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The Shiitake We Have to Put Up With on Twitter

In no particular order:

Sharing your two-bit clever quote that you found on someone’s blog post does not make you an ‘inspirational guru’.
Retweeting a charity appeal or using a hashtag relating to flood victims doesn’t make you a volunteer any more than applying for 50 jobs on Monster makes you employed.
Using hashtags like #earlyshift or #graveyardshift doesn’t make you look like you work hard, only that you are wasting time on Twitter in awkward hours.
Hijacking 5 hashtags to promote your new blog post “I can make you an Internet millionare in 30 days” is not going to help. It still sucks and nobody will retweet it.
Putting the words ‘expert’, ‘thought leader’ and ‘guru’ in your bio clearly indicates that you are delusional. Any ‘expert’ I know would never call themselves that, it’s for others to do.
And retweeting Mashable and/or TechCrunch all day definitely doesn’t make you a ‘social media thought leader’. A chimp can retweet Pete Cashmore and there is nothing original about it. In fact it makes you look like a complete Twitter novice.
Pretending that your auto-DM is a manual update by asking a question like “please tell me more about what you do, just head over to my site xyz.com and sign up first”.
Another auto-DM: “like our Facebook Page about cat toys” – that’s not going to happen and we both know it.
Actually owning up but having an excuse: “sorry about the auto-DM, it’s not how I normally interact with my followers”. Uhmm, ok then.
Not following back. Sure if you’re Stephen Fry you don’t need to give a damn but when you have 15 followers and people in your industry follow you, it’s probably best to follow back if you ever want to make any new friends on Twitter.
Protected tweets – I mean what’s that all about? The reason we’re on Twitter is that it’s a public feed. If you are looking for a platform to communicate with 4 friends, have you tried email? Or if you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re building a bomb in your basement, trust me the Federales will be wire-tapping everything that goes on your computer, protected or not.
Not tweeting very much as you “don’t want to be annoying”. Twitter is the one place people don’t mind lots of updates from you. Keep your restraint to LinkedIn where nobody wants to hear from you more than once or twice a day.

Any more shiitake? Let me know in the comments please!

photo by: law_keven

Filed Under: Rant, Twitter Tagged With: Etiquette, How-to, Rant

How NOT to Pitch Bloggers with Your Products and Services

If you’re a blogger, do you ever get pitched by marketers and PR folks? I’ve had enough of bad practice in this department and here is my rant on the topic.

Do you agree with me or am I being too harsh? Please let me know what you reckon!

Filed Under: Blogging, Rant, Video Tagged With: Blogging, Rant, Video

How Not To Make a Sales Call

I got a call last week from a woman that sounded like a potential client for Link Humans (my company). She introduced herself by saying her name and company and that she was recommended to speak to me by someone in a meeting she just had. Something didn't sit right with me so I only gave her small tid bits of information. She was asking whether we do work in the public sector and more importantly if we would be interested in doing so, as the spending budgets in this sector are in the billions of pounds. I explained that we are in no position to handle that much business but she persevered.

No research before a sales call?

The woman on the line then asked more about my company, what we do and our clients. She hadn't bothered to look at our website and she knew pretty much nothing about us, indicating she had done absolutely no research before a cold call - this may save her time but she loses all credibility. She could easily have googled Link Humans and myself to get a gist of what is going on with a company. I always look people up on LinkedIn for instance before a call or meeting (although I never do cold calling to be fair).

Only in it for the quick sale

This woman I spoke to had no interest in meeting me, sending me a brochure or even an email. Her job was to close this sale on the phone there and then – classic sales stuff. The trouble is that it will never work in my mind. Business is all about building relationships, not short term wins (unless you are selling widgets on a street corner of course).

Knowing where the pushy boundaries are

Toward the end of this call I had completely lost any interest in listening to her spiel and simply said "thank you, I'm not interested". When I said this she countered with more questions like "why are you not interested in new clients with millions to spend?". I repeated my statement and she popped out one line after the other. By this time I had put her on speaker and others were listening in and giggling away, something she seemed oblivious of.

When a customer says they are not interested, and even repeats this I would recommend quitting for the day. The only way to continue the dialogue would be to ask to send an email or call back later – she did neither of these, only kept pushing with ultra-salesy questions. I sales you typically want to advance a relationship and get it closer to that sale, but you have to take the steps to get there. If you don't have a brochure or a PDF to email over, be a bit creative instead of just firing over more cheesy statements like "so you are telling me you want to walk away from solid new business"?

Word-of-mouth is the way forward

We will only work with companies and people we have met in person or at the very least have had a number of conversations over Skype. Link Humans typically gets clients through word-of-mouth and I prefer to have been recommended through a mutual contact. Yes, of course we get clients through social media, as it is what we do, but a surprising number of these have another connection to us as well. My point here is that cold calling companies, doing no research in advance and only looking to close an instant deal is simply not going to work.

How to deal with calls like these

When somebody sounds a bit too nice for comfort, just ask straight away: is this a sales call? When they confirm that it is (they have to), you can simply say you're not interested in anything and cut the call short. As long as you don't know the person is selling, you're wasting your precious time with a call that is leading nowhere. My gut feeling on this call was that it was a sales call but I failed to ask the question early on and wasted eight minutes of my time (and hers!). It turned into a bit of comedy instead and a blog post of course so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Conclusion

How do you deal with pushy phone sales people? Please share your tips!

Still looking for sales tips? How about Creating a Twitter Marketing Strategy instead.

Filed Under: Marketing, Monthly, Rant Tagged With: Business, Sales

Dear Tweeters, Stop Cluttering My LinkedIn Homefeed!

LinkedIn and Twitter launched their Tweets application about a year ago. You can see exactly why they did it, LinkedIn has always been a bit boring and Twitter has been a bit too conversational. And they have both feared Facebook more than anything.

So far so good, the Tweets application is really handy and if you haven’t already done so, I urge you to activate it and see what LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and vice versa.

Setting up Tweets on LinkedIn

When you set up Tweets you can choose to share tweets from Twitter straight into your LinkedIn status updates. Most folks opt for only sharing tweets that contain the hashtag #in – a way for you to control what goes up on LinkedIn.

Others go for broke and set up a full integration where every tweet is broadcast on LinkedIn as well. This shouldn’t be an issue really if it weren’t for the fact that people tend to tweet a great deal more than they update their status on LinkedIn.

How Twitter ruins your LinkedIn homefeed

As a result, you sometimes get a completely cluttered LinkedIn home feed of users tweeting away and probably not thinking about the Tweets application. This gets very annoying and the only way to stop it cluttering one’s home screen is to remove that person from the feed until further notice (or even delete them as a connection if you are very annoyed).

Here’s a screenshot from my LinkedIn homefeed the other day:

I will admit that I tested out the full-on tweet function on LinkedIn for a week. In that week I tweeted about 20 times and I had no more profile views, no more people contacting me than normal. I suspect it did annoy a few connections though, especially when some of the tweets were responses to people on Twitter and not LinkedIn.

How it should look

The homefeed on LinkedIn is very useful as it gives you updates on people changing jobs, getting promoted, connecting to and recommending other users. These are the updates that will make the difference in your networking and should look something like this:

What you can do to get rid of Twitter clutter

When you see an update that is automated from Twitter, you can expect this user to have lots of incoming updates (at least in most cases). The best way to get rid of the user from the feed is to click in the top right hand corner of the update as per this image.

When you hit ‘Hide’ you will get another message confirming that this user has been hidden from your home feed – and you have freed up valuable network update space.

Bottom line

So my point of this blog post is basically: if you tweet more than once per day, please turn off your automatic Twitter feed into LinkedIn. If you don’t, you risk upsetting the calm and collected milieu that is LinkedIn and you could end up alienating your connections.

I am all for integrating social media platforms but we must remember that we use different platforms for different purposes. I hate the term netiquette but I guess it applies in this case. You don’t post pictures of your dog on LinkedIn, you don’t answer industry questions on Twitter and you don’t apply for jobs on Facebook. There is a time and place for everything and 50 Twitter updates from someone on my LinkedIn home screen is neither of these.

Do you agree with me or am I off my trolley here? Please let me know what you reckon!

At Link Humans, we train companies to use Social Media properly – check out our workshops for more details.

Filed Under: LinkedIn, Monthly, Rant, Twitter Tagged With: Clutter, LinkedIn, Rant, Twitter