An increasing percentage of the tweets you receive are spam. Twitter is especially vulnerable, given its inherent automation. Anyone can easily follow tens of thousands of people, and then gain a large percentage of followers in return. An easy, ready market for spam from lurid “marketers”.

What does Twitter spam look like? Twitter spam can take many forms. Legitimate companies spam when they endlessly promote their products through dummy Twitter accounts. These accounts often bear no resemblance to the products they pitch. Con artists attempt to shift your money and to gain your identity through a series of shady financial transactions. You are probably wary of these: “Help me access my dead uncle’s $20 million from a backward third-world country and receive a 15% fee.” Still, a small percent click through.

Many times, spam tweets are sent by members with few followers yet following as many as possible. This should be your first tip-off when someone starts to follow you. These people send tweets with blind tiny URLs linked to those click-here-if-you-are-18-years-or-older sites — except that requirement is frequently omitted. These can easily be identified by the busty, cleavage-popping, young lady’s photo on the account.

Then there are the “See how I got 3,000 followers in one afternoon” spammers. Another come-on: “I can show you how to make $1,000,000 by tomorrow afternoon by following this simple method. No, really I can!” Hair removal treatment for women garners a good share of spam tweets. You get the idea.

The quality of tweets. Pear Analytics, a products and services firm based in San Antonio, Texas, conducted a study of tweets. Over a two week period last month, they sampled the Twitter stream every 30 minutes from 11 AM to 5 PM for 10 days. They then organized this sampling of 2,000 tweets into six categories:

“Pointless babble”, 40.55%. Described in the study as the “I am eating a sandwich” tweets. These are the kind of tweets that blindly follow Twitter’s original query, “What are you doing now?” Let’s be honest though: who cares?

“Conversational”, 37.55%. That immediate dialogue, questions, answers, replies, and back and forth better suited for instant messaging. Again, who cares other than the two conversing, and even then…?

“Pass along value”, 8.7%. Retweets passed along from other Twitter members that actually might have some value.

“Self promotion”, 5.85%. Tweets that market the member, generally about products, services, demos, or the companies themselves. Actually, not that large a percentage.

“Spam”, 3.75%. The unwanted tweets you hoped never to receive.

“News”, 3.60%. Generally, these are re-tweets from mainstream or alternative media sources. As one wag stated, “It’s sad that news tweets are more rare than spam.”

What to make of all this? Here’s one thought: the vast majority of tweets — 81.85%, the total of “pointless babble”, “conversational”, and “spam” — are virtually worthless. Adding “self promotion” to that total gets 87.7%, although this category could also contain valuable information depending on your point of view. That means that a mere 12.3% of tweets, between “pass along value” and “news”, contain worthwhile information. Thus, for the sake of argument, one could conclude that approximately seven out of eight tweets are spam or spam-like. That represents a lot of time sifting through your personal twitter stream to garner some real usefulness and value.

What you can do. First, Twitter has been especially proactive in identifying spam accounts. In late July, Twitter simply deleted accounts that automatically follow people. They called it “Correcting follower and following counts”. As a result, counts dropped on many accounts, some precipitously. You can add to this protection by reducing the number of accounts you follow. First, don’t automatically click to follow everyone who follows you. Take the time to check out followers before following them. Block them if you want. If you think they are spammers, don’t send them a direct message or retweet them. Instead, follow the official Twitter spam account: type “spam” into Find People (the account from Twitter HQ uses a Spam can as its photo); click the account’s Follow button. Report suspected spammers to this @spam account. Go to the account’s home page for more tips on thwarting spammers.

As a final resort, consider ticking the ‘Protect my tweets’ check box under Settings/Account. You must then approve anyone who attempts to follow you.

Appreciate the point of Twitter: rapid, immediate communication that enhances your social media experience and educates, entertains, and informs. Anything less than that is unacceptable.

–Rich Maggiani

Engaging social media to promote your company is similar to taking a long trip in your car. You must take these four steps:

1. The vehicle you are taking: one you know how to drive.

2. Where you are going: your destination or goal.

3. How you are going to get to your destination; what are the means or objectives, for attaining your goals: the roads to take.

4. Checkpoints along the way: to assess your trip and possibly to make adjustments.

One thing is certain: a long trip does not happen overnight. It simply takes time.

All of these factors about taking a long trip are true about engaging social media, except there are multiple vehicles, goals, objectives, and checkpoints. Let’s look at them individually.

1. Vehicles. When taking a long trip, it’s best to choose a reliable vehicle. In social media, there are many reliable vehicles. Chief among these are blogs (posted from your web site), microblogs (through Twitter), social networks (Facebook being the most popular), and professional networks (LinkedIn by far the largest). There are others, of course, but these vehicles represent a firm foundation for your social media efforts.

Once you choose your vehicles, learn how to drive them. You can easily create a blog on your web site, join Twitter to make an account for your company, sign up for Facebook to create a fan page, and enroll in LinkedIn for a company page and for pages on your key executives, managers, and staff. In fact, you probably already own many of these vehicles. But are you driving them to your greatest advantage? For that, you need to know your destinations or goals.

2. Destinations or goals. These are broad, intangible, even abstract statements of your long-term intentions. Your destinations or goals describe your future expectations, provide direction for your actions (your means or objectives), and focus on end results. Some of your goals might include any or all of the following:

• Build awareness of your brand and enhance your reputation by shaping their perception in the marketplace.
• Generate leads and convert these prospects into loyal customers.
• Interact with your customer community, and influence their behavior.
• Manage customer relations with your prospects and customers.
• Promote your products and services.
• Increase employee morale and empower their collaboration with social media.

You can adapt these goals, add others, or create a list to meet your specific needs. What’s important is that these goals be the ones most important to you, the ones that help you attain your overall company goals.

3. Means or objectives. From your social media goals, enumerate the means for attaining them through the vehicles you are driving. It all works together. The means must be tangible, realistic, and above all, measurable statements of action. They generally fall into three categories: information (what to post); engagement (who is engaging your community); and management (how much time and resources to invest). Make these decisions up front, and all becomes clear.

To be more specific, your means describe the kinds of information — text, images, audio, video, ideas, concepts — to post in your social media vehicles, who is creating them and how, where are they being posted and how often, who is responding to comments, who is interacting with your community, and what are your guidelines for involvement. The means you choose must directly support your goals.

4. Checkpoints. Once on your social media journey, check at regular intervals to make sure you are still on the right road. This is why your actions must be measurable. Many methods are available. Success, however, depends less on the methods you use and more on what you measure and how well you do it.

Show some return: make money. When all is said and done — your vehicles chosen, your destinations set, your means being implemented — you must be able to answer this question affirmatively: Are we making money? Doing that makes for profitable journeys.

–Rich Maggiani

Would you like to know more about what is going on in your company; about your staff; about your prospects and clients? Then all you have to do is listen.

Ah, but listening is not easy. If it were, more people would do it with verve. But it is just that difficulty that sets those who truly listen apart, and elevates them in the mind of others. People will seek you out because they know you will take the time to truly listen to them. Given that place of honor in their circle of colleagues means that you discover more information faster, are more of a confidant, and gain a deeper association with those around you.

Listening is good for business. How? People feel free to tell you what is really going on in the company, and do not feel they have to gloss over it. And it’s just this kind of in-depth truth that helps you solve problems when they are still small.

There are a number of characteristics to becoming an exceptional listener that are easily within your reach: humility, patience, respect, sincerity, and empathy. You have varying levels of these traits in your character; it just takes a bit of focus to bring them out.

Humility, the misunderstood trait. Probably the most important trait is humility. This seems like a rare trait in business, one that is all too often perceived as weakness. Humility doesn’t mean that you are unintelligent. All humility says is that you don’t know everything, or even every perspective, and that you are willing to admit to that. Listening allows you to receive information that your ego might have already assumed you knew. But you don’t. How could you? No one knows everything. Try this: listen as if your perspective is wrong; think about the different perspective you would take based on what others tell you. Taking this approach can help you gain a deeper understanding of a crucial issue.

Understanding an issue from another’s perspective — taking the second position — is a trait that sets exceptional listeners apart. Listening from the other person’s perspective gains you immeasurable insight into the issue, gains deeper rapport, and can even — gasp! — get you to modify your position or change your mind, even if it’s just a little bit. And to what gain? Clarity.

Patience is a virtue. Or so my mother used to endlessly tell me. However you feel about that cliché, patience truly is a virtue when applied to listening. You must learn to — frankly — shut up! This allows people to talk, allows them to think, allows them to finish their entire thought. When you are quiet, the more people talk — and the more information you get. As Samuel Johnson once blithely stated, “Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

Embrace the pregnant pause. Be comfortable with the silence. Be still. Wait quietly.

Awareness. Just by reading this series of position papers on listening makes you a better listener, simply because you are more aware of the value of listening. When you are aware of your surroundings, you’ll be more attuned to when others are telling you something important or relating something that you ought to know. Give them that chance. Just think what you might learn.

Listening demonstrates respect. When you truly listen to someone, you are telling them that they are important, that they have something to say. And when you give respect, you get respect.

Sincerity and empathy. These traits help you connect with people at a deeper level. When people feel that you are genuine and understand their feelings, they feel more secure to tell you the whole truth and complete story.

Listeners are exceptional people. I was once in a conversation with several people. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. Mentally, I took a step back and simply watched the process. As it roiled on, I realized no one was actually listening; that they were all trading stories. How did I know? The same points were made more than once, and no one realized it. Except for one woman: Tracy. She simply moved her head from speaker to speaker. Finally, when everyone had exhausted themselves, one said to Tracy, “Gee Tracy, you haven’t said much.” Actually, she hadn’t said anything at all! “I’m sure you have something to say about this.” And everyone became silent awaiting Tracy’s response. She said, “I’ve been so busy listening to you all that I haven’t taken the time to compose a response.” Then she proceeded to summarize all that had been said so far, and by whom. I’ll never forget that, and neither did the other people in the group. Later, I discovered that Tracy was the person others sought out when they wanted to be listened to. Imagine what she learned.

Getting there. So, you are not quite there with these personality traits? That’s okay; you just need to work on it. Be attuned to how people talk to you, and adjust to be more receptive. Listening is a skill that can be learned, and like any skill, it takes time and a focused effort that is truly worthwhile.

–Rich Maggiani

• Build awareness of your brand.
• Enhance your reputation.
• Convert prospects into customers and clients.
• Create loyalty in your customers.
• Increase the morale of your employees.

So that’s what you get, the benefits. How do you get it?

• Through a Facebook fan page for a celebrity, band, or business.
• Through a Twitter account for your business.
• Through LinkedIn pages for key employees (executives, managers, employees, whoever best represents your company).
• Through a blog with one or more authors (or multiple blogs) on your web site.

Those are the tools. But they are only tools; you must know how to use them to enjoy the five benefits.

So you must have a plan, well thought out; with goals, strategies, and tactics. You must know where you are going and how you are going to get there; otherwise, how will you know you are on the right road? How will you even know when you get there, whatever your destination (your goal) might be? So a plan is a necessity. As is the skill to use these social media tools.

It doesn’t hurt to write guidelines for participation. Actually, guidelines are a necessity, for companies of any size, even for one-person companies. Why? Guidelines allow you to consider the rules for playing. They set a clear path of engagement.

All of this takes some thoughtful consideration, some time to gestate ideas, some time to adjust as you go. And a commitment for the long term.

See. That’s all it takes! Nothing to it, right?

–Rich Maggiani

Trust has shifted. Target markets shun official messages and the corporate leaders who make them, replacing these messages with conversations among peers. Marketing materials, advertisements, and press releases increasingly find fallow audiences. Target markets, instead, covet dialogues and multi-dimensional conversations among their chosen communities.

Revising your communication strategy becomes vital — one that contributes to the conversation; one that collaborates and connects with a community you create and cultivate. One of the best methods for engaging your community is through blogging and microblogging.

Blogging (the macro kind). If you don’t already, write a blog. Post an entry at least once a week, aiming for the same day and time so that your readers get used to the expectation. Why? Two-thirds of people on the Internet have positive thoughts about companies with blogs. They trust what they read in blogs, even about your product and service because, surprisingly, they perceive blog writers as peers (not as the top-down corporate speak they’ve already turned off).

What to blog about. Start writing about what you sell, your product and service. Integrate customer resource management into your blog posts. For instance, blog about a particular aspect of what you offer and review the results you reap.

Remember though that a blog is not a marketing and sales platform — it is about sharing useful information with your readers. Write stories that resonate with them. Your posts should make your readers smarter and help them succeed.

Write your blog posts employing your personal voice, a moderated conversational tone, some humanity (which is why our blog is entitled Toward Humanity). You are writing for your readers, not yourself or your company. Engender multi-dimensional communication — a conversation where readers can reply and comment. Respond to these comments and, above all, listen to them!

Many companies remain wary of blogs because they are concerned about receiving negative comments being added to their posts. With the ease of communication through the myriad of social media, these negative comments are going to find an audience somewhere; they are not going to be easily quelled. Negative comments on your blog, however, at least give you the opportunity to respond, deal with the issue, and set the record straight. Besides, readers feel better about the real voice of your company dealing directly with problems. As a result, your reputation — and your brand — is enhanced.

Promoting your blog and gaining readers. While it might feel great to write a blog, what is more important is for people to read it. Once you have a number of posts, promote your blog and its web address aggressively to gain community. Promote it in your printed materials and stationery, especially your business cards; on your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages; submit it to StumbleUpon, refer to it when you interact on FriendFeed and when you submit to Flicker and YouTube; add it to your email signature; and (of course) talk about it when you meet people in professional settings (think conferences). Submit each blog post’s unique address to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, Delicious, and Propeller) using socialmarket.com, submitting to 160 sites through one interface.

Microblogging with Twitter… at 140 characters or less (cutely called a “tweet’). Followers are the foundation of Twitter; these people are your community. You send a tweet and your followers receive it. They can then “retweet” it to their followers, thus quickly gaining exponential exposure.

Twitter has grown about 1500% over the last year and a half (mainly in the 35–50 age group), quickly becoming a standard of communication over the Internet, cell phones, and mobile devices.

Send regular tweets to your community of followers, using the same strategy as your blog posts: information that is useful, helpful, and makes them smarter. What do you tweet about? First and foremost, don’t tweet about what you are doing right now; trust me, no one cares! Instead, use Twitter to tweet about your blog posts, to engage in customer service, to converse with your customers, to promote your brand, to inform about promotions (such as couponing or discounts), to inform about breaking news or informative articles (and blog posts) of interest to your followers.

Gaining followers. You gain followers first by following. Follow your Facebook buddies, your LinkedIn connections, the people you email and those in your contacts list. Use wefollow.com to find people; try Twitter’s suggestion page for ideas; use keywords on twollow.com; and search for people you meet.

Succeeding at blogging. Increase your readership and your followers — your community of customers, prospects, and advocates — by writing engaging, interesting, and worthwhile tweets and posts. It’s that straightforward.

[Review the accompanying slides, download a pdf of the slides by clicking the top link, or download the related position paper by clicking the top link.]

–Rich Maggiani