I am sure you of heard the phrase “people are resistant to change.”
This is baloney. If I said to you, “I’m going to pay you twice as much next week as I paid you last week,” do you really think you would say to me, “Oh no, I can't take more money, I am very resistant to change.” ? Of course not.
We are generally not resistant to good changes. If you dig down to the fundamentals, there is no resistance to change, and there is no resistance to learning new things. However, there is resistance to risking looking stupid. There is resistance to feeling lost, confused, and vulnerable. So let’s address the resistance, and everything else will come. I promise.
Ok. Twitter. Forget about twitter, and forget about everything you ever heard about twitter. Twitter is meaningless. I don’t care about twitter. I care about you. Now:
If you are in a kind of business where it would be helpful to you to make new connections and generally contact people who have an openly stated interest in your service or product, would you want to be able to make those new connections or contacts? I shall assume yes.
Now let’s review: how have you made business connections and contacts in the past? It may have been a country club membership, with a big up front fee and a lot of time spent on the links. It may have meant direct mail. It may have come from cold calling.
There’s always a little bit of an upfront cost in finding new clients and customers. When you went to college (assuming he went to college), it was exciting and fun but it cost a lot and was also a little daunting the first few days for you, as you found your way around the campus and made new friends.
Well, twitter is no different from these other experiences. Like college, cold calling, or e-mail or direct mail, you probably made meaningful useful connections with only 1 to 3% of all the people that were around you. And it took time. But once you got established and you got used to the procedures, you had a blast, right? Well, twitter is going to be just like that for you.
Twitter is very much like walking into a very sizable cocktail party. Usually, the best course is to just stand around and eavesdrop on the various conversations. When you hear a conversation that interests you, you might focus on that, and ignore all the others.
Now before we continue, there’s something I want you to try to ignore. This is the whole concept of “followers” and “following” on twitter. For a lot of people, just having a lot of followers is important to them, but in my opinion, it’s really not the most important part of being using twitter.
Let me tell you the story of how I really discovered in amazing power of twitter.
One day I received a coupon the mail from Google for $100 worth of their adwords advertising (you know, those “paid ads” you see in the right column of every Google search). Hey, free stuff is free stuff so I went to take advantage. Little did I realize that I would have to spend about two hours filling out all kinds of stuff on the Google site in order to do this.
Well, when I was done, I eagerly waited for all the money to roll in, but it seemed like my ads weren’t appearing anywhere. Not knowing what else to do, I went to twitter and just vented. I wrote a brief note to no one in particular, saying “this adwords thing doesn’t work.”
Well here is where it got amazing. You see, anyone on twitter can select keywords to listen for in the huge cocktail party. And . . . some guy in Toronto, who is an adwords expert, was monitoring twitter for the word “adwords.” He saw my tweet (a “tweet,” by the way, is a single message sent on twitter. I hate this nomenclature but that’s the way it is and there’s not much we can do about it now.). And then this total stranger sent me a little message telling me how to fix my problem. This was totally unexpected, totally out of the blue.
( and since he was such a great help to me I started chatting with this guy and long story short he bought a whole bunch of my books. You meet people on twitter and it goes in ways you don't plan or expect.)
Now actually, there’s really nothing extraordinary about what I just said. If I had gone to a “live” cocktail party and had a couple of drinks and said to anyone listening “you know I had this really frustrating experience today…” and some other guy at the bar had said, “well what a coincidence. I’m an expert in your problem…” the exact same thing would have happened. Of course, the statistical probability of that happening at a single live cocktail party is next to nothing. But on twitter, the likelihood is close to a hundred percent.
Next item:
When you look at the twitter home page, well . . . don’t ever look at that page again. It’s pretty much useless. First thing I want you to do is download and install a program called tweetdeck.
There are many other aftermarket twitter programs you can use, and I’m sure I will get comments suggesting them below, this is just the one I use and I think it’s great.
In tweetdeck, you can set up litle columns for different conversations, and this has little or nothing to do with who you are following or who is following you.
For example, I am a professional speaker, and a few months ago I was sitting in my kitchen wondering how on the world I could ever find a way to connect with meeting planners and association managers, i.e. my potential customer base. Six months later, I have them coming out of my ears. It’s all because of twitter. How did I find them? Well . . .
Now here is kind of a big unfamiliar concept and I want you to brace yourself, not because it is hard, but because it is incredibly simple– and powerful.
There are these nifty little doodads you can put into your 140 character twitter message that will essentially “earmark” your message for people who are interested in that topic. In this case, the meeting planners that I am wooing for work are all referred to as “event professionals.” To save space, they call themselves event profs. BUT . . .
. . . there is one little thing that they do with this keyword, and that is they put the symbol “#” (called a “hash tag”) in front that keyword. So . . .
if I do a tweet message like “please hire me to speak at your next event,” well, only the people who are following me will see that. BUT
. . . if I include in the message code “#eventprofs”, just about every professional event planner on twitter will see that message, as they are all monitoring any message that has that keyword in it. And most of them ARE on twitter.
Now, do you see how cool this as? It’s like free direct mail. (Of course, I am being a little silly . . . you can’t abuse the cocktail party scenario and shout out your products and do “interruption advertising”– you have to be cool about it dude, otherwise you’ll get “blocked.”). You don’t shout out your products at a polite social gathering. You chat and mingle. You get to know. You make small talk. And if you think back on it, isn't that how you made all your best business contacts? Well, twitter is NO DIFFERENT. Forget about the technology and remember you’re just hanging out, meeting . . . PEOPL
E.
Another example of using hashtags: I sell a book that is really for everybody, but is mostly bought by orchestral musicians. So if I write the twitter message, “please buy my book,” well, my followers (all seven of them) will see that message. But if I write “please buy my book #orchestra”, every person on twitter who is interested in the topic of “orchestra” will see that message.
Now let’s look at this another way, i.e. just listening. Let’s suppose you’re interested in marketing. On tweetdeck, you can create a little column and it will ask you what is this column for, and you’ll type in "#marketing." Now, every person on twitter who is saying something about marketing will put that coded word in their (i.e., the hash tag before the word), and you will see these little messages popping up in the column you set up for that.
Now at this point, your brain is probably resisting it, feeling like, oh my gosh, where is the grand web site telling me all these wonderful codes. Well, it’s not really necessary. For general topics, you just throw it out there and see what happens.
Now let’s suppose you’re going to a convention or some kind of big meeting. If the meeting planners are on the ball, they will create unique “twitter hash tag codes” for their event. It might be something seemingly insensible like #ED123”. So if you are in the conference room “B” and you got a boring speaker, guess what? Someone in conference room “A” might send a twitter message out saying, “hey, great presentation going on in conference room A #ED123". Since you’re monitoring all the twitter messages with that hashtag/keyword, you’ll get some very useful information, and you can bolt out of that room and go see the good speaker. Cool, huh? And if you’re NOT on twitter, you will be wondering where everyone else is going.
You see, twitter isn’t just about sending little text messages to a small circle of friends. It’s about broadcasting to people with similar interests all over the world, and listening to people with similar interests all over the world.
Now… again referring to twitter is a cocktail party, bear in mind, it is a very LOUD cocktail party. Just think of how many radio stations there are in your area, sending out music and talk and all kinds of information right now, 24 hours a day. Do you listen to all of them? Of course not. You pick which station to tune into. Twitter is very much like that. 99.999% of twitter is sheer noise that is of absolutely no interest to you. And getting used to the concept of just ignoring stuff may take a while. But after a while you’ll start to realize that it’s just junk, and you’ll ignore it. And there is an awful lot of stuff on the twitter columns and messages that are private messages, thank you’s, grettings, etc., not meant for you. Again, just like a real cocktail party.
Next: There is also a fair amount of jargon. The “@” of course, is a twitterism for delineating a username. my twitter name is @justinlocke. If you’re like me, it will take you a while to stop thinking of that as meaning “AT justinlocke.” It’s not a preposition anymore. It’s a noun.
Another twitter convention is “RT,” or re-tweet. When you see it, this means someone found the content of someone else’s tweet so interesting that they are “RE tweeting” it. RT basically means “I just heard someone say this and I thought it was so interesting I’m repeating it to you now.” Again, just like a cocktail party.
To be honest, there are many other twitter-isms that I have yet to figure out. But who cares? It’s not like I’m going to have to pass a test.
NEXT If you go to big association/ business meetings and conventions, you will find that the meeting planners, and lease the cutting edge ones, are getting more and more involved in using twitter as part of the meeting experience. You can argue pros and cons, but it’s a little bit like arguing the pros and cons of cell phones. It’s fast becoming a primary form of how people communicate important information. The trouble is, the meeting planners are frustrated by the twitter users versus the non-twitter users at their events, and they want to try and train people how to use twitter at the event. While this is a great intention, it took me about two months to just get used to twitter and the power of it. It’s a little bit like lifting 300 pounds. It’s simple, yes, but not all that easy on first try.
I will be the first to admit, facing this vast seemingly new technology gave me a headache and made me feel very tired for several days. But like the Internet, now I’m wondering how I ever lived without it.
Getting over your stage fright of entering into something new is very very hard. I hope by offering you my experience and a little bit of sympathy for that very human reaction to this awe-inspiring new technology, it will encourage you to at least give it a try.
I recommend going very slowly. just set up an account and then leave it for a week. Then come back and maybe do that tweetdeck set up. Then leave it for a week. Then exchange tweets with a friend who is on twitter, and then let it sit for a while.
If you own a cat, you know that if there is a major change in their environment, they get stressed, so it’s very important to introduce them to new cats or changes in their environment very slowly and carefully. Treat yourself with the same consideration that you would give to your cat. Twitter is a whole new environment, and new environments are by definition stressful on living creatures, including you. Take it one step at a time. And be sure to follow me on twitter!
© Justin Locke
