1. Look for your contemporaries

I get asked nearly every day “why would I want to use twitter?” which is kind of silly, because no one person can tell someone they’ve just met what social media tool will appropriately connect them to their consumer. I don’t know you – I don’t know what you sell and I don’t know how you sell it. I don’t know the things that will kill you online: like being lazy, or having terrible customer service (when your csr hangs up on them you can bet they’ll twitter you about it), or having a terrible product. These are all things my clients and I talk about, and find the best course of action. Of course you probably want to see what your competition, kindred companies, and clients are doing – so a tool like Tracking Twitter makes that very doable. I am sure I’ll be using it to watch brands grow in their strategy, and see what their results are once these profiles have been active long enough to gain measureable results.

2. Learn what works

@Jetblue (the twitter handle for Jet Blue Airlines) just rocks. The airline presence is fantastic and in addition to giving you a headsup on specials, they give you great travel tips that will make your trip easier (security tips) and less boring (answers to questions about what movies are playing). If you do any kind of travel service then you should learn from them. Really.

3. Get comfortable with your persona

The 2nd most common question I get about using twitter (and any social media really) is “what should i say?” my answer is typically “what should you say?”. It comes back to the who are you/what do you do conversation I mentioned earlier. For tech companies and b2b firms there is often a tendency to be authoritative, to provide information (which typically means to be as boring as you can possibly imagine). Burger King has an icon – the king – and that’s who is doing their twitter-ness (check out @burgerking). He’s hilarious, and totally in sync with their current branding. On the tech side check out @delloutlet and any of the other dell twitter-feeds – it’s estimated that dell’s done over 1 million in business via their twitter handles in 2008… take that those of you who tell me twitter is a total waste of time!

The biggest and most important thing I can tell you is to think – think about what your goal is on social media, what you want to accomplish, and who should be working toward this goal – then you will have the direction to make “what should i say” a simple question with an easy answer. ’cause that’s what it should be.

@rebekah_king

If you’re a jerk, now the whole world knows it.
If you’re a nice person with jerk tendencies, now the whole world knows it.

Some people are freaked out by this, the merging of public and private lives, and often one must find a new set of boundaries (ie. stop twittering after 9pm – DUH!)

And often as these tools creep in to further degrade the private/public boundaries.. tools like myspace and facebook crossing over to LinkedIN, email, etc. We come up with more ways to waste time and to share our OCD with the world – tools like twitter and digg and del.icio.us

The trick in all this is balance – and one of the easiest ways to balance is to be a slow-adopter. Don’t necessary jump on every bandwagon… give it 6 months or so for the bugs to get worked out and the syncing tools to catch up. Sure you may miss a freebie here and there, but you’ll save yourself hours of headaches.

Take Myspace for example. I thought that tool was great and jumped right on… only to become a target for spammers of the world to unitedly blast. Every time I make an update, I get hit with half a dozen spammers… not to mention the porn and the current dramas in the news about kids publicizing their cruelty.

LinkedIN is one of my success stories. I signed up for it a year ago, but waited 6 months to really get into it… now it’s a huge tool for my networking and KIT systems.

Plaxo’s a 50/50 split… the plaxo pulse is a weak attempt to compete with other social networking tools, while the address book and calendar syncing tools remain unparalleled for those of us that have to sync home computer|cellphone|office|laptop and aren’t interested in thousands of duplicates.

So when in doubt – sign up but don’t email blast your address book immediately… sit around (aka “lurk) until you see a few friends in there, and then go forward. Always look for syncing ability to your existing technology tools, and never give up your right to wait.

Being the first one to adopt a new technology is very rarely worth being the first one to have a system crash.

Unless you’re in IT, of course.

Cheers,

Rebekah

So like a good nerd, I started researching other ways to use this new technology. I tried twitterific and twhirl and twillions of other twools that just made me feel lispy.

Meanwhile, I notice that all my other “social networking” tools are trying to get in on the action, with a series of “what are you doing” post options. These just added to the twitteration and twistication of my poor head. Being visible and “plugged in” is one thing…. but all of this stuff is just NOT WORK.

And then I found PING.fm
and my life was forever changed.

Ping let’s me post to all my blogs, all my micro-blogs, and even all the stupid little “status” messages across my metaverse. While it’s not perfect (thus is the world of beta) it is by far the easiest way for me to trick all the non-techies into thinking I’m a social networking queen.
(come on – you know you were thinking it)

Checkout Ping.fm on me – enter the invite code “pingfood” for access.

Fellow MLPF friends,

I have a simple, very simple question: how to manage such a huge amount
of information when doing networking?

How many hours do you spend per day doing business networking? And hot
to manage that with our normal work?

Thanks in advance for all the answers and comments.

I hear you! Take heart though, I think feeling just a few steps behind is a good sign that you are actively networking – it’s that sense of drowning that I often take as a reminder to update my networking maintenance systems.

I use plaxo sync’d w/ my computers (both home and office) to keep my address book and calendar’s lined up. I sync my office computer to my treo and then everything stays in line very well. I don’t participate much in the “connections” portion – I just use the tools to update contact information quickly and easily (if anyone you know is in plaxo, when they change their information it will automatically update in your address book).

I use LinkedIN as an online networking tool, and sync that to outlook quarterly. I don’t do the LinkedIN blast invites – I just invite people one-on-one & I let them know it helps me to refer them to my network.

I keep a rolodex sorted by industry (vs company name) that I keep cards in – this is a 2 1/2 inch binder at this point… I only keep cards of people I want to refer, or that I work with. Folks that I know well or refer often I ask for several cards so I can give one away and still have one in the binder. I’ll look through it periodically when I need a networking brainstorm.

I know it sounds like alot, but it’s actually a very simple workflow when you come back from an event: enter the contact info to your computer (which syncs everywhere), put away in rolodex, when done w/ all cards from that event, sync linkedin… ta-da!!

In Followup Mode: I set aside 2 hours a week to go through my new connections and see what we have in common or who they know that I’d like to know. If I took notes at the event that the person was interested in something I can pass along, I will do that within a week. Often there are folks that want to be updated on interesting articles or groups I am a member of, so I will forward an invitation to the group or the articles on a weekly basis – nothing to take more than my 2 hours a week.

I also go to 5 or so events a week, but only take away the business cards that are relevant to what I’m looking for at that event (always have an objective before you walk into an event). Staying active in several particular circles keeps me in touch with the membership.

Cheers,

Rebekah