7 Twitter Best Practices, for Dummies

1. Do unto followers as they did unto you. (uhh.. follow who follows you!)

2. Cull the "Herd". Use www.twitblock.org to surgically remove spambots and constant retweeters who don't actually share content.

3. Use the @GuyKawasaki method of "share something interesting" not what are you doing now?

4. Show some Personality. 90/10  or 80/20 business/personal

5. Just because you can schedule tweets to happen every hour, doesn't mean you should. I know you are not putting out educational info at 2am, 3am. 4am..6am. Don't you ever sleep?

6. Say thank you to people who Retweet or Mention you!

7. Want to be Retweeted or Mentioned? Retweet and Mention.

Got more? add a comment below!

Are Social Media Just Fads?

Pretty soon you won't be able to say, I'm too old for social media. The Boomers, Gens X, Y, and Milennials are all active in social tools and the cloud. Pretty soon we will be the old people.

Still think social media and tools are a fad? Watch this.

New Sheriff in Town Part 2 of 3

There's a new way of servicing attendees:
* Facilitating interaction of/with all conference participants, before during and after the conference.
* Helping people network before the conference, solving the "wallflower" syndrome
* Making better use of time at the conference, and learning more
* Extending the conference to months before and after the conference dates.
* Acknowledging the need to give more value to sponsors/ better ROI
* Providing social tools and handouts, education and learning under one roof

Attendee Satisfaction Make higher quality connections with the right people before, during and after the event Meet more people Able to contribute ideas, knowledge and resources to the topics being presented by speakers Single place that aggregates handouts, social media and networking

Your Benefit Increased renewals Increased referrals

Social Media Marketing Attendees can tweet links to profiles Aggregates blogs and tweets Part of your social media marketing plan

Your Benefit Increased awareness Increased attendance Earlier registrations

Sponsorship Satisfaction Improved exposure to engaged community New marketing channel to reach their audience Easier to engage with attendees

Your Benefit Increased package sales Higher-tiered sales

Conference Wallflowers Part 1 of 3

I love going to conferences. I love the fancy foods, traveling to new places, and meeting cool people. What I don't like about conferences is getting to networking receptions a bit late where people are already talking, and I feel I'm butting in.

I'm no introvert, but if anybody says they don't feel awkward at a networking social...they're lying. I also feel like I didn't get to talk to enough people.

This is the old way of experiencing meetings and conferences. I'm tired of it.

Thankfully, conference organizers are becoming more and more aware of the old way of doing things:

• One way education
• Not being able to connect with other attendees
• No interaction with the speakers
• Not meeting the "right" people (hey, for spending $1500 to attend a conference, amongst 1000 people I need to be choosy!)
• Great ideas in the hallway and after sessions are lost forever
• The conference is only a 3 day experience.
• Relying on social media tools that only serve to fragment information across web 2.o.

Make The Logo Bigger!

This is a funny video that is the biography of every creative services, web design and graphic design person in the world: Make The Logo Bigger!!!

I vow to never say this phrase again.

Developing New Relationships

Developing New Relationships

There is no such thing as a first-time, low-ball, trial price that ever migrates to higher prices. If you want to get the value you deserve, start by asking yourself a few questions:

• Is this the right customer? Will they appreciate the value we provide? Do I really want them as a customer?
• If so, do I truly know what is of value to this prospect? Did I listen?
• Have I done the best job I can in articulating and demonstrating the value the prospect will receive?
• Did I discover how important this assignment is to the prospect and his company? In other words, do I know the impact of this assignment on the prospect?
• And last, but not least, do we (everyone in our company) understand and believe that we do provide a service that offers more value to our customers? Can each of us articulate it? Are we really selling the filet or just tacos? After all, it is just cow, right? (Watch the video again!)

Maintaining Existing Relationships

Unfortunately, we too often take existing customers for granted. We assume that because we have worked with them for months or even years, they understand the value we provide. But ask yourself:

• Do I truly know what my customer thinks of the value I provide to him? When was the last time I asked? Is there a legitimate service hiccup?
• Have I sat down with my customer to walk through what we are doing? Have I made it clear how we are adding value?
• Is there a missing person (CEO, CIO, CFO) who is looking only at my invoices and does not feel or see my value? How can I be certain s/he is getting the full picture, before the invoices show up on his desk?
• Is there a new dynamic that has developed since I began working with the customer, e.g. a new, cheaper competitor?
• Am I doing only the work that needs to be done? Are there activities, tasks, or parts of the project that made sense three months ago, but no longer are what is best for the customer?
• In the end, whether we are talking about a new customer or an existing one, it all comes down to, "If I were the customer would I feel that I was getting value for the product/service we're providing?"

Content Credit given to Jill Konrath-"Selling to Big Customers" newsletter

Facebook & Farm Town Addiction

My wife Rhonda is addicted to Farmtown on Facebook. I can now freely give her a hard time because this woman that I love used to give me a hard time about playing video games, especially ones that were strategy and hours and hours of building (a la Starcraft).

My son is also playing quite a bit; but so far I have resisted the temptation to plow, harvest, and grow.

Please. help.

Publish Post

me. resist......

Whistler, BC

Thinking about going to Whistler, BC or Jackson Hole, WY for a ski trip next year. Anybody know anything about those places. As you may know we went to UT last April and had a blast!

Looking forward to taking Brendan on a men only trip again!

Pretty soon Andrew can get on some skis too!

How to Sync Goldmine with your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with MS Exchange)

Since 2002,I've been syncing my personal calendar and contacts from Outlook to my Palm OS PDAs, Window Mobile OS phones, and now iPhone. It wasn't until the last few months that I cut the Outlook "cord" and put all of my info in the cloud.

However, ever since my new job, I've been more and more tied to my work calendar which we have in Goldmine. This isn't convenient though, as I'm rarely in office to manage my appointment. Since I live by my iPhone, I was looking for a solution to sync my work calendar (only) with my personal calendar.

I wanted to avoid any monthly fees that normally come with such software and services. A while back I figured how sync my Google Calendar with Nuevasync, an MS Exchange service. I synced my Google calendars (Mine, wife's Son's, etc all through Google Calendar) This is great as we can all edit, view & manage our calendars either on our phones or on Google Calendar itself. What was missing was bringing in my Goldmine calendar in amongst my personal ones.

After much research, I purchased CompanionLink Pro, and I am able to avoid a monthly sync fee. Even the people at CompanionLink were impressed at my connection. Admittedly, it's a bit hodge podge, but it works, doesn't cause duplicates and is pretty much instantaneous.

Disclosure: I don't work for any of the companies mentioned. I don't sync contacts from Goldmine, only my calendar. So there's my back-story.

Here's how my data flows:

This article assumes you have Google Calendar already in action. (some do use Outlook at work for email at work but we do not.) CompanionLink can sync and route data through many programs, but this is how I use it.

I highly recommend that you create a "work calendar" in your Google Calendar for goldmine and companion link to sync to. I tried bringing my appointments into my personal calendar but ended up with duplicates.

If you have questions on actual step by step set up, I will be happy to publish another article with screen shots. Please email me or leave a comment!