Top most is having an understanding that twitter is for communicating and building relationships – not for blatant ads like old-fashioned media (e.g. a newspaper ad was a one way message). I saw a few businesses tweet their ad at least every couple of hours with no other messages in between. For one business, they had 3 variants of it and ran them in succession once every hour or so during their business hours. I wasn’t their audience anyway but seeing it so often bored and annoyed me, and gave me an uncomfortable feeling about them as a business.

Next is to have one honest profile. It because obvious when 3 twitter users repeatedly sent the same tweet straight after each other – a number of times. It came across as trying to trick and con people, plus it seemed they were desperate for business rather than offering quality or showing a genuine interest in people watching their tweets.

The other behaviour that was annoying while I was on twitter a lot (I haven’t really seen it when just keeping up with people I follow on twitter) was an excessive use of hash tags*. To me it was like reading a blog post or webpage written to show off keywords rather than actually communicate something – boring, annoying and an insult if they think I am impressed by such actions. Adding # to key words within a message is fine, adding a keyword or two after the message is also fine, but the following wasn’t so fine:

• adding five or more hashtags after a brief message
• adding hashtags that were about advertising not the message (e.g. adding #santa after a message about a computer breaking down to get noticed for Christmas or adding #webdesign to a message about dreading a visit to the dentist)
• making the entire message hashtags with a link

Tweets are like any other content you write – make it about the message and people reading it, not about SEO and getting noticed by more people, as that is what will genuinely get your message heard and distributed.

I can’t say what results those people get from their tweets, but I know I would never retweet or follow them (and I’m sure I’m not alone). I can say that most of the retweeted Love Santa tweets were those based on replying to someone else – in other words, ‘talking’ to people was appreciated and earned greater exposure to other tweeters.

Twitter can be a great marketing tool but it needs to be thought of as a relationship tool with marketing bonuses to have the best impact on your business.

Or maybe you are happy to read tweets with some of the above characteristics? Or have found them effective for viral marketing?

* A hashtag is simply adding # at the start of a word (or group of words without a space in between) that can be used to highlight a topic and make searching for relevant information on twitter easier.

At any time of year, using topical words and common events in your marketing can be valuable. For example, think about a chocolate company that advertises all year but leading up to mid February, they use more romantic concepts to tie in with Valentines Day.

If you don’t sell gifts, however, you may not think Christmas and Santa can help your marketing.

Actually, you may be surprised at how you can use current events to promote your business (and I’ll give some ideas later in the week) but here is an example from Jeff Bullas where he used Santa in a heading and one tip to tie an article on building trust to the Christmas season.

Let’s face it, are there any people more trusted than Santa? Would people trust your business based on your online presence?

If you do try to link your business in with Christmas, Santa or some other major event, it is important to do it in such a way as to build and maintain trust; make your message relevant to the added keywords rather than just adding topical words in a heading or description for purely keyword and SEO purposes.

Robin Cangie makes a similar point with “it’s not the metrics. Your marketing just sucks“.

So if you’ve been using Facebook for your business for 6 months and got nothing in your business to show for it. Does it make sense to keep posting on Facebook every day – or is it time to look at other options?

Maybe your Facebook campaign isn’t working because

• your target audience doesn’t use Facebook
• your messages are too social and not enough about your business industry/expertise
• your profile is all about you and not helping customers
• it leads to a website that isn’t good at converting leads to sales
• one of many other possibilities

Measuring marketing (whether social media or otherwise) is important, but not more important than running good marketing efforts in the right place at the right time (yes, the 4 Ps of marketing still apply).

Every time your marketing results are less than expected (or desired), you need to decide whether the poor results are due to a short time frame (looking at results too soon can be misleading), inaccurate measurements, a poor campaign or something else. From that, you can decide to continue the marketing, adjust it or stop it.

Going back to our Facebook example, something has to change. Maybe it is move to another social media channel (where your audience actually spend time) or maybe it just needs a new approach.

“There’s no point flogging a dead horse” applies to marketing, too. However, you must give each campaign a chance – no additional sales after a week on Facebook doesn’t mean Facebook is a poor strategy for your business. Sometimes it is a slow process to see results from our actions.

How do you judge when something has been tried long enough to move onto a new strategy? Or do you just keep trying the same thing even when there is little chance of success?

Many people don’t realise there is such a range of roles behind the public presentation of a business, so here is my summary of the roles.

A communications manager oversees many of the processes involved in producing materials to promote a business. For example, a communications manager ensures an annual report is written, designed, printed and added to a website with all necessary people approving it. A communications manager may do some of the tasks themselves, manage a team of people to do the tasks or outsource specific tasks. Communications managers generally have a writing or marketing background.

A business or corporate writer actually puts the words together to effectively communicate a message in a style that suits the business and its customers. The writer also often edits material written by other people such as a letter from a sales manager or a marketer’s brochure. Sometimes a writer will also help implement the content such as posting to a blog or working with a print-based or online-based graphic designer to tweak the message to fit.

A web manager obviously manages the website, which can include tasks such as making changes, optimising the site for search engine results, updating the design or navigation, and maintaining data.

A designer makes the message as visually appealing as possible, whether that is a simple letterhead, a website design, branding or preparing some advertising banners and posters.

A marketing officer or manager is a little harder to define. It is a creative role of trying to get the business/message to as many appropriate people as possible. Marketing includes deciding where to promote the business as well as the key messages to promote, such as a tag line, campaign theme and suitable formats.

A social media manager or monitor is obviously a newer role but no less important for that. Social media is becoming more important as a means of promoting and building your business, but it can be time consuming and has some elements that (like most things) require specific skills and knowledge. You can get someone to monitor your social media appearances (ie they check various platforms each day to see what people are saying about you) or someone can manage your social media overall (such as making posts for you, planning a strategy and replying to mentions).

If you are employing someone, you may want to think through exactly what tasks you need done before choosing the role to fill, and someone who can do more than one set of tasks may be valuable (for example a writer who can update your website or post tweets for you).

However, if you are outsourcing, remember the roles are different and choosing the appropriate person will probably give you better results than expecting too much from one person (for instance assuming that your designer will proof read your writing or write some tweets to promote your new eBook could lead to disappointment).

Some projects will obviously take more than one role to fulfill, which may seem hard to manage in itself. In this case, outsource to someone who is willing to manage those other tasks for you rather than someone who claims to do it all themselves. I would never outsource design work to me for example, but I have relationships with some great designers so can manage a project by sub contracting to them – the difference in results is huge but the effort for a client is minimised.

It’s true that a picture can convey a message very quickly and sometimes better than words, and can make any document more appealing. However, you need to be careful relying on images in your marketing.

Before making an image the central part of any email message, remember the following:

• many people (I’d guess the majority, in fact) have images turned off so they won’t see the image by default. If your email relies on that image, your email is not going to work very well.
  Yes, sometimes people will accept images and then be able to see your message but I rarely do that if the image is pretty much the entire message as I want to know what it’s about before lowering my security – and I guess I’m not alone in that.
• including a number of images, even if they aren’t the key message, can lead to a poor presentation of your email if images are turned off – not only are there lots of red crosses on view, but it may distort the layout of text, too
• people have different perceptions and ideas, and some see a half empty glass so think carefully about about how your image may be seen. It’s not so bad if a supporting picture is misinterpreted as if it is a key part of your message
• including many and/or large graphics makes your email much larger which may mean higher costs for you and again may limit it’s acceptance by all email servers
• text in graphics and images themselves won’t help your search engine efforts (for emails online as well as sent out) although it does hide words from spam filters. Technology may be changing this but for now it still matters!

So what do you think when you receive an email that is based entirely or predominantly on graphics? Are they as effective in getting your interest as text based emails?

And don’t forget to support your email marketing, too.

The American Express OPEN small business search marketing survey (March 2011) has a number of statsistics to show where small businesses see online marketing impacting their sales.

While it is a list of survey results (yawn, yawn!) it is a summary so easy to read and can give some useful insights for trends within small business which is useful for comparisons and particularly useful if you sell to that sector. My opening questions are also examples of how you can use this information to assess your own online marketing.

Read the report and let me know what you learn from it…

No matter how great your email is, though, you need to support it on your website – and this is something many people forget so here are some tips for you:

1. use the same branding and style in the email and the web page the email leads to. Sounds obvious but the obvious is often missed when we’re busy and caught in the middle of a project.
2. match the message in the email and your website. For example, if your email is about a sale but links to your homepage which doesn’t mention a sale you will find a lot of people will just leave and those remaining will be annoyed at having to search for the information. If you have specific graphics in the email, they should be visible on the site too – or versions of them – so the connection is immediate  
3. Remember to link to relevant pages, not just your homepage - again, this saves people having to search your site and it can also help your search engine results (especially if a copy of your email is online)
4. it is part of your branding, but to be crystal clear on this opint – keep the same tone in the email as on your website. If the friendly, young sounding email attracts someone, a formal, old-fashioned webpage will alienate and confuse them.
5. ensure the contact details given in the email are correct and that someone is available to respond to them. An ad in a magazine may result in calls over a period of days or weeks, but the majority of responses to an email will come within hours of sending it out – it’s not a good look if you send out an email inviting calls and no one answers the phone or emails for a few days!

If you looked at your latest email campaign and the related web pages, would you see the connection or would they clash? Try the above tips as a testing process and see if you can’t improve the campaign for next time.

In this case, the email was from someone who can apparently improve my email marketing – how can I trust that claim when their email is so poor itself?

So here are the main issues and the corresponding lessons to be learned:

• subject “Meeting request for Tash” email opening “Hi, well…”
  lesson – if you can put my name in the subject, how hard would it be to address the email to me too? Names are important, and beyond getting my attention in the subject
• opening sentence “Well I hope this note finds you well”
  lessons – using well twice in such a short sentence looks wrong and lazy, and the opening well doesn’t really fit there anyway; it is an email not a note
• “I know you place tremendous value on your time, so I’ve included an overview of what we do”
  lesson – you may assume or expect it but  you know anything about me; why give me an overview when I don’t even know who you are? Perhaps “so I will introduce myself quickly” or just “so I will be brief”
• “in-house data append… we would run append test and get back to you with the appended fields”
  what does data append mean (no, not a facetious question as I really don’t know and this email doesn’t even give me enough clues to guess!) Pretty obvious lesson – don’t use jargon or terms the reader may not know, or at least define them!
• “If you are looking at adding value to your investment and get more revenue…”
  what investment are we talking about? Do you mean adding value to my business, my brand, my marketing, or something else? Lesson – be clear and finish with something relevant to the entire message
  lesson – use good grammar when doing a cold call like this. ‘If you are looking at… get more revenue’ does not read well – no complicated grammar there!
• “Send us a 50 -100 records from your database…”
  Does this mean now or after we sign up for your service? Do I have any assurances how you will use that data – I care about the privacy of my subscribers. And more grammar issues (“a records” just grates!)
• Listed fields they include (which I don’t think is very relevant in a first call email but anyway) has ‘zip code’ which I don’t like – either they are emailing me from the US or they have copied a US email and are too lazy to localise it. Lesson – if in Australia, use Australian terminology, and likewise for any other grouping of people
• The email includes her name, her job title and the name of a business (presumably the one she is emailing about but she never actually mentions them in the email!) so I don’t know where she is from and a .com email address again gives me no assurance she is Australian.
  lesson – provide contact details and enough information for the reader to know how relevant your message is for them. Knowing where she is from affects things like currency (not such an issue while the AUD and USD are so close), time zones for support, spam and privacy laws and also how relevant her data acquisition would be
• under her signature is one line “To stop receiving our newsletters, reply back with STOP in the subject line”
  lesson – anti-spam laws at their minimum but surely an email company can have an automated unsubscribe system? What is worse, however, is the thought that I may get newsletters from these people when I never asked for it and certainly don’t want it after this email! If she has subscribed me as well as emailed me, I would be tempted to report her for spamming.

How would you respond to getting such an email? Would you just delete it as spam anyway, send a terse ‘no thanks’ or would you ignore all these issues if the service itself was of interest?

Try the following tips to make your tips effective:

• keep each tip simple and preferably short
• only give each tip once- repetition is pointless and boring
• make sure the tip is clear – give an example if you think it will help
• brand the page – add your logo and URL as a minimum, but consider coloured paper or a professionally designed template
• make the tips genuine – giving general statements everyone knows is pointless and won’t show your customers your generosity or your knowledge/skills base
• avoid jargon so it’s easy to understand
• check for correct spelling and grammar- although full sentences aren’t necessary in a bulleted list of points
• be consistent in your presentation and writing

Taking some effort to get your tips good is worthwhile as you can use the list over and over. It can be given to clients as a printed page or emailed as a pdf.

Do you already have a tips sheet? Have you checked it recently for the above points and to make sure it is still current and accurate?

This difference is often known as a unique selling point (USP) or a point of difference, and there are many ways to make use of it.

However, it is also important to show you are different by avoiding being the same. What do I mean by that? Well, if everyone in your industry talks about their compact products, don’t use the word compact – try space saving, small, minimalist or mini for instance.

Additionally, it’s not a good idea to use over-used words such as quality, value, fast and safe (see what Drew McLellan and others say on this in Drew’s recent blog post - he gives some good alternatives and the discussion is interesting.)

In writing as in business, being original and providing interesting content is likely to make more of an impact than being the same as everyone else. And making an impact may be just what you need to get customers to you rather than your competitors.

But when you are stating those great differences and reasons to use you, remember to be honest and only state real advantages rather than making up something your customers want to read.