Ten days into the new year and I think we already have a champion.

No, it’s not the N-Control Avenger PR Disaster that rounded out 2011. Nor was it the FedEx foul-up.

Let’s say you own a BBQ joint and a customer comes in, one of the only ones and orders a meal. You can tell she’s not happy and it’s verified by a well-written and factual review on Yelp.

So what do you do to make it right?

A) Get in touch with her and offer a meal for free to make it up?

B) Respond to the Yelp review by apologizing and explaining the issues

C) Call her a bitch and post her pic on Facebook

If you picked C, then you may have a new fave BBQ joint to hang out at!

Here we go, ready? Buckle up your brisket:

(All pictures are linked to their file, so if you’re on a phone and they’re tough to read, just click it)

1. Stephanie and her husband go to Boners BBQ in Atlanta for a meal after grabbing a $10 off coupon from Scoutmob.

2. They leave and she posts her review on Yelp. One of the better written reviews on the site to be honest. She lists the things she liked and didn’t like, with reasons why. Not an all-caps “ZOMG!! THIS PLACE IS HORRIBLE!”

3. After seeing the Yelp review and being told she didn’t tip the server, the person who runs Boners BBQ Facebook page decides to put her in her place by posting her picture (censoring by me, they put the unedited photo up):

And they added both this description and follow-up comment:

4. So, like most places on the Internet, the morons were there first saying things like “F&$K YA!” and other eloquent expressions, clicking “Like” to share it with their other Grade 10 classmates. Then people started commenting on how it’s wrong to post her picture and call her names and they replied with remorse and maturity… just kidding, they told her to F&$# Off too!

5. Now the owner jumps in, to bring some logic and sanity to it?

The logic of “She left us a bad review on Yelp so we can say what we want on our wall!!” really pushes the public’s buttons and a mass of comments hit their wall. Your wall or not, nothing can stop the Geekalanche once it starts.

6. They pull the entire status and comments and also delete any other posts that come in about it, which just makes people angrier. They end up posting an “apology” which is what I’d advise a client to do, just not so…..well…insincere.

You just get this feeling that they’re not apologizing for what they did, but that they wanted to stop the mass amount of anger.

7. It becomes pretty clear when they post in the apology comment thread later:

Yeouch. He had it perfect, explained what they’ve been doing, got frustrated and had a bad “moment”. Annnnd then reminded everyone there is no excuse for not tipping. What he doesn’t understand is it’s not about tipping or not (although if a tip is mandatory, then it’s a fee and should be stated as such) it’s about how you deal with people. We are a forgiving society if you just own-up. FedEx is a great example of that.

8. As it turns out, she said she DID tip. She posted on Reddit about the experience:

That Facebook post was about me. That picture is me. I can give some background on this if anyone wants to know. The basics are that my husband and I went to Boner’s BBQ for his birthday dinner. We were enticed there with a Scoutmob coupon (for $10 off) and we were the only ones in the place for our meal except for a brief period where a couple came in to get a pickup order. We paid in cash and yes, we left a tip. The ticket was $40 even minus $10 for the coupon + tax= $32.80 We dropped two twenties on the table and left. And yes, I did, politely, let the waitress know that the food wasn’t as I expected and no, I didn’t lick the plates or even eat all the food, that was my husband. He is far less picky about his BBQ than I am.

So what can we take from this? This isn’t a “social media” problem. You don’t train people not to call customers a “bitch” on Facebook and post their picture. (I’m picturing George Costanza saying “Was that wrong?”

Social media doesn’t make a business bad or good, it amplifies what they already are.

So, does this hurt their business or are you one of those “Any PR is good PR!” people? Will she sue? Comment below!

And one of you has to explain to my family why I have 9 screenshots on my desktop called “Boner”. Thanks.

Special thanks to Johanna Harrison and Michael McCready for the screenshots and heads-up. With my second book due to my publisher at the end of the month, it practically writes itself

+++UPDATE+++

So realizing the error of their ways (or it was the fact that news cameras showed up at their place (broadcast embedded below), and the Huffington Post blogged about it, they decided to give a little more sincere apology… but not really:

Looks pretty good right? And that’s that!! Problem solved…………… Orrrrrrr not.

Next someone adds this comment:

Not sure the worst part here: the fact that he calls people assholes, the fact that the woman actually DID leave a tip, 20% at that, or the waterboarding. Yeah, the waterboarding part. But this isn’t Boners BBQ that wrote it, they can’t control what some jackalope says on their wall right? You see that little “thumbs-up” sign with a 4 beside it? Let’s see who the 4 people are who clicked “I AGREE!!! ME LIKE!” beside the assholes/waterboarding comment:

Would ya look at that….. Doesn’t make the apology seem so sincere now does it?

Some people have asked what would I advise them to do if they were my client…

And I tell them they never would be. No amount of social media or marketing help would ever trump crappy product and a crappy attitude.

Customers should not be afraid to leave honest reviews for the fear of being publicly humiliated.

Today’s News:

Back in the old days of the Internet/Email, it was a happy place (we’ll call this time period B.S. “Before Spam”). In the BS years the Internet was pure information and email was a way to communicate useful information and conversation. Every time an email came in, it was like a little butterfly of excitement flew into your computer, knowing it was containing an ingredient of awesome. Then something changed. Email started getting UnAwesome.

Cold-callers, Cold-knockers (those that went door-to-door) and Car-smackers (placing flyers on your windshield) realizing that their methods of sales assault worked less and less, had found a place that they no longer even had to lift a finger to push their useless wares on the public. “Now we can email our crap!” and proceeded to group-high five (which is now evolved to awkward fist-bumping).

The holders of the inboxes started to get angry and classified anything they didn’t ask for as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), or SPAM for short? Laws were passed, ISP’s set up block lists and the word was spread “People don’t like spam. Stop it.”

If you are accused of being a spammer, it’s the biggest shame there is in business.

Now there is a bigger problem. Warm-Spam. Social Spam. Friendly Unsolicited Commercial Contact (FUCC). It’s the practice of spamming your social media contacts and it needs to stop.

Think about it, someone finally accepts you as a contact on LinkedIn, follows you on Twitter, friends you on Facebook and apparently that is yiddish for “SELL SELL SELL!!” to some.

It’s actually worse than old-school spam. With a faceless spammer, we can delete/block and think evil thoughts about them, but with social spam, you sometimes know the person in real life, so removing/blocking them can cause more awkwardness then seeing Uncle Louis at Christmas dinner after he poked you on Facebook.

Some common Warm Spam techniques:

1. Real Event invites – Inviting your entire friend list to an event, regardless of geographic/demographic make-up. (more on this practice in a previous post)

2. Fake Event Invites – An event made for a non-event. It could be your “website launch party” or “Vote for me because my self-esteem is based on artificial online popularity campaigns”. It’s not even the issue of the “event” itself, but the relentless inviting and messaging people who haven’t “RSVP’d” for an event that doesn’t exist that make people stabby.

3. LinkedIn Emails that show everyone’s email address. Nothing like you emailing everyone about your upcoming paralegal training seminar through LinkedIn, which exposed our private email addresses to each other! Yes, this just happened.

4. Tagging – Mostly on Facebook, but now creeping into Google+, it’s the practice of tagging someone in a pic/post for the sole purpose to make them read it and have it appear on their timeline.

5. Auto-DM – Tweeting someone about your Facebook fanpage as soon as they follow you on Twitter is like shaking someone’s hand at a networking event and then asking if they want to go to another event down the street.

6. Publicly Shaming – Asking someone to support a cause publicly by adding their Twitter name is like asking me to support your charity at an event with other people standing around. Ask privately or post a general support message. Don’t shame people.

7. Fan page requests – Inviting people to “fan” your business by sending a request hurts my brain. Add it to your blog, put it in the signature in your email, but going out and picking people to be fans is just awkward.

8. Farms Run By Mafia Ville – I know you want more coins/land/bullets are whatever they’re offering you to invite “your friends” to play a game of Farmville/MafiaWars/TheSims but stop it. While you’re tending to your farm, we talk about you behind your virtual back. (Thanks to Amanda Wood for the reminder on this one!)

Relax your pitchforks, “real” business people, I’m not saying never sell. I’m not even suggesting social media is a sacred ground, never to be sold on. It’s the method. Your wall on Facebook is yours, do as you please. You want to tweet about your upcoming teleclass? Knock yourself out. You lease that space. However, as soon as you add my @UnMarketing to the tweet or tag someone on a page, well, now you’ve FUCC’ed it. Especially if that action also generates an email to that person, now you’ve spammed their email with the notification. Double FUCC’ed.

Your wall, your profile is your real-estate. Post as many promos as you want. But you soon realize that nobody is sharing/liking/clicking/retweeting them. Now, a logical person would realize “Hey, maybe people aren’t engaging with my ads because they don’t really like ads in a social setting.” But sadly, most react “People aren’t clicking because they missed it!! I’ll just post this on their page too!!”

Nobody has joined a social media site to get sold to, but people do actually buy from people they know, like and trust, things that are created by being social with others. See that equation. Be nice, be helpful and don’t FUCC people, and social media can be the greatest thing in the world.

Have you had a friend send constant Warm-Spam? What did you do? Leave a comment below!

Let's call him "ROI Guy"

“What’s the ROI of Social Media?”

That’s the question that gives me ulcers when asked it.

Easy now, old-school business folk, I don’t have a problem questioning the value or return of something that takes potentially both time and money from your business. Any smart business person would do that.

My problem is we hold social media to a higher level of judgement than most things in business.

So, at no charge, I will Skype into any of your companies and explain exactly the ROI of social media, if you first can tell me what the ROI is of the following common business practices:

1. Meetings. Especially meetings about how social media is a waste of time. Weekly meetings…. with 10 people at them.

2. CC’ing everybody on every email. I figure the time it takes to read every “official” corporate email, you could’ve built a Twitter empire, ruled Facebook and had time for some Angry Birds (on Google+)

3. Meetings.

4. 2,000 mugs with your logo. I know when I need a lawyer, I search my coffee mug shelf. I know, I know, you bought them in December so you could spend your budget so you’d get it again next year, but still.

5. Overpaid conference keynote speakers No, wait. Scratch that. Nothing to see here. Move along.

6. Meetings.

7. Making your employees commute. Your business is mostly done over the computer or on the phone. Why do they have to sit at a desk again? Face time FTW!

8. Leather boardroom blotters. Ask the admin assistant that is on year 5 of a wage freeze how impressed he/she is that you just spent $2000 on leather squares.

9. Meetings.

10 Your Yellow Pages Ad, Direct Mail pieces and Tradeshow Booth. If you know the exact ROI on these three, awesome. You’re ahead of the game. Most have no clue.

11. Fax machines and toner. Seriously. I had a vendor say I couldn’t email a scanned version of a contract to them, since they needed me to “fax the original”. You know the actual piece of paper doesn’t travel through the phone line right? Right??

And even the smarter ones in business know that to be successful, you have to:

- Answer questions about our product or service

- Educate consumers

- Offer post purchase follow up

- Market research

- Discuss industry best practices

Read those five things out to a social media naysayer and ask if they agree about them being smart for businesses. Because that’s a checklist for what social media is used for. Just sayin.

Combine these with banning employees from using social media at work because it “distracts workers” and you see why I’m losing my hair. (Social media didn’t create distracted workers, Minesweeper did).

What do you think? Anything to add that you see companies doing with no question, yet deny social media because of “ROI”? Leave it in the comments below!

There are countless blog posts online about how out of touch PR people are with trying to reach influential bloggers/social media types. From mass-emailed blind press releases to not understanding how social media really works.

I finally have a story that is the opposite.

Many of you have heard of, or even read the story about Tassimo’s campaign in Canada in my book, (great post about it from Erin Bury here) and how they spread the word about the coffee maker by giving machines to influencers instead of a TV campaign.

It was pure genius on many levels, and so much of it had to do with Duri Al Ajrami, the Director of Social Marketing – Senior Partner at OgilvyOne Canada.  It was his ability to connect with me and many others that made us even open to the thought of this campaign. He emailed us after doing his research, met with us and understood how it all works, being the beloved go-between for their client and us crazy social media/blogger entitlement types

Fast forward to a month or two ago: I have been approached hundreds of times since by PR/Communication folks to try out their stuff and in return I can give them free exposure. For the most part I don’t even blink. It’s like they just went from blindly faxing reporters to blindly emailing bloggers. Then Duri drops me an email and explains that Magnum Ice Cream is launching in Canada and they want me on board, I’d hope it was because of my rugged good looks and boyish charm, but mainly because I have a platform.

He said all the right things: I only had to tweet/blog if I wanted to, only talk about it when/if I wanted to. He knew I wasn’t going to post a blog on UnMarketing as a “sponsored” post to say how yummy their ice cream is. His main concern was that I did anything that I was comfortable with and my audience would be too. We high-fived, they shipped me a case of ice cream in dry ice, I ate most of it in a 2-day binge, reflected on what went wrong that made me eat a case of ice cream in 48 hours and then decided to record this video (I haven’t even gotten to the awesomest part yet, keep reading):

I thought it was a fun way to talk about it! I even titled it “Magnum’s False Advertising”, which I’m sure made the client throw-up a little. I talked about how the box said the flavour was “Double Chocolate” even though there are actually four layers of chocolate, and I demanded it be changed to “Quad Chocolate”. Duri loved it, I enjoyed making it because I was my smart-ass self, and my friends liked it. They didn’t even mind that a lot of people who watched it wouldn’t be able to enter the contest since it’s only open to Canadians. Perfect. All good, everyone’s happy, let’s go home and eat ice cream?

Think again.

Duri just showed up at my house (he emailed first, relax) and said “I have a gift for you!” And handed me this:

Are. You. Kidding. Me?!?!

If you didn’t catch it, look at it again.

They loved the video so much, they “whipped up” four custom boxes of the ice cream with my new flavour description. And these aren’t stickers slapped on, it’s four real boxes, with the ice cream bars inside.

I literally lost it in the driveway, ran upstairs and am typing this right now.

Just because you’re in an agency, doesn’t mean you can’t be awesome.

PR doesn’t have to stand for Press Release. It can still mean Public Relations.

When you do awesome things, it makes people want to share the awesome.

It wouldn’t matter how much they paid me, I wouldn’t use this blog to promote ice cream.

And now I just did. Because of the awesome.

Well played Duri and Magnum, well played indeed.

Has anyone outreach/agency really blown your mind? Share it in the comments.

+UPDATE+ Duri mentioned in the comment below “To be fair to all … The idea of the box was a team effort lead by the the AWESOME Mark Forward and Jamie George (two amazing Ogilvy folks) who planned this and blessed by our amazing clients Gina Kiroff and Joyce Kim who always drove us to think out of the box. I just delivered Thank you all for your great words … we’re still learning”

Another great PR/Business lesson: Give credit where it’s due.

(You KNOW this post has to be epic, I started it off with a Helen Keller quote. Shazam!)

Facebook. Half a billion people. One of the greatest things to come out of the Internet for many reasons, without it there would be so many social media consultants that would go hungry and have to go back to shilling “video email!” from 1998.

The biggest threat to Facebook and it’s success isn’t a change in format, structure or infrastructure. It’s user apathy. And more specifically when it comes to Facebook for business, event apathy.

Exhibit A

This event invite defines all that is wrong with them. I live 2,519 miles from the event location, I’m not single and frankly a “hands-on” singles night sounds like something we should all be doing in private. (You may think I’m picking on the event organizer here. Which I am. If you don’t want to appear in my blog, don’t invite me to events like this. Easy peasey)

Many people have said to me “It’s no big deal, just reply with no, and be done!”

I say “NO” to that. The onus to stop Facebook event spam should not be on the receiver. The logic is the same that email spammers use (if you don’t want it, just delete).

More importantly, if you look closely at that event again, this is the most glaring thing:

3 “Yes”, 19 “Maybe” and 4,552 AWAITING REPLY! This screen shot is just before the event takes place, and the invite had been out there for weeks, so it’s safe to say these people weren’t replying anytime soon.

Read those numbers again.

Notice it doesn’t show the number of people who said “No” which I assume is about 400, since they most likely used a script to auto invite 5,000 “friends” to the event.

Do the math.

It’s not even the 400+ people you’ve pissed off with your untargeted invite to get 3 “yes’s”, which you’ve actually achieved the impossible with: You’ve made direct mail and cold-calling success ratios look good. It’s the 4,552 who never even saw the invite that scares the jeebus out of me.

This isn’t a freak occurrence. Most people I’ve talked to have gotten so over whelmed with Facebook invites to events like these, they’ve either stopped noticing invites or turned of notifications all together (like I have). And that is horrible.

I threw a party at BlogWorld last year. Open bar, 100+ of my fave people, fancy pants velvet rope. 45 people on the invite list never even replied and didn’t know about the event because they stopped checking them long ago. They missed an event that was targeted (only people I knew/thought were going to BlogWorld were invited) and most would have come.

And we have done this. The most social, strongest community in the history of the world, and people have turned to apathy for events. This has to stop.

We must stop:

- Inviting people to a local event that aren’t

- Creating events that aren’t actual “events” but a way to email mass people at once, regardless of reply

- Constantly emailing people who haven’t replied yet with information about your event like the person is coming

- Publicly inviting people to a private topic event (weight loss, confidence, being single). I’ve been invited to 15 different weight loss events in the past 3 months. What are you trying to say?

What can we do to make it better? Invite people to events that are a geographic and demographic match. You know, like actual real marketers do? Stop blasting it to thousands to try and land a few. Every time you do that, a baby unicorn dies. A baby unicorn.

PS – Don’t get me started on the new “groups” feature that adds you without permission and emails you every wall post until you opt-out of each group individuality. That’s for another day and Helen Keller quote.

Do you pay attention to invites? Do you get redonkulous ones? Do tell in the comments below!

]]> http://www.unmarketing.com/2011/02/15/how-we-are-killing-facebook/feed/ 427 http://www.unmarketing.com/2011/01/11/the-awesomeness-of-being-a-2-0-author/ http://www.unmarketing.com/2011/01/11/the-awesomeness-of-being-a-2-0-author/#comments Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:14:31 +0000 unmarketing http://www.un-marketing.com/blog/?p=722 I don’t know how authors did it years ago. You pour your heart and soul into a book, it hits the shelves and you hope people like it.

I’m such a spaz that I don’t think I could handle the lack of immediate validation and/or rejection.

I’ve been amazed since UnMarketing came out. The immediacy and coolness of tools has blown my mind. Waking up everyday and reading tweets in real time about people reading the book makes me smile. Every. Day. It’s the passive conversation our readers are having with each other that was untappable (my new word) previously.

Twitter mentions

And sadly most authors aren’t even listening to their readers:

And it’s not just on Twitter. Blog reviews, and other mentions can happen under our radar. Setting up a Google News Alert for your book title in quotes will keep you on top of most mentions online. I’m also tacking Trackur for a spin. I’ll update this post to let you know how it goes.

Kindle

I was initially a little miffed at the Kindle version of UnMarketing because they made all my saucy/sarcastic footnotes into endnotes, and people wouldn’t click on them, thinking they were real citations and other ridiculousness, but I now LOVE the Kindle version for many reasons:

1. Immediacy – I’ve had people buy the Kindle version during one of my talks as they’re in the audience. This blows my cranium. The drawback of being an author who speaks is when people leave the session, they rush off to the next one and forgot to purchase your awesome book. Or worse, there is no bookstore on site and if you think that they’ll rush to the bookstore when they get home, you’re sadly mistaken for the most part. The immediacy and ability for your audience to buy your book on their phone/laptop/reading device in real-time is epic. If you’re even a half-decent speaker, the highest moment of intent to purchase your book is during your talk. And people can buy it. Brilliant. (this isn’t unique to the Kindle, you can also grab them on the fly as iBook, Nook, Kobo, etc)

2. Digital loaning – I freaking love this about the Kindle. You can loan your copy (link explains it) to someone else for up to 14 days. All you need is their email address. You can only loan a book out once, and can’t read it while it’s out on loan. I believe it’s only available currently to USA based purchasers, I’m not sure why they hate Canada but nonetheless this is great for spreading your content, especially to those that can’t afford all the books they want to read. The author/publisher also  has to agree to it. I learned about it when I saw this tweet a few days ago:

I saw the tweet and retweeted it. I received a large amount of responses that people were impressed I would retweet that, since it doesn’t create sales. I say why wouldn’t I? I want people to consume the book. To love it. That’s our job as authors as far as I’m concerned. It’s not just to write it or talk about it or even sell it. It’s to get people to devour it. Jim wanted to read the content but didn’t have the means currently and I wanted him to read it. And now he is

Heck, if you’d like to get a loaned Kindle copy, leave a comment below or if you have the Kindle version and are willing to loan it to someone, leave a comment too. Then simply reply if you have or want it to the person. And Shazam! We have an UnLibrary!

3. Free R&D – This actually made me say out loud “WOW!” which was awkward since I was sitting by myself in a coffee shop, but I digress. Kindle lets you highlight parts of a book. That isn’t the cool part. Kindle also takes the data and tells you the most popular highlighted lines from your book. Check out the UnMarketing ones! This is R&D for an auther/publisher and tells you what is resonating with your readers. (I just said YA! out loud. I’m going to get thrown out of this place.) Another great thing to do is to take these and make them tweets. You already know it clicks with people. Bring on the retweets!

Here is a sample of mine:

That’s gold Jerry!! You don’t have to guess what’s working, it’s right there in front of you! You can go and check it out for any Kindle book, not just yours. Just click over here. And you can also see the top highlighted books. Just click on the book title and it will show you the highlights. Amazeballs!

4. Track Sales – Using Amazon Author Central you can login as an author and see sale info that used to only be available to your publisher. It allows you to track where it’s selling and in what medium.

Click to enlarge the chart

Digital books are gaining traction. Do not ignore them. It doesn’t matter if you like to read in that format or not.

And this is only a fraction of what is being done and accessible out there to authors and their fans. Did I mention I did an entire 30-city UnBookTour planned through Twitter without any cost to myself or my publisher? Ya, that too.

What have you seen out there when it comes to books that excites you when it comes to the 2.0 book world? Leave a comment below! Or let me know you want to loan/borrow the Kindle version of UnMarketing!

"On my command, unleash Twitter"

One of the things I love about social media is people stand-up for each other. The art of “having your back” has returned. As very recent examples show:

1. The Cooks Source Revenge: Editor uses someone else’s recipe/article, writer takes exception, editor sends condescending reply, citing that all the internet tubes are “public domain” and she should charge her for using the article. UNLEASH THE GEEKALANCHE! If you Google “Cooks Source” you can see this turned into a worldwide story. Advertisers were bombarded with calls and emails to pull their support from the magazine.

2. Amazon Pedophile Guide: Somebody discovered Amazon was selling a guide to being a pedophile and thankfully the online world collectively lost their mind on them. Within 18 hours, the call to boycott Amazon was so strong, they pulled the title. Sadly, this also generated sales of the ebook before it was removed.

3. #IAmSparticus: Man gets to airport, is cheesed his flight isn’t going anywhere and tweets “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” And is promptly arrested. During his trial, a horde of online folks, mostly in the UK, tweet the exact thing and add “#IAmSparticus” to the end, in an act of awesomeness and solidarity.

Here’s what I love: everything is immediate and everybody is relevant. it no longer depends on press releases, contacts and a huge budget to get the world to take notice, it just has to be an awesome outrage. Us geeks have nothing better to do than to gang-up and stand-up for what’s right. We live rent-free in wicked basements and don’t have to do our own laundry (at least I wish this was still true for me).

Here’s where I take issue: We’ve lost the benefit of the doubt. I have no problem with the examples above but people now default to complaining on social media instead of going directly to the business first. I try to treat screw-ups as if they happened with my business, meaning I’d want to know to have a chance to make it right.

With my last post I could have simply tweeted that the food sucked, and walked away, but I never would have gotten it resolved and realized the chef cared about my experience.

I’ve seen people post on Facebook and Twitter about a terrible meal or a bad service experience but have never actually asked for it to be resolved, like the social media smurf unicorns would run off in the night and fix it all, due to brands fearing the social media geek-tsunami that was impending.

My mom brought UnJunior to get his haircut last week and wasn’t pleased with the attitude when she was refused service due to the time of day (20 minutes away from closing). She asked me if I could “Twitter” it. That’s when I started to sob gently. Social media should not be a megaphone of anger if we haven’t tried for a resolution. I’m guilty as the next person. So with this situation, I sent a DM to the hair place, and she explained what happened, overbooked, only stylist there had to leave to get her daughter at daycare before it closed. I could have jumped on Twitter and called them out with the old “DO YOU KNOW WHO I THINK I AM?? HAVE YOU SEEN MY KLOUT SCORE!!??”  Amazingly being human here worked and we talked about UnJunior coming in at another time.

It’s gotten so bad I’ve heard of people threatening places that if they don’t comp them rooms, meals or swag at events, they will tweet, post or give negative Yelp/TripAdvisor reviews. THESE are the people that need to be outed and have a social media beat down. THEY are the ones that make the social media sphere bad for the rest of us.

So next time you’re about to rage, make sure you give the business a chance to make it right first. If they fail to make it right, then on my command, unleash social media hell.

Have you had good/bad experience with this as a consumer or biz owner? I’d love to hear your comments below.

This get-together has been over 5 years in the making (we had never met in person), so Michael Port and I decided to film us chatting about one of our biggest online pet peeves: being asked to speak on telesummits. Have a look:

The moral of the story is: Get to know people before pretending you know them. Do you have any stories of being approached or trying to run a telesummit? Do you have rules on what ones you’d speak for? Let us know in the comments!

Michael has a new version of his famous Book Yourself Solid program coming out. See that link in the last sentence? It’s not even an affiliate one. I don’t make a cent off of you signing up and improving your business. Michael is the best there is and I’m happy to spread the word, proud to call him a friend and gitty I got to finally hang out with him.

Holy monkeynuts.

That’s roughly 5,000,000 characters of typing, assuming an average of 100 characters a tweet.

And it’s been worth every one of them.

So the question is why? I’ve practically written enough on Twitter for five books, am a member of the 50/50 club (50k tweets, 50k followers) (I totally just made up that club right now. You’re welcome. I’m like the Jose Canseco of Twitter when he joined the 40/40 club in baseball, except I doubt I’ll be making an appearance on celebrity boxing anytime soon)

It’s not the fact that I’ve spouted off on Twitter 50,000 times, it’s the content of those tweets. The majority of them have been conversations. If you take a look at my stats you can see that almost 75% of my tweets have been replies. Over 37,000 of my tweets have been points of conversation. That’s why Twitter works for some and not for others. Twitter is a conversation.

I know, I know “TWITTER HAS NO RULES” and flippity-flo, but the point is if you believe that business is built on relationships, you have to make building them your business.

Here is a visual representation of my most commonly used words for those 50,000 (using Wordle through TweetStats)

“Thanks” “awesome” “good” (ok, and “Vegas”. Did I mention I’m opening keynote for BlogWorld in Vegas in October? Just be there)

I joined Twitter to get to know other business owners. It wasn’t to directly create business revenue, but if you’re great at what you do and connect with other great people, business is bound to happen either through joint-ventures or direct sales. People ask me all the time “Ya, but is Twitter worth it for my business?” Do you think I’d hit keys over five million times if I thought it was a waste of time??? I’m not a lonely guy. I have friends. Twitter has just enhanced that even more to where the people I know now through Twitter has made my life and business better exponentially.

The point that’s missed is the time it takes. Have a look at this graph of my number of tweets per month and take a wild guess to when I started seeing great results through Twitter:

Social media doesn’t change the fact that relationships take time. You truly do get out of it what you put in. It’s tough at the start. You can see by the chart I was barely around at the beginning. You have to have faith in the conversation. it seems like no one is listening at first, but trust me, we all are.

And I’ve finally changed my opinion. I don’t think everyone should be on Twitter. It can’t be forced. I don’t want people who hate the idea of “talking about nothing” trying to make Twitter work for them. Get out of our Twitter pool, you’d probably just pee in it anyways then complain about the temperature.

To all those that do believe in talking with each other, I adore you. Thank-you for making my life, both business and personal better than I could have ever hoped for.

Here’s to the next 50,000. Oh, and here’s to Vegas too

(Note: to make your own Wordle visual graph of your tweets, you have to go to TweetStats and run your account analysis (it’s free) and then click on the tab at the top that says “Tweet Cloud” then near the bottom right choose “Don’t like the TweetCloud? Well then, go make a Wordle!” and choose “no @’s” so it removes people’s user names so you can see just the words you’ve used. Then come and let me know in the comments your most used words too.)

Yesterday I spoke at Digital Leap, a “Digital Conference for Non-Profit Marketers and Fundraisers” where I talked about Social Media Success for Non-Profit. The entire session is below. I’ve also created an iPod/iPhone version for those that would like to watch it on the go. Just right click here and save it and then pull it into iTunes! (Big file: 160 megs)

Feel free to embed or share/save the below session, I would only ask that you link back to this post. That would be awesome of you.

That little book I wrote is available here for pre-order (34% off to boot!)

To download it, or the embed code, drop by the main Viddler page

A PDF version of the slides can be grabbed here

Enjoy! And comment below if you’re in the industry and what you thought and/or if you have any specific questions.