Jigsaw is useful when you want to directly contact a person but do not have their company email or other contact info.

Spokeo provides human resource folks with background information (the good and the bad) by searching people on 43 different social networks.

Tip from Guy: When approaching someone for first time, anything you learn about heir interests can give you a helpful icebreaker.  Like maybe the person’s Amazon wish list contains books about soccer, wine or vintage cars.  According to Guy, you might tweak the person’s interest for the few minutes you need to begin your pitch.

Marketing Your Company Using Social Media

Unless you’re a well-known brand with a base of fans already on Facebook, Guy doesn’t recommend using the site to market your business.  “You’ll end up talking to yourself and your competitors” he says.

This is where his love of Twitter comes in.  Guy thinks “Twitter is the best thing to happen to marketing since, well, maybe ever…”

Guy’s Strategies + Tools for using Twitter

Build a following

• Follow everyone who follows you.  Out of respect he believes.  (and my note hey, who knows where your next customer, gig or opportunity will come from?)

• Search for people with your interests. Here is Twitter’s advanced search page.

Find interesting links.  Tweet or Share them.

Search Alltop (just as an example) for juicy content related to your business and the interests of your market.

Try Adjix, a free-link sharing service for use on Twitter.  It also shortens URLs, a must for 140-character limit-Twitter but unlike other link-shortening sites, Adjix allows you to schedule re-tweets.  Bonus for Firefox web-browser users is an Adjix button.   http://web.adjix.com/AdjixWhatIsIt.html (Personally I find Firefox’s web browser to be like a rocket compared to Internet Explorer’s more 1960’s VW Beetle.)

Big Companies  Using Twitter Successfully to Market

JetBlue They actually answer customers’ questions.  Check out their twitter page, this is 5-star customer service

Los Angeles street food vendor Kogi BBQ is known for Tweeting where their food truck will stop and at what time.  This small restaurant is said to have hundreds lined up to buy their tasty food at each stop  http://twitter.com/kogibbq

Comcastcares is poster boy for customer service for Comcast with 23,000 Twitter followers.

Next post I’ll cover Guy’s killer Twitter marketing tools.