Multilevel Marketers, affiliate marketers, spamming business owners, scam artists, hard sell sales people, and a myriad of other “dark forces” are lurking on Twitter with the idea of selling you something no matter how you feel about being sold.

In order to avoid, and avoiding this at all costs strikes to the very heart of your credibility, the perception of being one of these “dark forces” avoid the following mistakes when establishing your Twitter presence.

5 Tips To Avoiding Being Perceived As A Spammer On Twitter

• Follow to Follower Ratio: Do not begin your account on Twitter by following hundreds of people-companies or you will be perceived as a MLM, affiliate marketing spammer. This condition is called “Being upside down”
• Follow Recipricols: Begin by following companies or people who almost automatically will follow you in return. Ex- GuyKawasaki usually follows everyone, Pat Kitano, or me deansguide
• Build Slowly: Monitor your “ratios” for the first 100- try to keep it at a 1-1 ratio of followers to those you follow
• Sales Messaging: Do not simply run tweets filled with sales pitches for you or your services. This is the fastest way to lose an audience
• Messaging Content: Just like on a blog, concentrate on tweeting about your region, city, town, community, neighborhood, politics, schools, events, restaurants, construction and any hyper local news that will make you the go-to source for your area

Part 3 in our series on mobile Web marketing strategies

As we have learned from Jon Cooper CMO of PhindMe Mobile, a mobile Web strategy is one of the most important marketing trends of 2010. Once you have launched your mobile Web strategy, the next step is to formulate your promotional marketing campaigns using your new technology.

4  Steps To Creating Mobile Web Marketing Campaigns

1. Opt-In Database: begin building your list of cell phone numbers by “providing your target audience with multiple opportunities to register to be on your text messaging list.” Place signs in your brick n mortar stores, on your website or blog, and in advertisements that inform your audience of your mobile Web presence
2. Incentive to Join: create an incentive for your audience to join your opt-in list. Exclusive information, deals, discounts, or events can be part of the incentives to join or sign-up
3. Exclusive Offers Alert: create exclusive offers for your text message list members. These offers could include “secret events”, previews, or sales. Then alert your members to be on the lookout for upcoming events
4. Word of Mouth: motivate your list members to forward your exclusive offer links to their friends in order to prospect for new list members and viral market your mobile website

Part 2 in our series on mobile Web strategy

Jon Cooper of the Philadelphia Business Journal wrote a great article outlining five reasons companies must have a mobile strategy in their marketing plan. Cooper identifies “commonsense tactics” that need to be incorporated into your current marketing strategy in order to launch your moble Web strategy.

3 Marketing Strategies to Launch Your Mobile Web Strategy

• Cell Phone Numbers: begin capturing cell phone numbers by asking for this information along with the “typical” consumer contact information in your opt-in customer relationship management efforts
• Web Pages: due to technology issues, your current website-blog can not be read by cell phone users. The answer is to establish your own mobile web page (website) that is cell phone “friendly” allowing mobile users to easily read your content
• Text Call To Action: “obtain text message response capability”-this allows you to add call to action text to your advertisement or marketing messages. Example: text ‘coupon’ to 77860 to opt-in for your complimentary sample

Part 1 in our series on mobile Web strategy

Jon Cooper of the Philadelphia Business Journal wrote a great article outlining five reasons companies must have a mobile strategy in their marketing plan. After a close examination of each reason, we have come to the conclusion that mobile is not just a necessary strategy but a must have strategy.

5 Reasons Your Company Must Support a Mobile Strategy

1. Mobile Adoption: “Four  or five  times as many people have cell phones as have PCs.”

Innerarchitect: With the explosion in mobile phones,  PCs will be going the way of the cord tethered land line phone-obsolescence

2. Mobile Content: “digital content hitches a ride in the consumer’s pocket and may literally guide him/her to your store or office.”

Innerarchitect: mobile users who share content, in real time, can share positive and negative experiences about your business. If you are not there to answer them they will leave this information unchecked on one of the hundreds of review sites (Yelp) available to them

3. Text Performance: “text messages far outperform e-mails in key metrics such as open rate. Ninety-five (95%) percent of text messages are typically opened inside the first 15 minutes. Your e-mail outreach program is struggling to maintain double digit open rates inside of several days.”

Innerarchitect: the open rate and time frame of open, 95%, far out performs the traditional open rates (15-25%) of e-newsletters or email marketing campaigns.

4. Links: “text messaging is short but they have the ability to carry, deliver shortened urls to a strategically targeted audiences.”

Innerarchitect: this is a huge advantage in delivering messages in real time that provide call to action lead generation for a business

5. Mobile Web Pages: “the combination of text messaging and mobile Web pages are “a powerful means of communicating important information to your audience.”

Innerarchitect: this is the key to the next generation of online communication and a wave that should not be missed.

One thing I have learned in managing Facebook business pages is that you can’t judge what’s really going on from the surface. The real story lies within your Insights. If you are not using these Facebook metrics, you are not taking your marketing efforts seriously.

Unfortunately, getting a clear understanding of what efforts are producing what results is not something you can do in a snap. It takes time to put all the pieces together, but that is the reality in effectively measuring any marketing campaign. If you don’t spend the time to understand what’s working, you miss the opportunity to get as much as possible from your Facebook investment.

What you need to piece together your results:

1. Facebook Insights
2. History of messages
3. Knowledge of what other efforts were influencing traffic to your page

What you should look for depends on what your Facebook goals are. If your business sells products or services directly to consumers, then page views are an important metric as you should be including product or service offers in your messaging strategy. The more times each fan visits your page, the more times they are exposed to your offers.

Certainly comments and likes are important as they influence Facebook’s perception of your page’s importance to a fan, and ultimately your place in their news feed. But don’t assume that no likes or comments means that nobody is visiting your page. Studying your Insights will show you otherwise.

If you would like some help with learning how to measure your own Facebook efforts, we offer training and ongoing page management. Please contact me for more information.

Twitter strategies abound throughout the Twitterverse where you can find virtually any explanation for how to begin leveraging Twitter. This is a very basic first phase description of how to screen the people and companies that follow you. Due diligence is important, unless you are a spamming hard sell MLM or affiliate marketer, to building an effective network. Let’s examine my due diligence steps with social media analyst Jerimiah Owyang:

3 Due Diligence Steps to Build Your Twitter Network

1. Read Bio: read the bio of the person-company following you. Understand what they do and if they fit into your network of followers, if they provide information valuable to you, if they have a large network you wish to leverage, and if they are in your industry or niche.
   
2. Links: click through the link provided in the bio. This link should lead to a website-blog with mission statements, purpose, goals, industry, and niche. This IS my most important step in the due diligence process.
3. Tweet “Stream”: read the tweet stream to understand what is being written. Does the person or company provide valuable information to you and your network? Is this person providing new thought leadership like Jeremiah? Do they share techniques or new processes? Do they tweet breaking news about your industry or niche?

Conclusion

It is up to you how you screen your twitter followers and who you will follow in return. I utilized this process 80% of the time. The downside to this process is that it is time consuming. The upside is the fact that you will have a more targeted network that will serve your research, broadcasting, prospecting, sales, networking, announcement, crowdsourcing needs in the future

One of the biggest challenges for any company or individual using Twitter, to engage and market their products and services, is the ever present mountain of spam. Affiliate marketers, multi level marketing schemes, and hard sell scam artists flood Twitter with noise and interrupting messages based on separating you from your hard earned money.

The following is a short list of ideas that could greatly reduce the number of spam messages on Twitter.

7 Twitter Ideas To Eliminate DM Spam

• 7 days: require a 7 day waiting period before a DM (direct message) can be sent when a follow-follower relationship has been established
• Opt In-Out: create a opt in-out option where Twitterers can either choose to receive DMs or turn the DM channel off
• Penalties: automatically penalize Twitter spammers who violate “content regulations” created to stem the tide of unwanted hard sell sales pitches and phishing activities
• Crowdsourcing Court: Twitters to vote on the guideline of penalties awaiting a company or individual who is found guilty of spamming the Twitter network. Base it on Dell’s Ideastorm crowdsourcing site
• Eliminate Links: disallow the use of links in any DM messages with the hope that spammers will no longer see the benefit of using a DM
• Less than 140: cut the number of characters in half for a DM making it a 70 character messaging channel thus challenging a spammer’s ability to create spam
• DM Limit: create a limit for the number of DMs allowed each Twitterer per month. Once you reach your limit, you have to wait until the next month to send a direct message