The most important thing businesses miss about Twitter is that it is NOT another marketing platform.  A marketing platform is somewhere you can broadcast your services and offerings.  You can use Twitter this way, feel good about how many followers you are gaining daily by just following them, and then spam them with advertisements offering specials and deals.  But you’re missing the boat.

Remember how much you hate salespeople?  Heck, salespeople hate salespeople!  They’re intrusive, bullheaded, and just want to talk about what they’re selling…  You don’t want to come across this way on Twitter—and it is super easy to come across like that.  Here’s why:

As with blogging (see more on Blogging here), Twitter is about sharing on an ongoing basis.  The micro-blogging with only 160 characters is deceptively easy.  But the ease of sharing makes the snippets of information even more interruptive.  It is hard for followers to pick through the threads, even with its new Lists feature.  So, if you do capture people’s attentions, you will turn them off even more so by being sales-y.

Second, there are too many marketers on Twitter, getting hyped and excited, tweeting and direct messaging followers with links and offerings.  They treat their followers like a mindless audience and automate an uploaded, hourly tweet.  They have thousands of followers who don’t care, and follow thousands more.  By becoming one of those marketers, you are not giving people what they want, which is the number 1 rule on the Internet, in the Information Age, where the competition is fierce.  Don’t play that kind of numbers game.

Here’s what Twitter can do for you.  As with blogging, Twitter can work in tandem to help you stay in touch with your customers/clients and stay human.  Giving what people want requires you to find out what people want.  On Twitter, the ability to listen by keyword is priceless.  Use the automated keyword search tool, if you must automate something.

By listening, you turn this into a research tool.  By responding, you turn a tweet into a dialogue—an appreciated one, not an intrusion.  By answering and giving the most value, you become a valued voice.

This takes time.  This is not an overnight success pitch that a lot of “experts” will give you.  However, through this kind of organic, human approach, you can build a following of people who really care and believe in your branding, and in you.

Don’t miss the boat!

To your success and more to come on Social Media Optimization.

Where Ignorance Is Not Bliss! Your Legal Responsibilities as a Blogger

by Misheel Chuluun

Blogging places a legal responsibility to the author despite its variety and wide range of expression. The fun of blogging to share your knowledge and experience must be tempered with an understanding of where the public risks for libel lawsuits stem from. Defamation is when someone says something false about another party (be it person or company), to person(s) other than the defamed.  Libel is when the defamation is written; slander is when it is spoken (so, Podcasters beware).

You can casually write, so-and-so “company cheats its customers” and NOT be liable in exceptional cases like when the company was found guilty of multiple counts of fraud.  Be certain.

However, if you are the only customer the company cheated, that you know of for certain, then you would be liable for defamation for writing the above.  You may write honestly about your experiences or others’ experiences, but only if they are true.  Also, in the eye of the law, it is wrongful to mislead by omission of significant details that would lead readers to another conclusion.

In other words, be smart and be honest. Don’t embellish. There may be severe consequences. “I didn’t know” would not serve in your favor.

Struggling to create a lot of content in a short amount of time? Tired of Blogging, Tagging, Filling out Forms, Descriptions, and Backlinks? Try Posterous.

I’m honestly blown away by how simple it is to blog with Posterous.com. There are tons of blogging tools and templates out there. I have been blogging through Word Press, for example.  I like it. So why mess with what works? Because it’s worth it… It allows me to share a lot more content with a lot less time, and it works well with everything else I’m doing.

Posterous is content development at its simplest.

When my brother asked me why Posterous, why do you have Misheel’s Scrapbook and SEO-Web-Design Scrapbook? I told him, “Because it is the simplest interface I have seen for sharing.”

Here’s how simple it is. Before you even have an account, when you email to post@posterous.com, voila! You have a blog. Then you claim your blog, and make an account, which is just confirming it and putting a password in. (Another kudos: it’s fairly new, so you can get pretty decent names still.)

You can seamlessly integrate with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other sites. It will post it automatically for you. You only want to post it on Facebook? You email, facebook@posterous.com. It will do the right thing. Twitter? Email, twitter@posterous.com. Both Facebook and Twitter, but not posterous? You email, facebook+twitter@posterous.com. Makes sense, right? Of course it does! How great is that?

Because it will automatically broadcast everywhere, your Twitter followers will follow your link to your blog. So, I have a regular readership of people checking out each blog. Throughout the day, I have multiple email drafts I work on, and I email them when I want to post it. But you can post by messaging from your phone too!

I saved the best part last. (A boo-boo in blogging, normally. Ha-ha.) It’s the bookmark. That thing made me a little nervous and intimidated at first. Nervous because when Posterous instructed me to download it to put on your bookmarks bar, I immediately remembered how much I hated “Bluelight” specials toolbar and other junk that got put on my browser, back in late 1990s and early 2000s.

Intimidated because I don’t know anything about technical stuff yet. My eyes still glaze over with something between trepidation and boredom, when presented with an instructional on how to understand the various technical scripting, plugins, and languages. Hey, that’s why we hire programmers and stuff, right?

However, when Posterous explained, I can be viewing anything on any website, and click the bookmark I downloaded, to share instantly. Just like that, it pulls up a window, allowing me to pick what exactly I want to pull from the website, and has a window for me to add my personal comments, if I like. Then when I click post, voila.

I will have posted a blog with proper backlinks, properly citing the source, and everything will be snapped and reformatted to look like the rest of my personal blogs. You don’t need to know anything technical like imbedding or formatting. It literally takes me 2 seconds to post, let’s say, a video from YouTube I like. Sharing an article from a news site is instant with my followers or subscribers, through my blog. Okay, 20 seconds, if I want to share my opinion or change how the wording will appear in the Title, to Twitter. BTW, is it important to use your portal and your blog site to direct people, even if someone else wrote it? Of course it is! See what I’m getting at?

Tagging is easy, too. After you post, you go to your post, click “Tag.” Start typing away the keywords for the blog. It will automatically show a ranking of the Tags from the most often mentioned to the least often, on a sidebar. If you don’t know why tagging is important, keep learning! I’ll cover this soon.

In short, Posterous has made blogging and sharing information so easy that I can’t think of many reasons not to use it.

Obviously an enthusiast and enthusiastically sharing away,

Misheel.

Now ubiquitous in the information age as a casual-information sharing portal, a blog or blogging* is becoming perhaps the most important tool for gaining market trust and niche market share for companies.

Why is blogging in today’s business world is essential?  There are three main reasons why blogging brings you results–content, personality, and updates.

The Internet

People go to the Internet to search for information.  The Internet is a search-driven, immediate-gratification tool for its users.  It’s true that sometimes the information people are looking for is very specific, as when they want to check the weather or buy a particular item from Ebay.

However, more often than not, people search online for answers to a question and to do research.  So, needless to say, marketing online is very different from traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing channels have captive audiences.  This means the audience’s momentum is on halt.  TV, Print, and Radio advertisements get exposure regardless of whether the audience wished to hear/see it.  Some websites still utilize this old method, treating its viewers as though they are brain-dead and love to be sold to with glitzy ads. Check out American car manufacturer websites for examples of amazing designer advertising work that does not inform, and technical information that loses its audience in the details.

With the Internet, people are on a “go, go, go” or “click, click, click” mode until the information they are looking for is found.  For example, when shopping for cars and researching online, people go to third party websites that have actual people talking about and evaluating the cars.  These manufacturers’ websites that missed the boat are more for showing off to your Facebook friends what you bought, after you bought it!

Blog Personality

Now, a good blog will go further than just serving up pertinent information. It will lend you the personality of the writer.  In a world of faceless strangers online, blogging thus gives voice and humanity to your company, and begins a dialogue with your audience.  That’s the difference between being talked at versus someone talking to you and answering your questions.

Blog Updates

Now a good content with personality can be on a static website, but the regularly updated content and entries of a blog makes it come alive.  This is true not only for the readers and followers of your blog, but also online, on the search engines, making it more likely to gather new visitors, viewers, and newly converted consumers.  I am sure that I do not need to explain that this will translate to more business.