Personal Branding

February 14, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Four Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

Have you gotten any sales leads from Twitter? Have you ever found any opportunities, whether personally or professionally, from the micro-blogging network?

While some of the social media purists might still gnash their teeth and pound their laptops from the safety of their moms’ basements, anyone who wants to see Twitter (and other social media tools) succeed needs to show their bosses that it can generate business. If you’re in sales or marketing, here are four ways you can use Twitter as a lead generation tool.

1) Connect With People in Your Industry.

Twitter is a great way to easily get connected with people in your industry. Use tools like Twellow (for Twitter Yellow Pages) to find people in your industry, and search.twitter.com to find people talking about your industry keywords. Also try Googling a title and/or company with the words “on Twitter” in the search. So, look for VP of Creative Services on Twitter or Professional Blog Service on Twitter, and see what pops up.

If you’re a TweetDeck user or use Twitter lists, save your industry contacts into their own list, and communicate with them. By keeping them in their own list, you’re more easily able to see what they’re talking about.

2) Build Relationships.

The newbie mistake that many new Twitter marketers use is to treat Twitter like an advertising channel. That is one thing you absolutely cannot do. People don’t want you to sell to them.

Instead, establish relationships. Have conversations with them, retweet them, introduce people, share articles, ask them questions. If they’re local people, or you have a chance to attend industry conferences, connect with them in person. Meet for lunch or coffee, and create that all-important offline relationship. Then, you’re a person, not a handle. You have a face, not an avatar. By creating those relationships, you become someone they’ll trust, especially if they ever need what it is that you do.

But never, ever try to sell anything. Do that in phone calls and meetings, when the time is right, not when they start following you.

3) Establish Your Expertise.

When people have a problem, make sure they know you’re the one to solve it. Answer questions, share information, refer useful articles to them. If you write a blog (you do write a blog, don’t you?), share the useful posts with them. Ask them to comment, and leave thoughtful comments on their blog.

If you’re trying to reach people in your industry, write about topics related to that industry, especially if you can make them useful to the problems your Twitter network is having. For example, if you own a Mac repair shop, and you know a bunch of Mac-owning public speakers, and you know a lot of them are having problems dealing with the new Keynote 09 (which, irritatingly, ruined a bunch of my past slide decks. Thank God for backups), you could write a couple blog posts about how to solve that problem.

Then, forward the article on to them via Twitter or DM. They’ll see that you know your stuff (as well as theirs), and they’re more likely to call you for that problem that can’t be fixed with a few keystrokes, or explosive cursing and an external hard drive.

4) Direct or Facilitate the Conversation.

If you create the subject people are talking about, or steer people to the place where they can find answers, you are helping people figure out they may need your product or service in the first place.

The best example I can give is Apple computers. Before 2001, no one knew they needed a portable MP3 player. No one knew they needed a way to play music on anything besides a portable CD player. No one knew they needed a way to create or listen to podcasts, or that they could even learn through radio shows of random length and scheduling. Once Apple introduced the iPod, people realized they needed this device, and the industry changed.

By directing or facilitating the conversation, you can help people see the pain point they never knew they had, and they will look to you for solutions.

How do you use Twitter as a lead generation tool? Do you even do that, or do you think it’s just wrong and that people shouldn’t do it? Leave a comment, and let us hear from you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

January 20, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Five Tips to Being Productive While You’re on the Road

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, with speaking gigs and client meetings, and I’m finding it harder to be productive, especially when these are all day trips, and the time I would normally spend in a hotel or a coffee shop is instead spent driving to or from my events. I’m also a regular entre-commuter, carrying my office in my backpack and working wherever I can find a coffee shop with free wifi.

While days like this mean a lot of evening, night, and weekend work (and a lot less sleep), there are some ways I have found I can still be productive while I’m out and about.

Get someone else to drive. When Paul and I drive anywhere, we take turns driving, so the other can get some work done. Get a friend or colleague to drive you to an appointment, or once you’re a big shot making a few thousand bucks for a speech, hire a driver. Do some work while the other person drives, and don’t be afraid to say “I can’t talk right now, I have to get this done.”
Keep projects “in the cloud” on your laptop. When we’re driving, I can tether my mobile phone to my laptop and get some very slow, basic wifi. This means that loading websites, answering emails, and writing blog posts is painful and I just give up. Instead, I write email responses and blog posts on my laptop and upload them when I get to a coffee shop or my destination. Since our writers turn in their submissions via Google Docs, I download them before I ever leave, make the changes, and upload them when we get to our next stop.

Paul's working on our new monthly email newsletter.

Plan for work breaks. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Columbus, Indiana, on the way back from giving a talk in Lexington, KY, to write this post, because we had some client work to take care of. Yes, we could just keep going, but we’re about to head north into Indianapolis’ rush hour traffic, and by delaying now, we’ll miss the bulk of the 5:00 rush. It also lets us get some work done so we don’t have to deal with it when we get home. Why slog through rush hour traffic only to do some more work when we just want to relax? Normally, we try to plan a 30 minute break in our longer trips so we can stop off and handle any surprise client requests — publishing a blog post, sending a Facebook message, responding to a tweet — that come in while we’re in the car.
Make phone calls instead of emails. My efficiency-expert friends say to stay off the phone and send emails, because I can write a note in two minutes, but a phone call can take 10. But when I’m driving, I’ve got 2 – 3 hours before I get to my location, so why not kill some time on the phone? I get to make that personal touch with people I do business with, and I avoid the 10-email-exchange that we try to do to get a task out of our inbox and into the other person’s. In some cases, a phone call even lets us finish a project completely.
Plug your laptop in whenever possible. I’m watching my laptop slowly drain its battery to below 50%, and I remember that I didn’t plug in earlier when I had the chance. Whenever you stop for a quick break (#3), your time and productivity may be limited by the fact that your battery wasn’t charged previously. This also cuts your productivity in the car — if your battery dies, you and your companion are forced to talk about ~~your feelings~~ any topic that randomly comes to mind. One way to avoid this is to get a DC converter for your car, like the truckers use. Get a decent one at your local hardware store or a truck stop, and plug it into your car’s cigarette lighter, then plug your laptop into it. Some really good ones even have a USB charger so you can charge your mobile phone with your USB cable.

What are your tips? How do you keep productive while you’re in the car? Leave a comment and share your wisdom.

January 17, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Ten Signs You’re NOT a Social Media Expert

10. You updated your blog in December. 2009.

9. You’re convinced that Orkut will be the breakout social network of 2011.

8. You’re feeding your Twitter stream into Facebook.

7. You think Chris Brogan was the star of “Jonah Hex.”

6. You’re still quoting the Malcolm Gladwell “10,000 hour rule,” unaware that you’re quoting someone who quoted someone else who didn’t actually read the book.

5. Your business email address ends with “@aol.com,” but you don’t work for AOL.

4. You work for AOL.

3. You play Farmville so much, Zynga’s revenues plummeted the week you went on vacation.

2. You tell people you had the high score on Technorati when you were in high school.

1. Your social media experience consists of your unpaid college internship at your dad’s accounting firm.

January 14, 2011 By Erik Deckers

Random Thoughts on Writing a Book

I’ve finished my second book, Branding Yourself, with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, and am working on a third book on networking with Jeremy Dearringer, CEO of Slingshot SEO, an SEO company here in Indianapolis. I also have a couple other writing projects in the works, although those are still under wraps. I hope to have some news about those by Springtime.

But I’ve learned a few things about becoming a book author, things that I thought were easy, and things that I learned are hard.

In all my years, this is the 5th most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

Writing a book isn’t really that hard, if you write on a regular basis. I used to think the advice “write every day” was stupid. “Who has time for that?” I thought. “I have work to do.” Turns out the work I was doing was writing anyway, and when I decided to write intentionally — to focus on new aspects of writing and become better at them — my writing improved.
Have a good editor. I learned a long time ago that while I’m a stickler about grammar and punctuation, I make a crapload of mistakes. Even though I catch them on second and third edits, I still usually find one or two that has to be fixed. Pearson just sent Kyle and me the “gathers” of the book. Individual chapters that we need to read over and mark any errors before the second printing. Believe it or not, with two writers and four editors, I found a couple errors. (What’s worse, they were mine!)
The hard part isn’t writing the book, it’s marketing it. In order to support the book, and sell copies, I’m starting to travel more to promote it during talks. Next week, I’ll be in Northern Indiana one night and Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’m trying to do some paid speaking gigs, but am thinking about adopting Scott Stratten’s idea when he was promoting UnMarketing (affiliate link). Scott made an offer to any group: buy 100 of my books, and I’ll travel out to you. I’m thinking about doing that for anyone who buys 50 of my books, as long as you’re within driving distance. But compare that to writing. I could write at home, spend three hours, and knock out about 6,000 words, or almost an entire chapter. It’ll take me that long to drive to most of my speaking gigs.
Know your subject matter. Writing teachers love to say “write what you know” (which presents a problem for science fiction or fantasy writers). But this makes life so much easier when you’re writing a book. I remember struggling with a couple of chapters on Twitter Marketing for Dummies because I didn’t use some of the tools we were writing about. I had to spend a lot of time using them before I could write about them, which threw a huge monkey wrench into my writing schedule.
Have a writing schedule, and stick with it. John Grisham’s writing schedule, when he first started out, was to write from 7 am to 8 am, before he opened his law office. Christopher Moore’s schedule involves a lot of screwing around all day before he settles down after lunch and writes for 4 or 5 hours. Mine is to write at night, after the kids are in bed, and go for about 4 hours. Ignore the people who tell you to wake up early because mornings are more productive, or the people who tell you to stay up late because no one is awake then. Do what’s best for your body and your schedule. If you’re a night owl, stay up late. If you’re an early bird, get up and get that worm. But create a schedule and stick to it.
Shut off distractions. I love my Twitter network, and love chatting. But they are also the biggest interruption of my day, because they’re always more interesting than whatever I’m doing (even as I’ve written this post, I’ve sent 4 tweets). So when I’m writing, and have the willpower to do so, I shut off TweetDeck, close my Gmail, turn off the notifiers, and get to work. I can save myself 30 minutes of writing when I do that. My wife once asked me why I didn’t do that more, and I told her to “rephrase your question in the form of a tweet.”

Writing styles and processes are different for everyone. What are yours? Do you do anything special to get your writing done, to be more efficient and effective, or even to avoid distractions? Leave a comment and let me know.

November 18, 2010 By Erik Deckers

Success Isn’t Showing Up, It’s Sticking Around

“80% of success is just showing up.”

I’ve been thinking about Woody Allen’s quote for the last few hours, after a rousing night at the relaunch of Social Media Club Indy. We heard Jason Falls speak, and I got a chance to hang out with him and a few other people at Yats Cajun Creole restaurant afterward.

Jason Falls models his new t-shirt. That’s me behind him.

I think Woody only got it half right. You can show up all you want, but if you don’t stick around, you’re missing out.

It was a lot of fun to just sit and talk about connections, past relationships, families, search engine optimization secrets, and food. I learned where the New York and Boston accent comes from. I learned a secret about Twitter lists. And I got a nice big plate of chili cheese etouffee with crawfish thanks to Duncan Alney and Joe Vuskovich (owner of Yats).

I’ve been writing and talking about the importance of face-to-face networking as a part of personal branding a lot lately. And last night, I realized that success isn’t just showing up, it’s sticking around.

It’s sticking around for dinner or drinks after the main event. Not to pick someone’s brain, but to share ideas, talk about family, tell stories, and learn more about each other. (Keith Ferrazzi talks about this a lot in Never Eat Alone (affiliate link). It’s my new networking bible.)

If I want to build solid relationships with people I trust and who trust me, I need to spend time with them after special events, not during.

If I want to build solid relationships, I can’t do it in a crowded room with people who only have a few minutes to talk.

If I want to be a valuable resource, I can’t shout advice over a loud crowd and louder music.

I need to hang out with people in a quiet place. The best place to do it is when everyone is happy, excited, and talkative. The best time to do it is after the big event that got people talking excitedly.

Unfortunately for those who didn’t stick around, they missed out on this opportunity. By not sticking around, they missed the chance for deepening relationships that lead to bigger success.

Now, I completely understand why people had to go. They have families to see and take care of. They have work that needs to get done. They have personal lives that mean they can’t stay out until 10:30. I don’t blame them, because 9 times out of 10, I do too. I don’t stick around because I haven’t seen my family since the night before, or I’ve got a client deadline the next day. I couldn’t even stick past 10:30 for drinks, because I had to finish a presentation.

However, there are times that I get to do it, because my family understands my insatiable need to talk with people about things I’m passionate about. And those are the times that I see my personal brand and my relationships leap ahead. (Of course, my family couldn’t care less about whether I’m a big deal to other people. I’m a big deal to them, and that’s who gets most of my attention. So for those who had to leave, I totally support you.)

But if you can arrange it once or twice, stick around. Be the last one out the door, and talk to the event organizers who are sticking around to hang out with the Big Name From Out Of Town. Stick around, and join them for drinks or dinner. You’d be amazed at what will come your way as a result.

So success does come from showing up. Anyone who came and met someone new last night was successful (and will be moreso if they can follow up with some one-on-one networking). But the bigger success, for me, came from sticking around just a little while longer.

Photo credit: Andy Huston