My Best Practices

Value Matters More Than Number

Now that you know the greatest feature of Twitter, “Search”, let’s review how to successfully complete something that is absolutely required to make anything from Twitter, gaining “Valuable Followers”.

It is a fact that if you don’t have any followers, your tweets are kind of useless. They will always be included into the public feed that anybody can browse, but they would be drops  in an ocean of tweets (Twitter has 18 million users now, and even if 60% of Twitter users abandon their accounts within their first month of use, that sums up anyways in a lot of tweets at every second).

I wrote “Valuable Followers”. Their number sure counts; the bigger the number the more influence and interaction you will have. But quality matters actually more than quantity. The question is how to gain followers that are interested by what you have to say? Where to find them? How to start? The value of Twitter is in the dialog you can establish with people, and the contribution you can make to selected topics of interest.

Like for a blog, the first step is to define what you want to cover, and what you want to talk about. You need an identity and a positioning on Twitter like everywhere else. Are you a subject matter expert and do you want to engage people on this topic? Do you want to promote your company and its services? Or do you want to share your view on technology, politic or anything else. Without being 100% specialized, you should be somewhere (I exclude again the use of Twitter for just interacting with friends and family. I only consider here a professional use of it).

With a clear positioning in hands, you are ready to start your quest. Here are my advice to build a strong base of valuable followers.

1-      Leverage Search on Key Words

Using the Search function, target tweet thread that are related to the topic you want to cover. You can launch a few searches to cover more space and keep them all visible thanks to the tools I mentioned in my previous post. Then identify the most valuable people, the ones who are making interesting posts, who are RT’ed by the others, and who have a lot of followers. Just follow them to start with. They might follow you back, although recent changes in the way Twitter allows you to follow people has discouraged Twitter users to automatically follow back. That was very common a few months ago.

2-      Reply to targeted users

If you feel good, have found your Twitter voice and could add something valuable to the discussion, you can “Reply” to them, engaging the dialog directly. Not sure they will answer either, but your chances to get noticed and followed back are higher… if you really added value.

3-      Use hashtag

Hashtag are words preceded by the sign # that people use to tag their posts. You can read this article on Mashable to better understand the concept.

The benefit of a hashtag is easy to understand. When you have identified hashtag related to your selected topic (use this site to do it: ), searching on them will bring you a new flow of people sharing the same interest. From there, use the same technique, follow the most influential ones and engage them.

4-      Add value

This is certainly the best advice: value, value, value. People will follow you if they learn something from you. Spammers and people sharing only “what they are doing” don’t get much traction, unless there are celebrities, or worst they are blocked. Twitter is a highly transparent and public space and people abusing the system get usually strong fire back.

 

There are three ways to do it.

a.       Directly in 140 characters… always challenging!

b.      By directing people to interesting articles, blog posts… and posting their url. My recommendation is to save room and use short url then, such as http://bit.ly/ (short url converter is embedded in Seesmic Desktop)

c.       By ReTweeting (RT) interesting tweets that you have liked and want to make more visible and share further.

5-      Be consistent

You read the statistic, 60% of Twitter new users drop their account after a few months. And amongst the existing users, a very little percentage actually post something every day (average is 14 time a month, meaning some people post once in a while and others do more than 10 times a day). If you want to gain and keep followers, you need a certain discipline and post on a regular basis. My recommendation in a professional environment is 2 to 3 tweets a day, always aiming to add value.

6-      Be nice

Yes, be nice. Thanks people who “RT” you, answer users who “D” you (interact directly with you), say “please” when asking something, and thanks also people referring you in the #FollowFriday weekly movement. 

Twitter is a social environment and being nice, while not hesitating to challenge ideas, is a must.

 

You should be ready now to smartly use Twitter in your professional world, identify people and topics of interest, contribute by adding value and grow your follower base regularly.

 

If you are a Twitter user already, would you recommend other techniques and way to use it and gain followers? Please share your experiences and advices by leaving a comment.

 

Your Boss Is Wrong!

Twitter. My first impression was like yours. “What can I do with this? Who cares about what I am doing? This is a waste of time.” Today, your boss might think that way too... I was wrong. Your boss is wrong!

I joined Twitter on Nov 8, 2008. One year later, I have been gaining an average of 4 followers per day, and I've got today a little more than 1800 ones. More importantly in the meantime, without been addicted (anymore…), I have found the real value of Twitter, which was definitely not obvious in the first place. I don't want to review here what Twitter is nor how to use it 101, there are plenty of great resources available on the Web. I highly recommend Alltop and lessons by Guy Kawazaki. I am aiming to the core of Twitter, what makes it a great tool for you and for your business.

The first consideration you should keep in mind is that as a 21^st Century Executive, you should have a digital footprint and you should control it. This is a larger topic I will cover in future posts: “What do people find when they Google your name?” This is an interesting search to do, and you might be scared… actually at the end of 2007, when I did it for the first, I was…. because I found “nothing”.  For your information, more than 85% of recruiters say they have used search engines to uncover information about candidates, and more than 40% say they have eliminated a candidate because of information they found (or not!) on the Internet.(source Execunet)

But let’s come back to Twitter. There is a lot to cover, so for this first post on this topic I want to keep it simple and focus on “The key feature of Twitter”. Actually people who spit on Twitter usually don’t know it, don't use it, and don’t get the value of Twitter at all.

I heard about it for the first time at a local tradeshow in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, maybe one week after having joined Twitter. I was attending a session on Social Media, and one of the speakers explained that “at the bottom of the Twitter user interface, there was this cool feature “Search” that we should try”. Twitter UI is getting better today (not great, even not good yet), but it was the worse UI ever one year ago. Not only it was not user friendly, but it was making this feature quite invisible.

I typed my company name “Qtask” and was stunned to discover people chatting about us! Yes, people I did not know were just talking about our CEO’s presentation a few days earlier in Atlanta. It was a big surprise. So I tried other words… such as my main competitors names… it was fascinating! I was live with people talking about them, positively or negatively.

This feature is a direct channel to listen in real time to your own market, what is going on out of there, what you competitors are doing, what the users are thinking and asking… this is pure gold! Companies like Comcast or Zappos understood it a while ago and have based a good chunk of their customer service on Twitter, having direct interactions with their customers.

Now that you know (if you didn’t know yet) the best and most valuable feature of Twitter, you need to know how best to use it. Twitter original user interface is extremely limited (you’ve got that, right?) and doesn’t give you the power you need to really leverage “Search”.

My recommendation is to use the following tools; they will dramatically change your Twitter experience.

On your PC, rely on Seesmic Desktop (my favorite) or TweetDeck. Both applications offer multi-columns search enabling you to build a dashboard to follow the key words you care about.

On your cell phone or iPhone, the best one for the same reason is Tweetie.

Moreover Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop are multi-accounts, so you can for example work from your personal account and from your company account at the same time without having to logout and login continuously. Pretty awesome!

 There are many other interesting aspects to Twitter, which is clearly a great online marketing tool. We will talk about this soon.

In the meantime, let us know how you have heard about Twitter in the first place and how was your original experience. Which tool have you been using and why?  

Getting To Yes! A Negotiation Framework That Works.

  This is an unimpressive book, really. So small, and so thin that you cannot imagine when you get it in your hands for the first time that it could be a live changing book. This is why you should know about it.

I read this book in 1990. I was then building the Training Curriculum for Sun Microsystems European Sales Force. One of the goals was to get rid of the traditional “push boxes and bargain on price” approach, and embrace a more consultative and strategic selling one, based on added value and solution. Negotiation was at the core of it. With the objective to complete an evaluation, I attended a negotiation training based on the “win/win” approach described in this book written Roger Fisher, William L. Ury.

Until then, I had been struggling finding a negotiation model that worked. Of course I had got all the possible recipes from “Start high” to “Know your goals and objectives” to “Get ready to break the deal”, but no comprehensive model that fully embraces the negotiation process.

This training and the book it was based on were a revelation. Like it is often the case, this was both brilliant and simple.

The 5 simple principles are the following (simple to understand, not always to execute);

1-      Separate the People from the Problem.

This is indeed one of the most polluting mistake people do when negotiating. The human side and the emotions get mixed up with the real problem. The factual issue that has to be solved is distorted behind bad feelings or old stories that prevent stakeholders to properly address it. So forget about the people you are dealing with and focus only of the facts. What is the real problem you want to solve?

2-      Focus on Interests, not Positions

The second biggest mistake is starting the negotiation with a position and to defend it regardless of anything else. There is a lot of pride involved in not moving or moving as little as possible. When this strategy is applied on both sides, you have endless and useless discussions… and sometimes war.  The new angle offered in “Getting to Yes” is to discover both parties’ interests, asking the magic question, “Why?”

To take a trivial example, people might say “We want 50% discount”. This is a position, a strong statement. If you ask the question “Why?” you could get something like this “We don’t have free cash flow at the moment” or “My team is judged on the average discount vs. public pricing we can get.” Those are the real interests you should focus on, not the 50% discount, and this is the only way to find the best solution for both parties.

3-      Invent Options for Mutual Gains

When you have a clear understanding of your own interests and the other party’s interests, you have to be creative to find out how they overlap and to create original options to satisfy everybody.

To come back to the previous example, the cash flow issue may require a financing solution that protects your own margin at the same time. The second example requires more creativity such as adding totally free (100% discount) items to protect the margin on the ones on which you don’t have this flexibility, while giving the highest frontal discount as possible.

4-      Use Objectives Criteria

Sometimes it is very challenging for both parties to evaluate the proposed common solution. A lack of data or knowledge could transform a great solution to an apparently bad one. In this case, even if you have the appropriate expertise on your side, it is better to refer to recognized experts who will have the credibility, and will establish the factual benefits of the solution.

5-      Develop your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.

Whatever you do, you should be ready for the worst scenario. A win/win game based on addressing the real problem, focusing on mutual interests and using objective criteria could fail anyway if you are the only player. Sometimes people just don’t want to play win/win. They have a position, they keep it for unknown reasons and they don’t want to use any kind of objectivity. In this very case, you should develop your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). Is it finding another party to negotiate with? Calling to a higher level? Dropping your price to a pre-defined limit? Whatever it is, you should think about it before the negotiation; that will make you stronger.

This 5-steps approach is extremely effective and I used it in a lot of circumstances, negotiating $M contracts with large companies, resolving internal conflicts within my team or negotiating annual budget with other departments. That simply works very well and creates such a positive momentum, it could be addictive!

You have to know that this method was used to negotiate the Camp David Accords signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, following twelve days of secret negotiations at Camp David. Easy to understand but sometimes very difficult to implement…

Which method have you been using? Which one would you recommend?

Open Wins, Close Loses!

I recently heard somebody stating:" With this tough economy, you’d better not share what you know to keep your job." This statement definitely shocked me because so much opposed to everything I have been doing and believing in.  I think everybody should do the exact opposite: if you want to keep your job, share as much as you can!

In 1988 I joined Sun Microsystems. The 800 hundred pound gorillas were named DEC, IBM, HP. Sun from the beginning, and later HP and IBM, committed to Unix, a new  and open Operating System (20 years ago!). There were differences between the few flavors of Unix, but the core was the same making software portable from one computer to the other across suppliers. No more proprietary applications binding your customers to your product line for ever. DEC had a proprietary Operating System, VMS, and most likely way better than Unix.

Who won? Unix! DEC is dead. Staying closed and not sharing with the community was a strategic and fatal mistake. Today Unix is challenged by the next step of the same trend, Linux, totally open source, so that any developer can contribute to directly evolving and improving the code. In our connected and mobile world, open wins, close loses.

What is true for Operating Systems is true for you and me as a person and a professional. Open wins, close loses. If you don't share, you socially die.

There are 3 reasons to share your knowledge instead of protecting it.

• Whoever you are, you would not be where you are today without people helping you on our way up. From your teachers to the university faculty, from maybe your first boss to some off your colleagues, a lot of people actually gave you a hand to become who you are today. Everything you have learned has been shared by somebody or at least has been learned thanks to somebody. The minimum you can do it to give back.

• Keeping what you know for yourself is the best way to do what you are currently doing… forever! To go to the next level, somebody has to take your job! My personal preoccupation (since 1992 when I really got it) has been to find, hire and develop people who could replace me, and literally take my job. It is challenging, pushing you up, but it gives you the opportunity and the freedom to move to the next job or the next company without seeing everything you have built falling apart.

• The third reason is a little more philosophical. You are not here forever, that is a fact. So the question is: what are you going to leave behind you. Not that I believe that any of my contributions will make history. Let’s stay humble; they were drops in the ocean. But they might have been perceived and received as a bottle of fresh water by people who were really thirsty of learning. Giving to the others will push them to give too. Millions of anonymous contributions altogether make the human kind better and smarter, one step after the other, and day in and day out. It is not to make history; it is to be part of the history, a link in the human chain, anonymously.

Social Media is a great way to share, and we will talk about it in a future post. What did you share recently from what you know? What did you give from what you have? Think about it for a little while and post a comment to share your sharing experiences.