I registered for Twitter over a year ago, but didn’t use it too much. Simply because none of the people I knew were on Twitter and I didn’t find a lot of use for it. I used search.twitter.com to identify trends and such, but I didn’t tweet as much myself. With the installation of TweetDeck and TwitterBerry (now trying to use TweetCaster) I started to get involved with a Twitter a bit more.

I instantly learned what Twitter spam is: you type a certain keyword and you get bunch of followers who are either: bots, porn people or social media experts. My favourite kind is “social media experts” they usually follow like 10,000 people and 8,000 or 9,000 will follow them back.

Now comes the question—do you block those accounts which are obviously spam or do you let them follow you? I mean, you will look cool if you have more followers, right? Wrong, due to the simple fact that it is easy to see who is following you. So if you claim to be a marketing expert and have, say, 1000 followers and then your clients click on who follows you and sees names like Kelly4568 or Mandy124 what kind of expert are you?  Of course, if you have hundreds of thousands of followers it is hard to monitor new adds, but the majority of people don’t fall in that category.

This reflects very poorly on your brand and also, from a practical point of view, you can’t really use your twitter account to deliver message to the masses. You think those bots care about your new blog post? The internet is just a medium, marketing principles stay the same: to be an expert in “Social” you have to actually be social. Social means developing conversations and, in a marketing context, helping people satisfy their needs.

So fellow Tweeps who don’t block those accounts, why aren’t you? Agree? Or think I am full of it? Let me know.

@romanz

P.S. Definitely not a social media expert.

P.P.S. But I have couple of good ones working for me.

Twitter:
It seems that everybody on the net talks and uses Twitter these days. I’ve been slow in using it and only have 56 updates – partly due to a simple fact that I had no followers. However, now when T4C is near its completion it is time to reach out to the public of Toronto, I said to myself, it is time to start actually using Twitter. Now, I know that my approach is totally wrong – I should have been developing relationships and followers along the way and now it will take some time till I build creditability with the community and actually benefit from Twitter – but hey, it is better late than never right?

So I did two things:

1) I installed Twitter – Facebook application. What it does is copies my Twitter updates to Facebook, I don’t think it works in reverse. This allows me to tap into more developed Facebook network while building up my Twitter account as well. I think this is a first step one should do.

2) Now before I go to sleep I go to search.twitter.com and search for terms relevant to T4C it is amazing how many people are on Twitter from Toronto while nobody around me doesn’t even know what Twitter is. I read through first two pages and check out interesting people. I don’t want to follow each and everyone, because then really it will be impossible to follow all of them. So I click on user profiles, check out their updates and their blog or website. If a person is interesting – I follow. Then – magic this people start following me as well. So in a day I grew my followers from 8 to 30.

I know that mastering Twitter is a slow process and I also need to bring value to people who follow me and not just promote my content. That is why I am going to take my time to develop this relationship and gradually grow the readership. I think next step would be to get custom designed Twitter page and participate more in conversation of people I follow already.

Toronto Food Blogs
Really there is no direct competition to T4C ( and that is why we started the project), but it doesn’t mean somebody is not starting the same project and you still have to follow other players in the industry. From my perspective the nearest to us in topic are food blogs and entertainment guides. Finding major ones is pretty easy, but how do you go deeper? I used a system that I read from Dave’s Fleet blog :Practical 101s: Google Reader And Persistent Search . So I set a brand new Google account, so it doesn’t mix with the regular feeds I read and set up a system that monitors every media company in Toronto I could think about as well as keywords like “Toronto Restaurants” or “Toronto Dates.”
Yesterday I logged in to this account and scanned the 660 feeds that appeared over there in a matter of 10 min I found 15 local Toronto blogs that are dedicated to food – I was amazed, because I couldn’t find them before when I was doing the research for my business plan.

Now these new websites that I discovered could be our competition or in opposite could become our content partner – you never know. What I do know that as a professionals in what we do – we just have to keep on eye on what these guys do and try to develop a relationship with them where everyone will benefit.

So here they are – my baby steps in social media. I think I will spend more time with blogs and Twitter for now, and not going to use use Stumble or Digg anytime soon – because I want to be authentic and that requires time and patience.

I decided to do a little investigation a did the search myself:

“rogers wireless overcharging” -6630 pages, mostly from blogs. I also found that there is a website over there with a simple name “I hate Rogers Wirelss” that sells T-Shirts and you can get an email with the ending of that domain.

Sounds like I am not alone in my thoughts:) One might think, so what Rogers probably doesn’t know about all those negative comments – but he or she would be wrong.

I continued to analyze my traffic and checked out my feed subscribers and one of the subscribers was a mysterious bot: www.radian6.com/crawler. I went to their page and quickly learned that Radian6 provides big corporations a service of monitoring blogs and forums to see what people are saying about their brand. I cross checked the subscribtion and my post about Rogers and figured that they are actually monitoring what am I saying about the company.

Check out couple of posts about Radian6:

An Abusive crawler from Canada

Radian6 Monitors You

Now I know Rogers is reading what I am saying or at least the aggregate version of our cumulative posts. I don’t know what I am more appaled by, by the fact that I am being watched or that nobody still didn’t appologize for my experience with the company. I know I spend around $2500 per year with the company and as thanks I just get bunch printed flyers in my mailbox with an attempt to sell me more services. Own up to your campaigns about customer service, make me not dread calling your line or better don’t create any reasons to call you rather than to just say thanks.

Make me wanna tell my friends that I love Rogers Wirelss and I will pay even more for your services.

I didn’t find any blogs with words in them “I love Rogers Wireless.”

Think about it!

Technorati tags: Blogs

The article resonates with a lot of bloggers who hate plagiarism. While, I hate it myself I wouldn’t suggest spending a lot of time on trying to prevent it. The reason is simple it is not going to happen, you can’t stop copycats. Instead I would suggest concentrating on becoming above average blog, get into Technorati 100 and be recognizable. Speaking in Seth’s style be happy that your content is plagiarized, because that means is has some value. People who steal your product can never be a real competitor to you. So my suggestion is stop wasting energy on trying to make hard to copy things, and put your energy in creating something worth copying.

In a summary here is quote by Howard Aiken:

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”