You wouldn’t know it with some of the things I’ve written in the past about social media… but I DO find social media valuable… in fact, extremely so.

I can’t credit a dollar I’ve made in my life to it, but as well there’s some things I can ONLY credit social media for… and it’s these things that lead me to the conclusion that MAYBE this is what social media is good for…

You know what it is?

And it’s funny because I have a feeling this is what social media was intended for…

MEETING PEOPLE!

Since Elysia and I left Australia, we wouldn’t have made one single new friend if it weren’t for Twitter. The coolest people and the best friends we made this year came after random Twitter meetups with people who we learned through Twitter were doing cool things online and happened to live nearby.

On the business side, I’ve become closer to a bunch of people also in online business that through the year I’ve learned alot from, met at seminars and had a reason to begin a conversation with or that have introduced me to other cool people.

All these are relationships that without social media, wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be so strong.

Personally, I can’t say I’ve met anyone who’s become a JV partner, something that I could claim as an “ROT” (return on time) from Twitter, but I don’t doubt that at least a few relationships solidified through Twitter could become JV partners in the future.

So maybe that’s what social media is REALLY good for… maybe that’s it’s purpose. Not traffic, not revenue boosing… just good ol fashion networking!

And it’s interesting because networking is something that all business people do… no one ever tries to measure the ROI of it (how many dollars you make per hour spent networking at a conference) but most agree that (depending on the business) it’s a valuable and a worthwhile thing to do…

Maybe a bit of food for thought for today.

Yeah, social media’s all the rage these days… Yeah you have to be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and 15 0ther communities if you’re a business owner… Yeah it’s changing the way marketing happens online… Yeah, yeah yeah!

I’m not immuned. I think these things,I do all these things, I believe it…I’m active in these channels, I’m tryin to make it happen…

But somewhere in the depths of my brain, my psyche perhaps lives a little Andrew, a pseudo Andrew… a timid little fellow who hides under the blankets through every conversation about social media. He’s scared. And the more I think of him, the more I think he has a bloody good reason to be!

3 things actually inspired this post:

1. I saw some statistic in a Tweet (ironically) that said Ford Motor Company would be, in the coming fiscal year, allocating something like 15% (might have been 10%, might have been 25% – forgive my inability to find the source. Suffice it to say the number was enormous) of their online advertising budget to social media.

2. One of the activities I do for my own social media “presence” daily is to use the service MrTweet to help me add followers to Twitter who are in the same circles as me, who like the same stuff and are followed by similar people. Going through these people it’s just ASTOUNDING to see how many “social media experts” there are. It’s out of control. Every second person is social media consultant, social media expert, social media manager for SOMETHING.

3. Some comments by John Reese in a recent blog post about social media that I think were well over due.

Before we delve into the heart of my “fear” about social media, let’s start with a hypothesis.

I contend that not more than 0.5% of people who claim to have any expertise in social media REALLY know what it takes to create a campaign for a business or individual that will not only result in a positive ROI and ROT (return on time) but a GREATER ROI than a similar investment in a campaign of search marketing, JV marketing, or ad buying.

There, I said it.

I don’t know what it takes, I’m a self confessed social media noob. But I know what it DOESN’T take.

In fact I think I can give you a list of things that despite the hype, are NOT “social media marketing” (meaning, using social media to generate a real ROI that’s significant compared to other online marketing methods)

1. It most certainly has nothing to do with the ability go get followers, friends or any similar alternative. Number of friends/followers says literally zero about what level of traffic you might be able to generate or how that traffic might interact with your site or what you sell.

2. It most certainly has nothing to do with how well you can get people to “share” “retweet” or pass along any message of yours, including of your brand. It doesn’t matter if a million people see your “message” because it was funny or stupid. That doesn’t mean they’re going to want to have a business relationship with you.

We’ve all seen the number of “viral videos” that are lamely trying to capitalize on their success by sticking up a link to buy their shirt at cafepress because they have no clue what else to do.

Take the recent, and in my opinion appallingly shallow, attempt at some press by MillerCoors – donating 1c per tweet to cancer research for everyone who retweeted a message that said something like “MillerCoors is helping fight breast cancer so retweet this”.

I don’t know about their results, but let’s say they got 2 million retweets (highly unlikely) – they effectively paid $20 000 (donated to breast cancer yes, but really it’s just money they’re spending on exposure) to have their brand name on Twitter’s “Trending Topics” and have people MAYBE talk about their brand in a few extra conversations for one single day in time.

Do you think they made a return on that $20k? It’s hard to say. But how did they even test it?? How COULD they test how sales increased from a promotion like that?

Maybe it was an honest (albeit weak) philanthropic effort too, but there’s other companies who are spending much more money than that doing the EXACT same thing for far less altruistic aims.

3. It doesn’t REALLY even mean the ability to use social media to bring visitors to your site. Most people who’ve done testing with social media traffic agree that it’s some of the worst, lowest converting traffic you can find, right up there with that of crappy traffic exchanges. Of course it matters alot to conversions and actions HOW you drive that traffic, through what strategy, and what you do with it, but as a whole…

The point I’m making is that I just don’t think many people yet have REALLY understood social media in the marketing context. I sure don’t, I’m not saying that I do. I’m just saying that I don’t think many other people, even “experts” do either.

Because when you think about it, it’s the most unique form of “media” that’s ever come into existence.

Looking right back to the printing press, and the TV you get an insight as to it’s uniqueness. These are things that came from within the establishment, BY the establishment, totally “centralized”. It was obvious to the creators of the TV for example, how this device could be applied for the benefit of business; how it could be leveraged to increase business profits..

But social media started at the grass roots, totally decentralized, completely by the people. And it’s put business and marketing minds on the back foot. Suddenly they’re trying to catch up. All the people are using this new form of media and they have to hustle to work out how to make it work for them, and they don’t have much experience in doing that!

And that process, I think, is still playing out. In fact it’s in it’s absolute infancy. BUT…

Why It Scares Me

It scares me the same way all kinds of people jumping onto the web, investing TOO big into the web, and making rash decisions about buying websites would have scared me if I was in online business before the tech bubble of the 90’s.

People are getting TOO into this social media thing before they really understand what they’re doing or why.

They’re spending 10% of their ad budget just because everyone else is doing it; Because it’s the new train comin through town and if they don’t hop on they’ll be left behind!

I bet the tech bubble was built by people claiming to be “internet experts” too. People who had all the answers for how you could start up a website and exit in a year’s time with millions in buyout profits.

I’m sure the parallels aren’t perfect, but for me, or at least, for that little Andrew deep down inside me, they are similar enough to be cause for alarm.

I was browsing a random travel blog today and noticed that they were using an extremely cool plugin that I immediately wished I’d thought of myself…

It’s based on the concept of “trackbacks” where if someone links to a blog post of yours they get credit with a link in the comments section of your blog. The benefit is that it encourages people to link to you because there’s something in it for them too… the exposure they get on your blog.

This plugin allows you the ability to do the same, but with Tweets!

So when someone tweets your blog post, mentions something you’ve written on your blog on Twitter, they get a “twitter trackback” on your blog! In other words, your blog post registers a comment that links to that person’s Tweet. It’s kinda like giving them a quick “thanks for tweeting about me!” as well as giving them incentive to do so again in the future.

Check out the pic of it below:

But even more so than that, this is a tremendous relationship building tool.

Imagine if you could be instantly notified when someone talked about your blog on Twitter (without having to do your own Twitter search)? You can get in touch with them (AFTER having done them the courtesy of giving them a link), follow them, follow the feedback that their tweet about your link got, and in doing so, potentially get in touch with a whole new group of people interested in your content.

You can download the plugin here.

Implement it on ya blog and let me know what happens!

So today marks about a month since I seriously started using Twitter.

While I’m no guru, I’ve seen a lot this past month, learned alot. I’ve been lucky to be in touch with some people who are doing well with it, and seen a lot of people who suck at it.

This post is everything you need to know about Twitter, the good and the bad. It will help you avoid buying Twitter “how to” products that suck, and help you navigate the stream of BS to focus on the best strategies for maximizing your use of Twitter – oh, and help you with the question of whether you should use it at all.

First, about my results…

It’s been an interesting month.

First, the link to this blog on my Twitter profile just became the single external link that brought the most traffic to my site. So that’s positive

I’ve grown my followers by 650 in the last 4 weeks. Nothing to brag about, but it’s helpful.

The best result in my opinion is the contacts I’ve made. I was looking for a WP theme designer the other day, found one quickly. I needed a recommendation for a certain kind of product a few days earlier, got one quickly. I’ve also “connected” with a lot of new people who wouldn’t have known me if not for Twitter, so for me in the kind of business I’m in, that’s positive.

So from that perspective, here are my observations, listed here in random order.

1. Getting X000 followers in X days.

This is one I wanted to debunk quickly. If you see a report like that, you can bet with 90% certainty that if they have actually achieved it, it’s been one of three ways:

a) They’re using Autobots. There’s a tonne of Twitter bots that will let you import someone elses whole contact list, import 1000 followers a day, and whatever else you want to do. This can get you banned by Twitter.

b) They’re using outsource teams. Other people are hiring outsource staff to go and follow people that are relevant to their business. These people usually but not always, will follow you back, so the outsource person then has the job of UNfollowing everyone who doesn’t follow you back. In this way, the person gets a lot of followers quickly and they also follow alot of people quickly (and then unfollow). This is also something that can get you banned by Twitter.

c) They’ve got an existing following who they emailed and said “follow me on twitter”. Common also.

If your devious enough, you might be wondering – right, so Twitter doesn’t like it, but does it work? Does it bring you traffic? Can it make you money? (not including money you got from selling your report on how I got 20 000 followers in a day.)

As far as I know, it CAN. If you feel ok about doing it (not something I’d recommend) that is. Thing is, like any game of spamming (and I know from experience) when you’re going against the rules of a service that you’re relying on for traffic and income, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

But it’s at this juncture that another point becomes particularly relevant.

2. “Followers” Are Not Fans

I hate the word followers. The people who “follow” you, don’t really “follow” you at all unless… wait, we’ll get to that in a minute.

When people say “Get 10 000 FOLLOWERS In A Week” it sounds like “10 000 subscribers” in a week, but really, a “follower” has no such value, nothing like a “subscriber” who’s opted in to receive information from you, at ALL.

There’s this idea that 10 000 followers have some kind of inherent value but they don’t. Unless you’re providing value to that 10 000 people, or being interesting, funny, helpful, kind, whatever, they’re not going to care about you at all.

And if they don’t care about you, they’re not going to click on your site, opt in to your stuff, or ever buy from you. Remember they’re also following another 1000 people, why would they care about YOU just because you’re one of that thousand!

I “follow” about 800 people but I REALLY follow about 15 of  them, through another program TweetDeck that I use to make sure I don’t miss the things that those people tweet. I still make contact with the people not in that 15, I reply to them when I have something relevant or interesting to say and they reply to me similarly and sometimes by doing so get ONTO that smaller list but otherwise, I don’t know em, and I don’t care.

The bottom line is, I’d much rather have 500 people who are really interested in what I say, really care about me, really like me and my work, than 50 000 autobot, spam followers. 500 TRUE fans will spread the word about me, buy my stuff, and help grow my business, 50 000 randoms will not.

3. Getting Real Followers (read Fans)

Unfortunately, a fan is a lot harder to get than a follower but not as hard to get as you might think. You can’t get a fan with one click. You have to earn a fan. But you can earn a fan with one nice act, one unexpected bonus, one joke, one compliment.

The first thing you need to do is get involved in the community. As Twitter Guru Scott Stratten would say, you have to spend time each day interacting in a way that doesn’t involve your business or your self at all. Listening to other people’s tweets, replying to their tweets, helping out, giving.

Next, you have to provide value with your own tweets. Write things that are interesting, funny, or helpful, maybe even a link to your blog every now and then when it gives something of value without selling the crap out of somebody.

When you provide value or be funny or interesting, you can get REtweeted, meaning someone will share your tweet with their followers which encourages their followers to also follow you. That’s authentic follower growth, the kind that can win you real fans.

4. Twitter Takes Time

It does. Whether it’s time spent by an outsourced worker or yourself, it takes time.

Since starting, I guess I’ve probably spent an hour a day on Twitter when you average it out. But if your business involves relationships, and those relationships can be enhanced or grown with Twitter (not everyone’s business is like that) then it’s time well spent.

Even if you Auto-add followers, you’re not going to make any money until you get them to care about you by posting good tweets, and that takes time. (well actually some people even have scripts that can auto add interesting tweets from random places)

Which brings me to the next point:

5. The Distractor Factor

If I’ve spent an extra hour a day on Twitter this past month, I’ve probably spent an additional hour per day browsing randomly at the always distracting but strangely interesting tweets of others.

If you’re getting involved in the community as is required for successful Twittering, you’re going to have to prepare to be distracted by meaningless crap.

You’ve got to either factor it in, or straight up discipline yourself to only spend X amount of time. Even the best Twitter guru’s will tell you how distracting Twitter can be.

6. How To “USE” Twitter For Your Business

As Mark D pointed out to me in his comments on this post, there are many ways that successful Twitterers are using the tool to grow their business.

And the way YOU should use it, depends on a lot of things. The nature of your business, the nature of your customers, your existing positioning in your market, and more.

If you’re just getting started and your customer base is small, you need to build relationships and win fans that will help you spread the word about you. If you’re established and have a big customer base you can use the tool for solidiying your brand image, selling more with coupons, and more.

Again, the best way to leverage your followers and use your tweets depends on your individual business model.

7. Twitter Search Is Cool

However you’re using Twitter, the search feature is cool, not only for finding new followers but for market research, getting into the “minds” of your market, and spotting where the action is taking place in your niche.

As Josh Spaulding wisely pointed out in a recent post, it’s a great tool for an affiliate marketer, to find people who are looking at making buying decisions and providing them reviews or information at the key moment – very smart indeed.

Other intelligent companies are using the search to find people talking about their brand or product and thanking them and encouraging them, also a great idea.

8. My Original Sentiments Still Apply

Despite my big change of heart related to Twitter, I still say this:

I have a blog that’s for people looking to make more money and market their businesses online, and I know there are a lot of similar people on Twitter, so I got into it.

I have another blog that promotes a reverse phone lookup service (I don’t actually but it’s a good example) where it’s far easier for me to pay to have an article written to pull 100 visitors than it is to spend time trying to find and build relationships with people that might have interest in that product on Twitter.

If my blog’s following wasn’t on Twitter, or was too obscurely scattered on Twitter, I wouldn’t bother using it for business purposes ( remember you CAN still use it without any business motive… I think that’s what it was made for?), and I don’t think you should either.

I hope you’ve found this post helpful.

It didn’t take long being at Underground 5 to see that my views on Twitter, which I’m sure you all know by now… were not popular.

I’m not kidding, hotel security staff diffused an attempt on my life at one point…

I heard some of the speakers on Twitter and was left with the pretty much left with the same conclusion… Great for business people or people in markets that actually go on Twitter – waste of time for others.

That’s until I met this guy:

The one on the right.

His name’s Scott Stratten, a speaker at the event and owner of un-marketing.com.

This guy is a die hard twitter-er.

He gets about 1000 new followers per day, posts about 1000 tweets a day, fills up coaching sessions and paid events with single tweets – you name it. He loves Twitter and he’s good at it.

After a couple of beers, I asked him the big question:

“Do you think Twitter has value for people outside the online business, techie kind of niches”.

To which his reply was both profound and insightful… (I just hope he forgives me for paraphrasing)

“Let me tell you something… I never went on Twitter to get business – period. I went on Twitter to meet people and keep in touch with my friends”

“Wow, so if you’re going on to Twitter with a purpose other than meeting people and keeping in touch with friends, you’re doing it wrong?”

“Absolutely”.

The analogy was made at the event that Twitter is like a party. It’s a place you go to meet people and catch up with friends. If you go to a party with the intention of selling people on your business, you’re like that annoying Amway friend who can be seen scribbling the “If you know 3 people, and they know 3 people” diagram on a napkin to the disgust of the onlooking guests.

But if you go to the party and start conversations, interesting conversations, you end up meeting interesting people, and as a result, sometimes, some of those people happen to become interested in what you do. And even then, selling them on your business isn’t what you do. You become friends with them, invite em to your place (your blog?) sometime, and then MAYBE, tell them about how they should use your business/product/service.

So lesson – if you’re thinking any of these…

“I’ll use Twitter to drive traffic to my website!”

“I’ll use Twitter to get leads to my business!”

“I’ll use Twitter even though none of my friends or people I’d like to be friends with use Twitter”

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz – you’ll fail at Twitter and waste a lot of time in the process.

Personally… and I have to say I still feel embarassed to say so, I’m going to be using Twitter alot more often now. I’m not going to be tracking the traffic it brings or looking for leads or sales from it, though it will be interesting to see if they result as a bonus.

If you want to learn what Twitter’s really about, follow Scott at twitter.com/unmarketing

Oh and you can follow me too if you want @AndrewHansen1

Yeeeeew, it’s not just me that thinks “social media” is completely overhyped.

Just saw this post on Problogger where a guy goes to town on Digg. And rightly so.

And I think you can substitute Digg for many other social websites there too – but that’s another story.

“Social Media” sucks for traffic generation – it’s not worth your time or money

I’ve alluded to it before, but I’m willing to come right out with it now for the first time…

Twitter is about as useful for your online business as… (take your pick)

Cutting off your hands and trying to touch type with the remaining nubs on your arms…

Biting through your broadband cabling with your teeth for no reason…

Writing to your local government and BEGGING for a tax audit.

…

You get the point.

Why marketers started telling you this thing is worth using to generate traffic, I’ve no idea…

CAN you generate traffic with it?

Of course.

I could also generate a few visitors by tattooing my URL to my ass and running around my local neighborhood naked – but that doesn’t make that a good strategy does it?

The bottom line is this…

Do you honestly think any good, successful online business person – I mean REALLY successful – 7 figures a year online…

Do you think a single one of them wakes up in the morning and thinks… “Hmm… How can I spend more time on my Twitter strategy today?”

Get real.

Add Twitter as a marketing tool to the list of BS you got fed, laugh at yourself for not realizing it earlier, and move on.

That’s all I got ta say about that.

If you read yesterday’s post about Squidoo … you might find this more interesting.

I decided yesterday (obviously) that I wasn’t going to be wasting any more of my good content on Squidoo when they were raping my poor links, so…

I checked all the other social content kinda sites I usually use, and one that came out on top was…

Wikidot.com

Wikidot is one of the lesser used social content sites so far, at least among us marketers but I have to say, it kinda rocks.

This site lets you publish content, on a good platform – write as many pages as you want, easily, AND it doesn’t put a stinkin block on your outgoing links.

Oh and not to mention the wiki’s RANK well too.

The result?

I’m takin all my good content off Squidoo tonight and putting it on Wikidot!

Well, I’ll leave a little there and keep trying to get that lens ranked for the same long tail keyword as I was before – but it’s certainly not going to get any more of my good content I know that.

If you’re not using Wikidot – check it out.

EDIT** I haven’t had alot of sleep this past week so didn’t fully check to confirm what I was writing about in this post Turns out it was only half right – but some helpful commenters corrected me so please see below for that.

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This last week I’ve been following on with my theme of going back to the drawing board… doing the things that alot of you guys will be doing in trying to start YOUR own online business and passive income stream… only it’s AGAIN for me.

Remember the next case study I told you all I was going to start? Well it’s in progress right now! I’m posting it regularly for our Firepow members.

But more about that soon.

Today I just wanted to let anyone who’s interested know a dirty little secret about Squidoo.

Alot of people use squidoo to help promote their sites. Either by directly creating “lenses” that they try to get to rank for certain keywords, or by using their lenses to link to their main blogs, to improve the blog’s rankings.

Well…

Stupidly… and I can’t believe I never even bothered to check this… the Firepow team and I realized yesterday that the in content links you place in Squidoo lenses – like when you create a text module and add an article and put a link to your website? It’s a NO FOLLOW link!

Sneaky Squidoo wanted to lessen their page rank bleed and so (I don’t know whether right from the start or not) snuk their no follow tag into any outgoing links in text modules that you insert.

Come to think of it, I didn’t check whether all other links on the lens you create are no follow too, like a link to a blog from an RSS Feed Module, but I can only imagine they are.

The bottom line for those of you who don’t know is… any links you put in your squidoo lens are null and void in the search engines eyes. You might pull a visitor or two if you manage to get traffic to your lens, but in terms of benefit from adding that link to your blog/site – nada.

So if you’ve been using this strategy – you might want to reconsider, or at least change your approach.

Just thought I’d share that with y’all

My interest in Twitter is for the purpose of deciding whether or not the average marketer, newbie included, should bother using it as a means of making more money from their websites.

Social networks can be alot of ‘fun’ but I’m really playing with them to decide whether by whatever means, it’s worth recommending others to use them in order to increase traffic and profits from their niche marketing.

Did I just say basically the same thing in two sentences? Yes, so what?! :p

In the coming weeks I’ll be posting my thoughts and results from playing round withTwitter, hopefully for your benefit.

(Warning: If you’re a Twitter user already, this next part might be a little boring)

My thoughts so far are:

Firstly, I can’t quite pinpoint why, but it’s a cool social network.

Kinda like Myspace but simpler – you don’t have to worry about uploading tonnes of pics or monitoring friend requests (as such) – you just tell people what you’re doing – “follow” what other people are doing, and let other people follow what you’re doing -  good for busy people I suspect.

Then on your page is a mini profile where you link to your own website – but as well, you can link to your site at any time you like by writing about it in “what are you doing today”

Plus there seems to be a tonne of tools that you can use to beef up what it can do for you – but I haven’t gotten into that yet.

Basically here’s what I’ve done so far.

1. I added my Gmail contacts that were already using Twitter – so now I’m “following” them and I can hear all about what they’re doing in their day.

2. I went around looking for interesting people and clicked to “Follow” another hundred or so people – I figure the more people I can connect with the better

3. I started writing some updates, telling people what I was doing, and making some replies to what other people were doing – the beginning of relationships!

What result will this incur?

We’ll see!

For now I’ll keep messing around, taking mental notes, and letting you know!