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FollowBlast Allows Twitter Users to Connect Based on #Hashtags

It was the greatest thing at Blog Indiana 2010: someone on the stage mentioned BlastFollow.com as a way to follow a lot of people who were all using a specific hashtag, like, say #BIN2010. Everyone in the room immediately went to BlastFollow on their laptop and started using it.

Unfortunately, BlastFollow went away after Twitter upgraded their system, not allowing non-OAuth access to the API, blocking 3rd party apps that let you mass follow and unfollow people, and insert other geek mumbo-jumbo here; I can’t recall everything. TweepML.org was a suitable replacement for a while, until they shut down in October the site to make some repairs, promising to get the system back up two weeks later. It’s early April, and they’re still not back up.

FollowBlast.com is the new hashtag find-and-follow tool from my friends Noah Coffey (@NoahWesley) and Chuck Gose (@ChuckGose), and is something they just completed earlier this week.

I had a chance to check FollowBlast out right after the Indianapolis Social Media Brekafast, using the hashtag #indysm.

FollowBlast.com lets you find and follow other Twitter users based on their #hashtags.

The way FollowBlast works is that it pulls up the 50 most recent tweets that used that particular hashtag, and it lets you follow those people, either selecting them one at a time, or allowing you to mass follow those 50 people. (That’s how they get around the limits Twitter has placed on mass following/unfollowing.)

While the product is still very new, and has a few bugs to work out, it’s a great tool, especially if you go to a conference or event you’re not familiar with. It’s ideal for people who have newly joined Twitter and have an interest in a particular idea or event.

My one word of caution to FollowBlast users is that you do not use the Follow All link until you have checked out the results first. The first time I did it, I unintentionally followed someone I did not want to and had to go back and unfollow them.

The tool is supposed to filter out people you’re already following, but that wasn’t the case for my results, as most of them ended up being people I was already following. However, knowing Noah and Chuck, I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

FollowBlast has a promising future as a very useful tool for special event and conference attendees. It’s filling a very big hole that BlastFollow and TweepML have left, and as FollowBlast grows and improves, it’s going to become indispensable.

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Five Rules to Getting Good Customer Service on Social Media

Social media has made customer service more important and easier since the advent of the 800 number.

We tell people, and our companies, what makes us happy and what makes us upset. We tell others they need to support or avoid companies that have pleased or displeased us. And if we’re lucky, the companies will pay attention to us, and solve our problems for us.

But depending on what you complain about and how you do it, you may have better success with some techniques than others. Here are five rules for getting good customer service on social media.

1. Don’t Be Passive-Aggressive

Social media has made it possible for the passive-aggressive among us to air our grievances to all of our friends without actually confronting any issues. You see them on Facebook, Twitter, and other anywhere else we can share our innermost thoughts and accomplishments with our friends:

Claire: I wish some people would quit leaving the toilet seat up.
David: Jeez, I said I was sorry.
Gayle likes this.
Gayle: Good for you, Claire. Make whoever it is PAY!”
David: You know, I can see you both across the table.

Customers who complain about a company need to be specific, factual, and shouldn’t play the hapless victim seeking sympathy. If you don’t like something, say so outright. Also, sticking the #fail hashtag on a complaint tweet just makes you look like a petty drama queen.

Wish someone at @burgerking hadn’t only put one piece of cheese on my Double Whopper. Learn to count. #fail #MyDayIsRuined

2. Don’t Be a Jackass

The funniest thing I heard Scott Stratten say at his Social Media Club Chicago talk was, “I’m not the jackass whisperer. I don’t have time to deal with jackasses.” If you’re a jackass to the company you’re dissatisfied with, don’t be surprised if they don’t help you. Calling someone names or insulting them because you’re not happy will only make them mad, and wreck what might have been a valid complaint. If they do help, it’s because they’re committed to customer service, not because your jackassery is actually effective.

3. Don’t Say Anything You’re Not Willing to Say to Someone’s Face

If you’re a jackass online, how willing are you to be a jackass to someone’s face, especially when they’re not the person who aggrieved you? And if you’re the passive-aggressive type, are you willing to make a cutting comment at the same time you make eye contact with someone?

What makes me laugh is to see is when someone complains about a company on Twitter, and the company responds, the person quickly backtracks and tries to soften what they previously said. It’s an understandable vent. They’re upset, they’re frustrated, and so they reached for their mobile phone, and told the world why, but didn’t realize the company was paying attention to them. When the company responds, they backpedal on their complaint, embarrassed at their outburst, and more than a little humbled. And yes, I’ve done this. It’s embarrassing.

Many years ago, when I was in grad school, I was on the receiving end of this. I had stepped onto an elevator and hit the button for my floor. The doors closed just as a woman ran up. I couldn’t hit the Open Door button in time to keep them from closing all the way.

“A-hole!” she shouted as the doors shut in her face. (She didn’t actually say “a-hole,” she said the whole word.)

However, it turns out I did hit the button in time so the elevator didn’t leave. The doors slid open again, bringing her face to face with the guy she had just called a name.

“Oh jeez, I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I was just annoyed about the doors.”

“Don’t worry about it. I won’t make you ride with an a-hole,” I said, and hit the Close Door button.

Here’s the rule. Don’t shout something on Twitter or Facebook that you have to stammer an apology for when you meet that person.

4. Send Out Thank You Messages After Your Complaint Is Resolved

After you’ve been helped, write a blog post, or post a video or some photos about you being happy with your new or replacement item. Turn the company’s effort into a win for them. Give them something to be happy about. Customer service people spend 8 hours a day being our whipping posts, so show them — as publicly as possible — that you’re thankful.

There’s an old management adage that says “reprimand in private, praise in public.” That works here too. If you have a customer service gripe, it’s nice to keep it private. Just between you and the company. But definitely make your praises public. Let everyone know why you’re pleased.

If you do launch a complaint in public, it is absolutely not right to only thank them with a personal email. You made sure everyone knows about the company’s failure, so you need to make sure everyone knows about their success too.

5. Praise a Company Before You Have a Need to Complain

There are some companies that just rock your world. You love their products, you “like” their Facebook page, and you tell all your friends about them. Become a super fan and praise them on your blog, Twitter, and Facebook. Become their evangelist before you ever lodge your first complaint.

If they’re on social media, connect with them there too. Become someone who will help them out when they need it. Then, when you have a complaint, not only do you have one or two people you can complain to directly, they’ll take you seriously, because they know how much you already love them.

As clichéd as it is, the old saying, “you catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar” applies here. If you’re unhappy with a company, by all means, complain. It’s your right as a customer. But if you do it the right way, you’re more likely to get what you want than if you whine and gripe about their incompetence and #failures.

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.

Photo credit: kandyjaxx

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Five Online Reputation Management Tactics

Your 15 minutes of fame will last a lifetime on the Internet.

Former Indiana deputy Attorney General found this out a couple weeks ago, when he was fired for posting tweets that called for the use of live ammunition against the Wisconsin protesters. I had the chance to appear on WISH TV the day Cox was fired to talk about the importance of managing one’s personal brand on social media.

Tweet from Indiana deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox

I told WISH anchor Debby Knox, “Unfortunately, this sort of thing will follow him around forever. When someone, like a new employer, Googles his name — even 10 years from now — this story will forever be associated with it.”

The problem is, as a lot of people are learning the hard way, what you say on the Internet, even something as small as a 140-character tweet or keg-stand photo, will be around forever. And if the wrong people find it, you’ll be crucified with it. Whether that’s a potential employer or someone from the media, you can be guaranteed you’ll be found out.

Here are five online reputation management tactics you need if you’re concerned about your personal brand.

1. Know What The Internet Is Saying About You

We worked with one guy whose name was nearly identical to someone convicted of real estate fraud in the same state. The felon’s name would always appear first in a Google search if you just typed in our guy’s name. Anyone who knew him knew the difference, but when it came to potential clients, they would probably worry that they were going to hire a convicted felon.

Anyone who is named Jeffrey Cox is going to have a similar problem. A quick Google search showed that there are a lot of guys named Jeffrey Cox, even here in Indiana. Imagine the problems they’re going to have for the next several months or few years when people try to find them…

To know what people are saying about you, sign up for Google News Alerts, and have an alert set for your own name, your company name, and even your Twitter handle. Monitor this closely, and pay attention to any mention of your name that’s not on your own blog or website.

2. Know Your Influence

Whether you prefer Klout or Twitalyzer, or any of the myriad of other influence analysis tools out there, you need to know how many people are paying attention to you. If you want to positively manage your reputation, then you need to have that number as high as you can possibly get it. I prefer Klout, only because that’s what everyone is using, and so it’s easier to compare my reach by using the same stats as everyone else.

3. Practice Search Engine Optimization

Normally this is a website-/blog-only technique. If you want to get your blog or website to the top of the search engines, you need to optimize it so Google and the other search engines know exactly what your blog (and each individual post) is about.

This becomes more important if you want to knock something off Google’s front page. If you made a mistake and something is appearing at the top of Google, you need to focus on a couple of properties, like a blog, and optimize it so it sits at the top of the search rankings.

This practice is called reverse search engine optimization, and it’s becoming more important as companies and individuals realize they either made one mistake they don’t want following them around, or in a few cases, someone shares a name with a convicted felon (see below).

4. Use YouTube and Flickr/Picasa

Photos and videos are an excellent SEO tool. Not only do they boost your search rankings, but your photos and videos will often show up in your search results. If you have another result you need to boot off Google, photos and videos can help. Sign up for (and use!) YouTube and either Flickr or Picasa.

I prefer Picasa only because Google owns it, and it’s easier to integrate with my other Google properties, but Flickr is by far the more popular photo sharing site.

The best way to use photos and videos is to embed the code into a blog post, rather than uploading the photo or video to your own blog. Not only does it take up server space, but you don’t get as much search engine juice for an uploaded video as you do for an embedded one.

5. Join a Niche Social Network

If you’re trying to find a new job or establish your expertise in an industry, join a social network that’s specific to that industry. Or join one geared toward your local community. I first started connecting with people on Smaller Indiana, an Indiana-based network for people who live and work in the state. Even now, when my name appears in Google searches, there are a few results from Smaller Indiana that appear in the results.

Additionally, participating in that network will make you more visible to the other people on it. If you’re trying to make your name known in an industry, contributing a lot of valuable content to the network will accomplish this for you. Answer questions, write valuable information, and forward interesting articles to your fellow network members, and they’ll come to rely on you as someone valuable and worth working with or even hiring.

How are you managing your online reputation? Any tools or tricks we should know about? Leave a comment and let us know.

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.

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A Social Media Strategy for Non-Marquee Sports & Athletes

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dan Clarke (@speedydanclarke), an Indy Lights racer from England who lives in Indianapolis, and learning about his struggles this off-season. He’s looking for corporate sponsors so he can race in the upcoming season.

Dan Clarke at Carb Day 2010

If you don’t know what Indy Lights racing is, then you’re starting to see Dan’s problem. Indy Lights is the developmental racing league for IndyCar — Indianapolis 500 — racing. In a sport with fewer US fans than the NHL, he’s in the minor leagues.

Think of your favorite baseball team. Can you name its AAA minor league affiliate? Can you name their players? Do you know who their best hitter was last year, or their best pitcher?

Now you understand Dan’s problem. He’s looking for sponsors for a sport outside the big three — NFL, NBA, MLB — trying to convince them that the developmental league is a great place for them to be seen.

This is where social media can help. A personal branding campaign, even for athletes, can help build their brand, find new fans, and hopefully, bring in the big sponsors. It doesn’t matter if you’re an IndyLights driver, a minor league baseball player, or even the veteran right guard for the New Orleans Saints. If people don’t know who you are, they’re not going to care, and you’re going to have a tough time getting them to notice you. But by doing some basic personal branding, you can use that network to bring in new opportunities that contribute to your total success.

Start with Twitter

Twitter is one of the easiest places to start. This is where you can immediately see your fan base (# of followers), interact with them, and even measure the impact you’re having. Turn followers into fans, turn fans into evangelists. And as more people follow you, demonstrate to potential sponsors that you carry a lot of weight with your network.

Most athletes ignore their fan base on Twitter, choosing instead to communicate with each other publicly about private issues. For example, most IndyCar drivers have only a few thousand followers and only follow a few dozen people. Helio Castroneves, one of the most famous drivers in the world today, only has 31,000 followers, Ryan Briscoe has 8,600+, and Penske Racing (“one of the most successful teams in sports history with 330 race wins”) has 9,900 followers. To put that in perspective, I have 7,200 followers, I write blogs for a living, and the last thing I won was “Best Comedy Script” in a theater script competition in 2005.

If you don’t follow people, they won’t follow you. When you’re in a small-market sport, you can’t afford to be picky about who you follow. If you’re worried about privacy, don’t tweet your personal life. If you’re worried about managing a large Twitter network, get TweetDeck and use Twitter lists. But don’t make yourself seem unapproachable. Twitter is the one place you can interact with fans and still keep them at arm’s length.

Tip: Use Klout or Twitalyzer to measure the influence you have. Show sponsors that a positive word from you can influence buying behavior among your fans.

Create a blog

The blog is really the hub of your personal branding campaign. The point of being on those networks is to drive traffic to your blog; the point of your blog is to get people to join you on the other networks.

Your personal branding campaign is a wheel, with the blog at the center.

A blog is a place where you can share a behind-the-scenes look at what you’re doing. Share your exploits on and off the field/court/track, post photos, post videos, and tell stories. Fans love feeling like they’re connecting with their favorite athlete and learning stuff the casual observer or fair-weather fan doesn’t know. This is why celebrity news is so popular. People get to learn something about their favorite stars. But since small-market athletes don’t get the rave coverage that the Peyton Mannings and LeBron James of the world, you have to make your own news.

Blogs are becoming more important and popular among the PR crowd, especially crisis communicators, because they avoid the whole filter of mainstream media. For athletes, this avoids the filter of the sports media, which only gives a scant amount of attention to your sport anyway, and even then, only to the victories of the marquee stars and screwups of everyone else.

Tip: Use Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics to measure web traffic. Demonstrate to sponsors that you 1) can get traffic to your blog, and 2) can send that traffic to sponsors’ websites.

Social Media PR

Adopt a strategy of sharing with other bloggers in your sport. Even though I’m not a big open wheel racing blogger (I’ll get to blog from the media center of the Indy 500 for the 3rd year running, but won’t be going to any other races), I can name at least five other race bloggers who all have a decent readership. And they’ll gladly share some digital ink with anyone from the sport who will talk to them.

So, talk to them. Tell them stories, give them exclusive news, and grant interviews. In short, treat them like real journalists, and they’ll pay you back with space, exposure, and kindness. Let a few bloggers break the news about your new team, your plans for the year, or even your struggles. They’ll become your fans, and tell their fans all about you, which will make them your fans too.

I’ve been listening to Wall Street Journal sports writer Stefan Fatsis‘ book, A Few Seconds of Panic (affiliate link), about his weeks spent in training camp with the Denver Broncos as a kicker. While I have never been a Denver Bronco’s fan, Fatsis’ look at the danger and drudgery of training camp and football has me looking at the Broncos in a whole new way, and I may have to cheer for them a few times this year (something I would never have done until this week). Can you find bloggers to do that for you? What about bloggers outside the sport? When less than 1% of the country knows who you are or what you do, non-industry bloggers are a rich, untapped vein. (Just don’t blanket every blogger out there. You’ll be labeled a PR spammer.)

Tip: Let other bloggers tell your story. If they make it compelling enough, they’ll win your fans for you. If you connect solidly with 10 bloggers and they each have 1,000 readers, you’ll reach 10,000 people. Now, compare that to the effort you would need to put out to reach 10,000 people yourself.

Build a Facebook Brand Page

You may already have a Facebook page, but that should be kept private. Try not to connect with your fans on your personal Facebook profile, since that’s where you’re also connecting with family and friends. Instead, create a Brand Page, and connect with people there.

However, it’s crucial that you actually use this page regularly; don’t ignore it. Promote your blog posts there. Post status updates when you publish your tweets (but don’t feed your Twitter stream into Facebook; it’s annoying. Just rewrite them to be more Facebook friendly.)

Tip: Republish your videos and photos to your Facebook page too. Ask your fans to share them with your friends. It’s a well-known adage in social media circles that we consumers trust recommendations by our friends. Let your fans evangelize to their friends about you.

There are a whole lot of other strategies I could recommend — posting videos to YouTube and photos to Picasa/Flickr — but that’s for another post. Use these strategies as a place to start and start building your personal branding campaign as a way to get sponsors, build name recognition among fans, and add new fans.

Do you have any strategy suggestions? Anything you’ve done as an athlete, or anything you wish an athlete would do? Share your wisdom in the comments section and let’s learn from each other.

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.

Photo credit: Just_Bryan (Flickr)

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5 Strategies for Avoiding and Eliminating Twitter Spam

Yesterday, I sparked some real interest from people with my 10 Signs for Spotting Twitter Spammers, and a lot of people started tweeting and commenting about how they have been hit with the same Twitter spam hammer. That got me to thinking about some of the different ways I’ve avoided and even eliminated a lot of the Twitter spam clogging up my Twitter tubes.

  1. Shut off email notifications. If you’re still getting email notifications about new followers, the best way to cut back on it is to shut off all email notifications and use TweetDeck’s New Followers column.
  2. Hit the Block or Block & Report Spam. Look for any of the signs of Twitter spammers and just block those people directly from TweetDeck (HootSuite can’t do that, can they? Update: Jill Manty says in the comments that, yes, you can do that.). If a Twitter account gets enough blocks, they’ll shut it down. This has an added bonus of not only eliminating spammers from your stream (and preventing them from seeing your tweets), but you can continue to frustrate the attempts of spammers.
  3. Use Formulists.com to see who has unfollowed you.A favorite trick of Twitter spammers and number chasers (i.e. people with 10,000+ followers and 200 tweets) is to follow and unfollow people. Since Twitter caps the number of people you can follow at 10% over the number following you, the spammers will follow and unfollow a lot of people, letting them bounce their rate higher and higher as their followers increase. This lets them build up a large follower network, which allows them to follow more people at a time.With Formulists.com, you’ll start to notice that people who followed you also unfollowed you 2 – 3 days later. You can also see if you inadvertently followed a spammer, so you can then unfollow them before you hit the Remove button.

    (Note: While I expect this kind of behavior from spammers — because they’re evil — I’m sometimes surprised to see this from real people with real accounts. How do I know? Because they’ll follow me 2 – 3 times, or they’ll unfollow me within 48 hours of following me. You people know who you are. You should also I know I block you. Hard.)

  4. Use SocialToo.com to eliminate DM spam. I don’t use this service very often, but only because I’ve managed to avoid following a lot of spammers. Occasionally I do get auto DMs from people who thank me for following them, and ask me to download their free report. SocialToo will let you filter out certain DMs based on keywords and phrases you choose. So adding things like “free whitepaper” or “free report” to the filter will keep those DMs out of your stream and email inbox. SocialToo has limited options in their free service, but this is at least a place to keep some DMs out of your tubes.
  5. Use TwitSweeper.com. Doug from TwitSweeper left a comment on yesterday’s post, which reminded me I had signed up for their free trial several months ago (which has since run out). The great thing about TwitSweeper is that it identifies the tweeting pattern of your followers, and will flag them as spammers if they meet certain criteria. The one downside is that if you follow some news outlets, they may inadvertently be flagged as spammers, because they don’t have conversations and they don’t retweet. But TwitSweeper lets you see who you’re about to unfollow so you don’t accidentally drop people you wanted to keep.

Do you have any strategies or tools? How do you get rid of Twitter spam? Do you have a way to drop the spam hammer on people cluttering up your Twitter followers? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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.

Photo credit: Jens Lumm (Flickr)

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10 Signs for Spotting Twitter Spammers

I’ve been seeing a lot of Twitter spammers lately, andI’ve learned how to spot most of them rather quickly. Aside from the people who blatantly tell us we can make money, build traffic, or try Forex trading (I still don’t know what that is; don’t care either), there are a few tricks people are using to get you to follow them.

They’re trying to make their Twitter accounts look like real ones so you’ll follow them. Then they’ll either change their Twitter handle to something more spammy, or they’ll just DM you their crap, hoping you’ll fall for it.

    1. Following over 1,000 people, but doesn’t have an avatar. Someone who has managed to gather enough followers should know enough to get an avatar. No avatar is not a sign they’re spammers, just like a real photo is a sign they’re not. But when I see a new follower with no bio and no avatar, I may block them, I may not.
    2. They’re following over 1,000 people but have never, ever tweeted. Sometimes someone can write a decent bio, and post a photo, but have not sent a single tweet.
What
  1. The bio is formulaic.The one I’m seeing the most lately lists their likes, where they used to live, and another place they used to live.Likes – Writing, Tunes, Photography, Movies. Gym, Formerly from Albany , various places near Columbus.
  2. Their avatar photo has ugly borders. The ones I’ve been seeing are photos that look to be about 15 – 20years old (they’re actually a little faded; nice touch.), and have borders on the top and bottom, or left and right. The colors are purples, greens, and blues that remind me of something you would have worn in the 80s. Basically, the photos were too small, so the spammer added some border colors to fill up the photo space.
  3. Avatar is of a young attractive woman but has a guy’s name. And not even the sort-of gender neutral names like Tony/Toni or Stevie. No, these are names like Barry, David, or Kevin. I’ve only seen this once in a while, but it still happens from time to time.
  4. Avatar is of a young, scantily-clad woman. Guys, I’m sorry, but not only is she not really into you, it’s probably not even a woman on the other end of that Twitter account. Most women will not post a photo of themselves like that on Twitter, especially if they want to show you how to make money through your Twitter account.
  5. They have tweets on their profile page, but they’re usually gibberish. Things like “Ian successfully dispelled” or “it isn’t sepulchral quiet.” I’ll block them on both Twitter.com and on TweetDeck. It doesn’t actually count as double-block to Twitter, but I feel better doing it. (Update: @KaryD and @JenKaneCo apparently call this Twitter Haiku. I’m adopting this moniker too. Thanks you two.)
  6. Their Twitter handle contains numbers. Not just a couple numbers, like the year they were born. These look like tracking numbers. Once you start seeing several of these people following you, they invariably follow the same patterns: they’re all young women, they’re often accompanied by a formulaic bio or no bio at all, and their tweets are often commercial or nonsensical. Sheila9489, Kelly1276
  7. Their Twitter handle is NAME_in_CITY. I’ll see Lisa_in_Milkwaukee and Stephanie_in_Madison. I got hit by this spammer when he started in Portland, Maine, and he predictably traveled westward over the next several months. I couldn’t even give him points for creativity, although I do confess to a little thrill of recognition when he chose a few Indiana cities I knew.
  8. Their Twitter handle follows similar formulas, like CITY_OMG or CITY_140. Handles like Omaha_OMG or Louisville_140 were also common. I still see follow requests from this guy once in a while.
  9. Unfortunately, Twitter hasn’t been able to crack down on these spammers, or they’re not as worried about it. But I think they should be able to identify some of these strategies (or even maybe hundreds of accounts all signing up from the same IP address) and work to stop these slimeballs from clogging up their Twitter tubes.

    How are you spotting spammers? Any hints? How do you deal with them or eliminate them? I’m working on a new post about how to deal with the people who clog my Twitter, and I would love your suggestions.

    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.