In the last Tweets in 10 post, you read about Tweetdeck, which is an app that allows you to tweet and sort tweets from others on your desktop or on your mobile device. I wanted to talk about that one first because it set the stage for what I’m about to tell you in this article.
Today, I’m talking about HootSuite. HootSuite is a browser-based application that uses a similar “columns” approach to help users sort through tweets. Like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite gives you the power to sort your tweets into default parameters like “everyone” or “direct messages” or into customized parameters like specific people or search terms (referred to as “groups” and “search” in Tweetdeck). So, all of the ideas and sorting parameters I gave you in last week’s post (i.e. clients in one column, colleagues in another, competitors in a third) apply to Hootsuite.

And, like Tweetdeck, HootSuite gives you the ability to tweet from their interface rather than having to sign in to Twitter, there’s a HootSuite phone app, and you can manage other social media accounts, too. Very convenient.

But HootSuite gives you additional tools that, in my opinion, make HootSuite a superior application:

• Multiple accounts: Sometimes you might have multiple Twitter accounts. Say, a personal account and an account for each of your businesses. HootSuite makes it easy to manage all of your accounts inside one single HootSuite account without having to sign out and sign back in.

• Scheduled tweets: While Twitter is an interactive medium, not everything you tweet needs to be tweeted in real time. There might be some resources or information you want to tweet at a later time. For example, maybe you want to tweet the release of your hot new ebook at a certain time of the day. Or maybe you want to be able to engage your audience even if you are in a meeting. HootSuite lets you schedule your tweets.

• Statistics: HootSuite gives you statistics on tweets so you can see how your tweets are doing to let you know how to tweet in a more compelling way in the future.

• Hootlet: Hootlet is a little app you can place on your browser’s toolbar and it lets you tweet about what you are viewing in your browser.

• More social media: You can manage your status updates for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ping.fm.

An important part of the value that Tweets in 10 offers you is the ability to maximize your Twitter engagement while minimizing your time and I believe that HootSuite is one of the top tools to do exactly that. Now, I’m giving a glowing review of HootSuite but I’ve also mentioned in the last issue that Tweetdeck is my primary Twitter interface. The reason for that is simply because I manage just one account and I want the ability to access Twitter without having to have a browser open. But I do like and use HootSuite for many of the reasons above.

You don’t have to choose one or the other to be a successful Twitter user. You can easily incorporate both Tweetdeck and HootSuite into your workflow. For example, you might want to use Tweetdeck exclusively for your tweeting and following but you might use HootSuite for scheduling your tweets and for tracking your tweets. That’s basically the workflow that I use. But if you want to use just one application instead of two, figure out what functionality you want and decide from there.

To gain access to HootSuite and its services, go to HootSuite and sign up. There’s nothing to download and you can get started right away.

In the next post, I’m going to talk more about prewriting tweets and why it might be a good idea for you.

Related posts:

1. Tweets in 10 – All Hands on TweetDeck!
2. Tweets in 10 – Groups for Groupies
3. Tweets in 10 – “I Don’t have the Twime to Tweet Twegularly”

Some people will tell you that Twitter is all about engaging people, but let’s be honest: The end goal is to have people paying attention to you. Sure, some people use Twitter to chat with friends and family but that is not the only reason to use it. Typically you want to connect with others, network in a virtual fashion, tell your audience about your life or your business. The question is: Are they listening?

You can talk all day long. I remember seminars in college where a professor would talk for 3 hours but half of us were not listening. As a matter of fact, I began to take seminars early in the morning just so I could sleep through them (Sorry Dr. Higgins!). So, your audience has to pay attention to you. That is where the engagement comes in. If you engage with your audience they will pay attention. Again, using the college example, a roundtable discussion was far more engaging and proactive than any seminar in a dark room with 300 people in theater-like seating.

When I tell my clients or colleagues the importance of engagement, they say: “Okay, but I don’t have time to do all this chatting over on Twitter.” I will show you how to steadily gain an audience that is paying attention… while only taking ten minutes of your day.

Here are a three basic things you have to do to get started so that you can use my Twitter in Ten techniques.

1. Sign Up for Twitter and import your address book from services such as Gmail or Hotmail and see if any of your colleagues use Twitter.

2. Get a Twitter Client. That is a software that helps you Tweet. There are several and Twitter themselves link to the most reliable ones. I use TweetDeck on my PC, Blackberry’s Official Twitter App on my Blackberry (http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/8160), and Hootsuite (www.hootsuite) for my team. These programs will help you stay organized and use Twitter in a more effective fashion as you get used to it and get more comfortable with it.

3. Register yourself on Twellow.com (Twitter Yellow Pages)

Now you are ready to begin. Below are the steps you can take for Twitter in Ten Minutes:

1. Start finding people to ‘tweet’ with. (Hopefully you have already imported your address book from services like Gmail to see if any of your colleagues use Twitter.) Then find strangers! I like Twellow.com; it is like Yellow Pages by Twitter. Look for people in your industry; look for people in your general “atmosphere”. For example, I work in the Virtual Industry providing coaching, consulting, and third party virtual administration services. So I could go to Twellow, look under Management, then Consultants and there are over 22,000 people on Twitter in that category. Whoa! Don’t add all 22,000 but look at 10 profiles a day and if they seem interesting… follow them.

2. Check your Twitter account like you do your email.

a. Go to your Direct Messages Section and see if anyone has sent you direct messages (private tweets). Don’t be overwhelmed, there are a lot of autobots out there that “auto-message” you when you follow them. You can ignore those if you want. See if anyone messaged you directly and if it seems personal (i.e., they used your name or said something about your profile), message them back and say thanks for paying attention!

b. Go to your replies (@yourtwittername) and see who has messaged you (public tweets). Reply to them. If they say good morning, say good morning back! Make sure you reply; they are engaging you!

c. People retweeting you or talking about you. When people are talking to you they will say “@IAC_Heather Good Morning, how was your day yesterday?” When people are talking about you they would say something like “I really like @IAC_Heather’s tweets, she is so friendly.” When people are retweeting you they would say RT@IAC_Heather: whatever your original tweet was that they recopied. If someone is talking about you engage/participate in the conversation by responding to them or other members discussing you. When someone re-tweets something you say, thank them (This is a must and a requirement!)

3. Pay attention to 3 people. That is right, pick 3 people that you are “following” and pay attention to something they said and respond to them and comment on their tweet.

4. Pick 2-3 things that you find interesting and re-tweet them. This could be an article that someone posted, or a quote, or a joke. Retweet what they have said. Retweet by writing RT @their twitter name: their original tweet

5. Tweet 1 thing about yourself or your business or your day to the Twitter world. Examples would be: “I am up bright and early today and feeling great” or “I have a cold today, staying home from work” “or Going to work on Project X for my coaching practice today”.

6. Tweet 1 resource and feel free to have it be self promotion. A blog you posted, an article that was recently published about you, an article that you recently distributed, a press release or video you recently released. Tweet it with an appropriate title or description.

7. Make a few lists. Go to your list section (right hand side bar of your Twitter page when logged in) and create a new list and add people to it. For example, I have a celebrity list, I also have a tech and geek list, and a employees list, add relevant people to that list to better categorize your followers and people you are following – in addition it gives a little ‘list love’ (people like to be listed). Just add 2-4 people a day to a list.

8. Thank the people that have added you to their lists. Up in the top right corner you have FOLLOWING | FOLLOWERS | LISTED – if listed has a number, you are on a list – click on the number and thank the person that has listed you!

Then sign off! You should have done that in less than 10 minutes (of course people with high volume replies and direct messages may take longer, but once you get that large of a volume you don’t need to reply to every single last one. And if you are at that large of a volume, you may find that Twitter is worth more than 10 minutes a day!)

Disclaimer: I am not saying that you should only spend 10 minutes a day on Twitter. In fact, I strongly suggest that you incorporate Twitter into your daily work, just as you would your email or voicemail. However, the purpose of this is to help those that are either new to Twitter or finding it overwhelming or just don’t know what to do. If you get small doses at a time, you will be effective in the long run. Obviously spending more time on Twitter will produce more results.

Bonus Tip:

Don’t forget to use services like www.tinyurl.com or http://bit.ly/ (my preference) when tweeting your resources (because URL’s can be incredibly long). If you are using TweetDeck they provide that for you with the “shorten” button.

Install the WordPress Plug In “Twitter Tools” and don’t worry about ever having to do #6 again or you can replace #6 with another resource rather than a blog post. By installing Twitter Tools in WordPress, it will auto-tweet everytime you post a blog.

Super Special Bonus:

I’d recommend mentioning bit.ly instead of tinyurl.com. The biggest reason is statistics. If you add + to the end of a bit.ly URL (http://bit.ly/linkname+),  instead of redirecting you, it will show you how many clicks the link received, when, where they were from, where it was mentioned on Twitter, etc. If you sign up for a bit.ly account, you can track all your links but you can see stats for anyone’s links (not just yours) without an account. Twitter’s web interface switched from using tinyurl.com to bit.ly and many clients use them as the default now, too. “More advanced services like TweetLater.com and HootSuite help to manage active or multiple Twitter accounts.” — David Szpunar http://www.redeemersystems.com.

Related posts:

1. Be a Twitter List Champion in Just Ten Minutes – Part 1
2. Be a Twitter List Champion in Just Ten Minutes- Part 2
3. Tweets in 10 (Part 1) – Twitter in 10 Minutes a Day

While there is still a lot of effort to be put into climbing out of this hole, we are hopeful that economists are correct in their prediction of a current economic recovery. While I am not an economist, I am an avid reader and I watch the trends and signs closely and everything does indeed seem to be pointing in the right direction.

So, if that’s the case, are you in recovery mode?

Here’s what I’m talking about: During the darkest depths of the recession, many businesses stopped spending to save on expenses. They redoubled their efforts to drive income (although the wise person will note that if everyone is watching their spending, they’re not buying, so increased sales effort doesn’t always work because it’s a vicious cycle).

And things are turning around and will boom again within the next couple of years. Unfortunately, many small businesses will wait until things are booming again before they finally unlock their wallets to begin buying. That’s a bad strategy. If they do that, they miss out on the highly lucrative growth period between the depths of the down market and the heights of the up market.

So, how can you take advantage of this growth period?

1. Start by investing in your business. Customers are starting to buy again and your business needs to be fresh and ready to serve them. Is your website up to date?
2. Slowly increase your inventory. You don’t have to create a huge backlog, but orders will start coming in and you’ll want to have some inventory to sell. (Colleagues of mine who are service providers are booking up weeks and even months in advance now).
3. Prepare for increased capacity, perhaps by hiring and training additional staff or developing systems and processes that will increase efficiency. It’s best to do this now while you are still a little slow and only just starting to pick up rather than waiting to be bombarded with orders before you do something about it.
4. If you have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then lower your prices to generate more marketshare right now. If you don’t have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then put one in place first.
5. Consider raising your prices. Don’t make too big of a leap but bump them up slightly in the next six months because, if the market blossoms in the next couple of years then your prices will already be where they need to be.

Now is a good time to start spending because you’re probably beginning to get some more income coming in but many prices are still low because there are lots of businesses still in “recession reaction mode” with extremely low prices to stay afloat.

Lastly, this is the perfect time to stop and look back over the recessionary period and think about what you learned. Are there things you’d do differently in the future? It could be as simple as melting down emotionally at the beginning because you thought that the world was about to end but realizing one year later that business marches on and you’ll be okay. Or, it could be slightly advanced, like the top ten things that you need to do if a recession were to strike in order to stay profitable. Once you’ve figured out what that “if it happened again” list is, write it down, put it in an envelope, and on the envelope write something like: “In Case of Emergency, Open Envelope”. This is your recession survival guide and it will help you to keep a clear head if and when the economy flushes down the drain again.

Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Embracing the recession
2. What’s stopping you?
3. A Year in Review

Recently on a project I was involved in, the owner of the website was not happy with the results and made some very rash decisions.

A bit of background:

• The website targeted an audience that she was not familiar with.
• She had never created any type of website other than one selling products.
• Her goal with this website was to sell advertising space.
• The topic of the website, while a strong topic that could do wonders, was difficult to peg down an advertiser profile for, especially given the target market.
• She outsourced 100% of the work (while this is fine, she did nothing for the site except provide feedback. No content building, nothing!)
• She was upset after 6 months that she had not generated any revenue.

Now, here are my thoughts: If she was someone who already had a large clientele from her other businesses, I can understand setting some higher expectations because she could drive traffic to her advertising site. However, she was effectively starting from scratch on this project.

Her only revenue from this site would have been advertising space, and while she set the prices low enough, she did not have statistics (at least not impressive ones) to entice any advertisers.

When it came to content, she wanted about 40 pieces written as quickly as possible. In the timeframe given, the quality and length of the content was not as strong as it needed to be.

No marketing was done on the site at all, despite advice and guidance, with the exception of a couple hours a week of feeding posts into various social media streams.

Why am I saying all this? If you are creating a site that is content only, you need to create reasonable expectations and be in for the long haul. It is an urban legend that within 6 months you will be earning enough money to call it a success.

Here are some tips that I would have given her, had I been able to:

1. Think of your website advertising space as real estate. When you bought the domain, you bought a plot of land in the middle of nowhere: There was no water or power. It will take time to get neighbors, utilities, and services out to you. Only after you have those things will your real estate be worth something!
2. Social Media is great, but it should not be your entire marketing plan.
3. You can’t effectively use social media across 5 or 6 platforms in 2 hours a week and expect a large result from that.
4. 6 months is not enough time to show you whether it will be a dud or not. The best SEO experts will tell you it can take at least 6-12 months to see “real” results.
5. Don’t create a site that you plan on not participating in at all, or that you can’t or don’t want to do on your own. If you want to outsource most work, fine; but if you don’t know anything about the topic of the site, and the only contribution you can make is money and design critique, this is not the project for you. Like other businesses, this is a hands-on business model… in spite of the get-rich-quick myths that fly around the web.
6. Start with Google AdSense or something similar and make sure your site can handle AdSense. While it may not be a million bucks, it will give you some type of revenue and give you a chance to learn statistics (click-throughs and impressions) to show your potential advertisers. And, it will help you determine your real estate value when the time is right.

—

I like to blog about different things, so sometimes I start series. For example, I have an “Ooops” series where I talk about business “ooops” that I see (which is much neglected; sorry). The BUL series is Business Urban Legends, a series revealing things that people (clients, colleagues, innocent bystanders etc.) have said or say to me in daily communication.

Some disclaimers:

• I will change the name of anyone I am discussing (or just not use names at all).
• I will not blog about clients with whom I am working and bound by confidentiality.
• Almost all blog posts that I write go through my editor prior to being posted. Some of these will not, as some of my best written blogs are written on the fly and without editing. So excuse any typos etc.
• There are exceptions to every rule (or, in this case, “legend”), so when I speak, I am not saying something is impossible or can’t be done. I am speaking about the majority of the time or about my own experiences.

Related posts:

1. “What Should I Do?” – Advertising
2. Make Money from Your Informational Site!
3. Become A Fortune Teller in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2

When we have testimonials, we can present them in online and offline formats and create a powerfully convincing “chorus” of happy customers. Testimonials are useful, multi-purposed, high value, and convincing. They really are ideal marketing tools.

But how do you get testimonials? And what do you do with them?

If you’re a freelancer on sites like Guru or Elance, there is a feedback loop built right into the system, encouraging each party to leave feedback. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect system but it’s pretty good (after all, not every business encourages that level of feedback). If you’re a freelancer on there, though, you need to do something with your feedback. Take it from that site and repost it on your blog or website, for example, or add it into your printed portfolio.

If you’re on LinkedIn, you can request recommendations from people. This might not be as nice as having unrequested testimonials coming in but it can be a nice way to get testimonials, especially if you’re new in business but have previous colleagues who would be happy to speak kindly about you.

Everyone loves to get testimonials, and even more so when they’re voluntarily given (rather than requested), but they don’t always come to us in a useful form. It’s not easy (or even very nice) to go back to a client and say “Hey, can I reword your testimonial because it had run-on sentences that barely made any sense.”

This problem has been effectively solved by Rhonda Hess, a coaches’ coach, who shows us just how to get LOTS and LOTS of really useful testimonials. Ms. Hess might be a coach to coaches, but her testimonial “system” is enormously powerful for anyone – not just coaches. If you own any kind of small business or professional practice (or big business for that matter), this is the system to use.

First, read her blog post “How to Get High Impact Testimonials from Coaching Clients” (and remember, she’s writing to coaches but I’d advise that lots of small business owners can discover real value with this technique. Read the blog first then come back here and continue reading my blog to see how I’d recommend implementing the idea.

… Good post, right? I thought so, too. Now here is how I would implement the idea:

Second, set up a database where you can collect feedback from your clients. Do so consistently (for example, spend a moment after every interact with a client to see if there is a bullet point you can add to the database.

Third, from time to time (perhaps at the end of a quarter or after a client has bought a product from you or whatever a place in your sales cycle that makes sense), have your assistant compile the bullet points for a client and draft testimonials according to Rhonda Hess’ parameters. Then send them to the client. Believe me, you’ll get more testimonials than you’ll know what to do with!

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. A Great Innovation Strategy
2. Choosing the Right Freelancer or Contractor
3. What should be delegated?

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a large business, a small business, a start-up, a department, or a project that is being managed within an organization – businesses need to work towards high quality completion but NOT perfectionism.

Here are some great examples (“war stories” from colleagues, mostly) that illustrate why perfectionism should not be the end-goal:

• On a project for a large organization, one shareholder wanted to strive for perfectionism. Their seemingly small changes/recommendations/demands/improvements (intended to turn a great project into a perfect project) cost just as much to make at the near-to-finished stage as the rest of the project cost to do, and doubled the timeline. Their changes were minor – a period here an extra line there, another review, a semi colon instead of a comma, etc. Their effort to take “great” and make it “perfect” doubled the budget and timeline… on a project in which the audience would not notice the changes that were made.

• A marketing website meant to capture the attention of prospects could have been rapidly deployed with effective results, getting prospects signing up quickly. Unfortunately, the company went through hundreds of drafts by dozens of writers because it wasn’t perfect. At the time of this writing, six months after the project was supposed to be live, it is not live yet.

• Back when the housing market was better than it is today, one colleague was waiting to buy a house. He patiently waited through the tiniest of interest rate changes, calculating that one more point might be the perfect time to buy. He was not impressed when I pointed out to him that the months of high rent he was paying in the meantime would surpass any savings he made on the single point of interest.

Here’s where I see it most frequently… and where it is most relevant for small business owners: If you are in sales or have a sales department where you work, I predict that this is one of the biggest challenges. If you put all of your sales people into a room and ask them about their sales, the ones who are less successful will tell you that they are still working on their pitch or their presentation material or trying to perfect the marketing brochure or PowerPoint to use. And the most successful ones? They have material that is “good enough” – it is high quality, there aren’t glaring errors, and it’s accurate – but it’s not perfect. And yet they are successful because they know that these elements do not have to be perfect.

You might notice something else I’ve hinted at: The cost (of money, time, and effort) to take something from poor to good and then from good to great can be equivalent to (or even less than) the cost to take something from great to perfect. In sports, an amateur athlete needs to do less work to go from good to great than an Olympic athlete needs to do in order to go from great to perfect. And if business is a sport, no one is expecting Olympic-style performances. They’re costly and only come once a year. What people really want is consistent business wins, day-in and day-out.

Business owners and project managers: Take a look at your list of projects (especially your to-do’s related to marketing and sales). How much of it is “good enough” but currently unused because it is not perfect? Try using it anyway and see what happens. I believe that your “good enough” material can be made great on-the-fly as you interact with your marketplace. And because you didn’t invest disproportionate amounts of time and money up-front to make it perfect, you’ll be willing to make changes if the marketplace tells you that it needs something different.

Trust me. It works. Perfection is a myth. Aim for great, achieve it, and succeed. Leave perfect for fairy tales.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. Embracing the recession
2. Project Management Gone Wrong
3. Yes, you even need to know how to sell

Some disclaimers:

• I will change the name of anyone I am discussing (or just not use names at all).
• I will not speak regarding clients with whom I am working and bound by confidentiality.
• Almost all blog posts that I write go through my editor prior to being posted. Some of these will not, as some of my best written blogs are written on the fly and without editing. So excuse any typos etc.
• There are exceptions to every rule (or, in this case, “legend”), so when I speak, I am not saying something is impossible or can’t be done. I am speaking about the majority of the time or about my own experiences.

So,  in a nutshell, you will not be a millionaire eating bon-bons (or doing nothing). This is an all too common misconception. I hear people saying this or telling me all the time:”I just need a product or two that can create a passive income stream and then I will have time to travel or time to spend with the kids.”

Uh… FALSE!

I don’t mean to be rude, but there are so many problems with that statement it is not even funny.

1. Products do not ‘create’ a passive income stream: YOU create the passive income stream, whether creating the product, doing the marketing, or both.

2. 1 or 2 products is not (normally) going to create enough of an income stream to pay for lots of travel or all of your expenses so you don’t have to do anything. (Again there are exceptions: You could be the inventor of the light bulb!!!)

3. There are other things that exist besides “having” the products. How are you going to sell these products? How are you going to provide service, support, or help on the products? Who is going to do your bookkeeping, marketing, copywriting, patenting? There are overhead costs or work associated with anything you do or sell. Keep that in mind.

I know people that make millions. They do not have 1 or 2 products and spend all their time lounging on the beach. If you are rich or independently wealthy, maybe you can pay enough people to do everything for you so that you don’t actually have to do anything. But from the get go there will probably be a loss, so the statement still won’t hold true.

I know people who make millions… and they all work. Whether it be by writing their web pages, or thinking up copy/content, or networking, or speaking, or just thinking up and researching ideas. They ALL work.

I told this to someone today and they responded: “I know this one person, [name removed to protect her privacy] and she sells a package of ebooks for $19.95 and she makes millions!”

Well, I happen to know this person, and I happen to know she does not make “millions”. She makes about a million in a year, but not “millions”, and her primary source of income is not from that package. Her primary source of income is in her consulting and she charges thousands of dollars an hour for her consulting service. That $19.95 ebook package is just a marketing ploy to get you “in the door” – to get you to purchase something not too costly, so that she shows off her stuff enough to you so that you will maybe hire her later at $3k per hour (and she consistently markets to you her other products and packages through her email marketing campaigns).

In addition to this, she speaks at about 50 events a year (that’s about 1 a week) so that she can be known as the “expert” in her niche market. (If speaking at an event a week is not work, I don’t know what is).

On TOP of all that – she HAS a niche market. What she is teaching and consulting on is very very specific and she knows her stuff. Being an “Internet Marketer” is not a niche market. Being a [changing her expertise here to again protect privacy] specialist in squeeze pages would be the “niche” market.

Last, but not least, she is just not “telling you” she has done it, she has helped hundreds of people do it who are also experts in their niche markets. This proves she is good at what she does if she has helped them and they are successful.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you are the CEO of a large corporation and have enough employees to handle every aspect of your business (and even then this is far-fetched) the chances that you will never have to work again is slim to none.

There are exceptions, of course: Inventors, people who have such a grand idea that it is a big success and they are able to hire the staff needed to man it, etc. But the average entrepreneur who wants to get started or grow their business is not going to be making big bucks off an ebook or two when that is their whole product offering and they don’t want to work.

My advice:

Passive income IS important, but until you build up a reputation or client base to market these products to, it will generate peanuts. To build up a reputation or client base takes work – lots of work – or lots of money to pay the right people to do it for you.

Try to work passive streams of income into your billable activities (or whatever it is that you do) so that one day you will reach a level where your passive income is large enough to tone down the actual work you do have to do so that all of your work can be related to creating and brainstorming up new passive income ideas.

Related posts:

1. Joint Ventures – Be Picky! Like Me!
2. What Compels People to Hire You (Instead of Your Competitor)?
3. The conundrum of committedness – part 1

If you’re a business owner who is stuck at your desk for lunch, you might be getting work done but you’re missing out on the powerful networking opportunities of a business lunch. That’s where BusinessLunchClub comes in. BusinessLunchClub is where entrepreneurs on Twitter have lunch. If you’re stuck at your desk but want to do some networking, tweet while you eat and add the hashtags #businesslunchclub, #bizlunchclub, or #blc.

Read 8 Ways to Use BusinessLunchClub to Grow Your Business.

Here are a couple of tips to help you get more out of BusinessLunchClub:

Either invite a handful of people to participate or tweet out that you’re looking for others to join you.

For example: @AaronHoos @IAC_Heather you guys around for #businesslunchclub?
Or: Stuck at my desk. #bizlunchclub anyone?

You might also want to schedule your next BusinessLunchClub meeting. Mondays with one group of colleagues, Tuesday with another, etc. Consider having a business problem that you’d like to talk about.

Check out BusinessLunchClub.com to see what other people were talking about or to review your conversation, or keep track of those terms in TweetDeck. (Ref. Thanks to Jeffrey Priebe for the TweetDeck recommendation)

Just like many business lunches have a purpose (besides eating at the same table), BusinessLunchClub is made more beneficial when you participate with a goal in mind. Perhaps it might be “I need to find someone to help me solve this business problem” or it might be broader, like “I’d like to learn something about a few of my followers or it might just be a nice way to make your stuck-at-your-desk lunch a little more valuable.

As originally posted on: Blog by Aaron Hoos

Related posts:

1. 8 Ways to use #businesslunchclub to grow your business
2. Lunch 2.0 Launched! #BusinessLunchClub, #BizLunchClub, #BLC
3. Better Business Lunches in 10 Minutes a Day

Everything you enjoy about business lunches is now available on Twitter with Business Lunch Club. If you find yourself unable to have a real business lunch, simply tweet while you eat and add the hashtags #businesslunchclub, #bizlunchclub, or #blc.

Here are some ideas to get the benefits of a business lunch from Business Lunch Club.

1. Find others who are stuck at their desks over lunch. You’ll make your at-your-desk time far more productive while you eat.

For example: Stuck at my desk. Anyone else in the same boat? #businesslunchclub

2. Start a discussion about a topic that you might normally talk about over lunch. You’ll engage others in topics that interest you and shape the discussion on Twitter.

For example: How has the economy been impacting your lead generation? #businesslunchclub

3. Participate in a discussion that someone else has started. You’ll add value to other people as you talk with them. Several people can join in at once, just like a real discussion.

For example: Re: lead-gen I’ve had to really ramp up the value of my offering. How about you? #businesslunchclub

4. Ask for help. Leverage your relationships to ask professionals for advice on issues you face in business.

For example: Can anyone point me to a good online bookkeeping system? #businesslunchclub

5. Get to know your followers. You have lots of followers but how well do you know them? Get to know them a bit better and perhaps you’ll discover some potential opportunities.

For example: Taking a break from work for #businesslunchclub. @IAC_Heather tell me a bit about your business

6. Talk about a joint venture or collaboration idea. Twitter is the perfect place to start up a discussion, test interest, and find experts to collaborate.

For example: @AaronHoos I’d like to work together on an ebook about sales. #businesslunchclub

7. Introduce a couple of colleagues who you think are a good match for each other. Network and help others to network. This is like #FollowFriday but far more focused.

For example: @IAC_Heather, you should talk to @AaronHoos about that book you’d like to write #businesslunchclub

8. Visit BusinessLunchClub.com and meet other people who are #businesslunchclub participants. Follow them to gain access to a whole new network of people interested in win-win business growth.

For example: Hi @AaronHoos I saw you on BusinessLunchClub.com and wanted to follow you #businesslunchclub

As originally posted on: Blog by Aaron Hoos

Related posts:

1. Lunch 2.0 Launched! #BusinessLunchClub, #BizLunchClub, #BLC
2. Tips to get more out of #businesslunchclub
3. Today’s #businesslunchclub discussion (July 13, 2009)

I began into my normal explanation of how Twitter differs from other forms of Social Media and she stopped me right there and said Social What?

I realized something… many people don’t even realize what Social Media is. I mean they might ‘know’ about it because they have a profile on a Social Platform like FaceBook or similar, but they don’t understand the concept of Social Media, Social Media Marketing or Social Media Engineering. They definitely don’t understand how it could help them or their business.

I had to take two steps back and remember to explain the core foundation or basis of Social Media. That took me back to my college days, when my Professors would never let me go into a presentation or thesis without first discussing the theory or theories behind my discovery or beliefs.

I ask you… do your clients, customers, colleagues or prospects really understand what it is that you are doing? Make sure before assuming what may seem very clear to you may not be so clear to others. And if that’s the case, your chances of selling to them are slim to none!

Best,

Heather Villa

Related posts:

1. Recommended social media tool for your business
2. Lessons to Learn from Starbucks and Social Media
3. The Metrics of Social Media