leveraging the value of twitter... and no spam allowed

I just Dugg a post by Dave Fleet, in which he offers his own tips for making the most of your 140 Twitter characters.

I'm new to Twitter. In fact, I just signed up yesterday—because my organization wants me to look into Social Media and how we can leverage it. At first, I couldn't figure out Twitter's value. It just looked like the "Status" updates on Facebook that you show to your friends. Then I looked at the Public Timeline and saw how other organizations were using Twitter—to provide press releases, etc., and I even started following one of the presidential candidates.

The potential value became obvious. And so did the potential for abuse. We don't want to go over to the "dark side" and spam people. But as an organization that offers conferences filled with valuable content for people involved with relationship marketing, customer loyalty and consumer services, we do want to get our message out.

So, I pitched Twitter as a venue to my boss and the President, then drafted a series of 140-character micro- press releases about the offerings at our upcoming conference. At the beginning, I did boilerplate type stuff, speaking in generic terms about the value of the organization. Then, I looked at the text and realized: "That would be spam! That's not offering value to anybody! That's just a plug, like the stuff I get in my inbox!"

So I wondered: how do I get our message out and let people know about content that could interest them—as the the political campaigns or news broadcasters using Twitter do. I started focusing on avoiding all the tactics that I associate with spam. When I put together my Hollywood Ripper website, I learned to use white hat SEO tactics (i.e. to drive search engine rankings by offering valuable content) rather than black hat SEO (i.e. dishonest tactics, such as spamming the index with useless repetition and text that's the same color as the background). All these years later, I still have a #1 ranking in Google for my keywords... even though I haven't updated in a while and have static content. So in drafting my micro-releases, I made sure that each of my 140-character proto-tweets had content that could be of value to people.

Right now, on the account I set up for my organization, I'm not following anybody who did not ask to be followed... well, except for Seth Godin, but why wouldn't we follow him?! (It's on my personal account that I'm following the campaign). And I'm so new to Twitter that it had actually not even occurred to me to follow a lot of people in order to get them to follow me! So Dave Fleet's blog post was of tremendous value on that front. Now, of course, I'll know to steer clear of going down that path. We don't want to look like stalkers or spammers!

Instead, I'll draft a recommendation that we offer Twitter updates to our members on an opt-in basis. Our followers would be opt-in, but our messages to our followers would still go out to the public timeline and possibly catch some prospects. I think that's different than offering spam. Anyway, I would love to hear how other people are using Twitter... especially other people in communications positions.

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