Bad Twitter advice from Advertising Age

It’s disappointing that David Berkowitz (representing the venerable Advertising Age – i.e., someone who should know better) would tell you, in one breath, that the single most important thing you can do when jumping into Social Media for business is to “establish your goals,” and then in the next breath tell you that the one person you should follow on Twitter  is Shaquille O’Neal.

Now Shaq may indeed be a Twitter super-user, and he might even coin more words than Seth Godin. But recommending him as your one must-follow was a waste of an opportunity to give real, sound advice.

The person you should follow on Twitter, if you’re a business owner and really only have time to follow one, is the person in your industry who has taken the time to become a resource for others. This person:

• Posts a ton of links to relevant reading material
• Re-tweets useful stuff – not fluff
• Engages with those who reply to them
• Follows proportionally to their followers
• Blogs passionately about the industry and links out when appropriate to their own incredible blog

Having established that setting goals is “the most important thing” you can do when getting into social media, I’d say that the second most important thing you should do is make sure you’re not wasting your time by connecting with people who can’t help you meet them.

Are your blog post comments scattered?

As bloggers, we try to make use of all the cross-promotional tools we can to try to drive traffic to our blog posts. Particularly with venues like Facebook and Twitter, where people can also comment on what you’ve written, it’s easy for comments about a post to end up scattered across  several different places.

So the question becomes: Is it important to try to gather all the comments into one place for the most complete discussion?

When I first noticed this occurring with some of my posts I had shared on Facebook, I worried that the comments there would not become part of the “record” of the original post.

But I soon realized that it’s beneficial to have a trail back to the original post from several different venues because it gives you more “lines in the water” for reeling in new readers.

That said, I do think you can further manage your scattered comments for the benefit of your blog. Here’s a strategy that will help bring the conversation back to the blog, but still acknowledge and promote the responses on other venues. It will also help you get more “mileage” out of the original post, while contributing something new.

Take a quick look back at the responses you got on Twitter, or Facebook, or wherever, and write a follow-up post about them.

• If any of them asked a particularly good question, answer it in a new post inter-linked back to the original.
• If they were all just “nice post”-type comments, think of something you personally can add to the post and lead into it by saying, “My post on (x) received some very positive feedback over on Twitter, so I wanted to follow up with (xx).”
• Be sure to include your user ID on the other relevant service(s) within your post so blog readers can find/follow you there.

Use this strategy to showcase all the conversations taking place around your blog post.

photo from the Flickr stream of Jungle_boy