As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach.

I don’t know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they’ve forgotten what it is like to be a real person.

Here are five sins that I’ve seen businesses commit in social networks:

1) No foreplay

Social networking is precisely that ’social’, that means it works just like real life.  How many times in real life do you just walk up to someone and say: “Hi I’m X, do you want to buy my product?” without saying “hi”, making some eye contact & introducing yourself?

In real life, apart from outbound telemarketers, we typically shoot the breeze for a while before launching into the hard sell.

2) Not being real & not letting staff be real

One of the reasons that @comcastcares and @zappos have worked on Twitter is that there were real people behind those accounts & they backed it up with consistently having real people there. Some companies forget that the social nature of these networks means that they need to be more transparent and open up to the outside ... read more >>

It should hardly need repeating at this point: When you post stuff to the Internet, people will see it, and quite possibly use it in ways that you don’t intend. And yet, either people keep finding new ways to make the same mistakes, or other people keep finding ways to use that information.

Two recent cases in point:

* Project ‘Gaydar’: This Boston Globe article looks at some MIT researchers who analyzed Facebook friending patterns and figured out that they could pretty accurately predict which men were gay, even if they didn’t list it in their profile. They did this by looking at the subjects’ Facebook friends; apparently, gay men have more gay male friends than straight men, so by looking at someone’s followers and plugging them into a computer model, they could infer who was gay. (It didn’t work as well with bisexuals and lesbians.)

The reason it works is that people with similar interests tend to cluster. Call it birds of a feather flocking together, or guilt by association. Either way, it shows another way that indirect information — in this case, the company you keep — can be used to reveal more information about you than you might have intended, especially when that ...

I always stress to clients that results on Twitter don’t happen overnight. This isn’t to discourage them from using it to enhance their marketing—but to help them understand the power of consistent, personal interactions and the cumulative effect this can have on their business.

Every time you engage others on Twitter, you are planting seeds that can have potentially big payoffs in the future. Once I explain this concept, the next concern is usually that this will be a major time investment. It’s not—if you leverage your time by applying a few of the select strategies discussed below.

Re-tweet

Re-posting others’ interesting tweets is one of the easiest and most effective ways to be discovered and gain more followers. For the people that are already following you, it’s a quick way to get on their radar screens.

Thought-provoking quote

People always seem to love great quotes. You have a good chance of being re-tweeted with these. The quotes you choose can also help you share a bit of your personality.

Feedback on someone’s link

Take a minute to visit a link someone has posted. They will often preface the link with what it’s about. If it’s of interest to you, check it .. ... read more >>

Before you can create your personal brand, you have to know what your personal brand is. This post will help you to define your own personal brand through taking a look at your unique personal brand attributes. Once you have your personal brand attributes you can begin sharing your personal brand with the world.

Simply put in a word

Simply put, a personal brand attribute is a word that describes a characteristic or quality that you possess. It can also be defined as how others would describe you if they could only chose a few different words.

Let’s take a look at my personal brand attributes so you can get an idea of how this works. A few months ago I won an award at work for my performance — on the award were five words that best described the winner of the award. When I won the award I thought to myself, “these words are my professional personal brand attributes and exactly how I want to be perceived in the workplace.”

Here they are:

Work Ethic: I have a very strong work ethic and believe in making sacrifices that others won’t.

Accountability: I’m believe in my work and others can rely on me to get the job done.

Professionalism: I put forth a professional demeanor in ...

You can really do a lot of link building in an hour if you are focused and have a plan.  Here you will find that link building workout plan.  All you need is just a dash of focus for one hour and you’ll come out of the session with more links with a more solid relationship with your current followers to boot.

Low Hanging Links

This is your 20 minute warm up.  It will get your fingers ready to roll and put you in the “zone” for the rest of the hour.  It is best to stretch before every workout, so crack those knuckles, down an energy drink, saddle up and let’s get going!

Blog Comments:  These are special simply for their traffic.  Direct clicks.  You need to visit your favorite blogs for the next 15 minutes and do some meaningful, engaging commenting.  The more funny, thoughtful, and pithy (to the point) the better.  There’s no telling what any blog’s comment links are really worth to the engines unless you slow down to check, so get that out of your head.  These links are made for clickin’!

Twitter:  Make a couple really helpful Tweets for your followers.  From some of the stuff you discovered at the blogs above, you . ... read more >>