MarkTzk.com » Online marketing

Why you should stop trying new social media sites

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:17:57 +0000

Google Wave. Google Buzz. Farmville. Foursquare. Gowalla. Yelp.

Don't get lost in the maze of choices social media offers. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1093677)

The list goes on and on. There are more social media sites, social media apps and cool online things that people are talking about than I will ever have time to fully explore. Even though I make my living in part by helping companies use social media, I can’t commit enough time to explore every new thing to come along. Chances are, you don’t have the time either. And that’s OK.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying the latest and “greatest,” easy to worry that you’re going to miss out on the next Facebook or Twitter if you don’t jump on a new site right away. In other words, it’s easy to forget why we’re here in the first place.

We’re here to have conversations, to learn, to market and brand ourselves, our businesses and our causes. Actually doing those things requires work, attention and focus. But the siren song of Google’s latest project or the newest game that all your friends seem to be playing on Facebook can be all too alluring sometimes.

A better strategy might be to focus on just a handful of sites and activities, to spend real time building real relationships, creating real content and establishing a real presence. It’s OK to not be everywhere. Instead, pick your places and really BE there. For me, these days, that means I’m spending a lot of time focusing on this blog (my home base on the web), on Twitter and on Facebook. I spend less time on LinkedIn and a private forum or two.

I have dipped my toe into Google Buzz and Google Wave, am intrigued by FourSquare but not ready yet to focus on it, and I keep an eye on the news, apps and sites that keep social media enthusiasts talking. But that’s all. And that’s OK. It’s better to pick your places, focus and have an impact. Trying to be everywhere is probably a formula for being nowhere.

So I don’t really mean that you should never try a new social media site. It just means that you should do so carefully and with some consideration as to why you’re doing it and how it fits into your overall goals.

What say you? Where do you spend your time online and how do you figure out what’s valuable? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

30 content ideas for an email newsletter

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:48:45 +0000

One day your boss comes into your office and announces that he wants to publish an email newsletter about your department, company or organization. And then he gives you the job of actually producing it. He gives you a deadline and says “I look forward to seeing a draft of the first edition next week.” What do you do?

I’ve created and managed a few email newsletters over the years. Just as with a blog, an email newsletter is built around content. Here are 30 content ideas for your email newsletter.

1. Links to and excerpts from your recent blog posts.

2. Links to and excerpts from other web sites or blogs that your readers might find useful or interesting.

3. A short essay or letter that’s not published anywhere else.

4. An exclusive tip of the week/month.

5. Links to your company’s social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook fan pages, etc.).

6. News and announcements about what’s going on in your business or organization.

7. Special offers, discounts and coupons.

8. If your employer is a for-profit business, links to the favorite charity encouraging people to donate and explaining why you support the group. (Like I did with this post.) If you work or a nonprofit, links to businesses that support you in a substantial way.

9. Employee profiles (to put a human face on your business or organization).

10. Customer profiles.

11. Customer testimonials.

12. Links to independent reviews of your products or services (such as on Yelp or Amazon).

13. Invitations for readers to review your products or services on your web site or an independent site.

14. Contact information (seems basic, I know, but it’s important).

15. Polls or trivia questions.

16. The results of the last poll or answers to your last trivia question.

17. Photos of your products.

18. Reader-submitted photos of your products being used.

19. A contest.

20. Listings of upcoming events (sales, meet-ups, open houses or whatever’s appropriate for your organization).

21. A tutorial or lesson. You could do a series of these.

22. A guest column by an outside writer, perhaps a well-known blogger in your industry or even a celebrity.

23. Q&A style interview with a key employee in your organization.

24. Emails from readers, answered by you “Dear Abby” style.

25. Inspiring, compelling stories of about customers of yours who are doing great things (climbing mountains, raising money for charity or maybe training for the Olympics).

26. A funny video produced by your employees.

27. Holiday greetings (during the holidays).

28. An invitation to an event or webinar exclusively for your newsletter readers.

29. New job listings. Hire your customers? Why not. If they buy from you, they could be great advocates for your brand.

30. Sneak peeks or previews of new products or services.

What else have you put in email newsletters? What would you put in a newsletter if you were doing one? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

How to use personas in blogging

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:33:29 +0000

Putting a face on your readers with personas can improve your blog and content marketing efforts. (Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/499007)

Many marketers use personas to help them better understand their customers and design products and marketing campaigns that will be attractive to those customers. You can use them to improve your blog or other content marketing efforts — podcasts, videos, white papers and so forth.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional character used to better understand the desires, goals and motivations of some set of potential customers.

If you’re running a blog about weight loss, you might use personas to understand the differences between a 19-year-old woman and a 47-year-old man when it comes to losing weight. Chances are they have different motivations, different values and different circumstances in their day-to-day lives. Rather than treating those two sets of customers the same, personas allow you to clearly fix in your mind how each group is distinctive and will likely seek different information as they explore weight loss solutions.

Properly constructed personas are built off extensive research, which could include interviews, spending time with people in their day-to-day lives and collecting statistics about a target group of customers. If you have the resources for that sort of research, then you have a huge advantage compared to your competitors. But even if you don’t, you can still use personas to rough out some basic ideas about different audiences.

You can still consider all the people you know in real life who are representative of potential readers. That can help you define personas based on interactions and communication you’ve had with real people.

Also note that you can have multiple personas for a single brand, product or service. Different groups of people may purchase the same product for different reasons. Effective marketing communications will still take into account the needs, aspirations and values of these different personas in creating an overall marketing plan.

Four steps to building blog reader personas

1. Figure out who your readers (or potential readers) are. Or, if you don’t have any readers, figure out who you’d like them to be. Are they male or female, young or old, from your country or from abroad? Just the basics here.

2. Figure out what your readers are looking for. Do they want actionable information (how-to posts), industry news, strategic perspective or insights into the big picture? And take this beyond merely what kind of information they want. Ask yourself why they want that information: What is their root motivation?

3. Decide how knowledgeable your readers are. Are they rank beginners? Jaded experts with decades of experience? Somewhere in between?

4. Craft persona portraits. Once you’ve figured out your readers are, what information they’re looking for and how knowledgeable they are about your subject matter, write short bios for each persona. Here’s an example of a persona profile I wrote last year for this blog:

Media Michelle – A young professional in media, marketing or PR who is just getting into social media and wants to learn more about them. She needs basic information about how to do things better and more efficiently, plus examples of others doing things well, ideas and some basic theory.

I’ve seen personas much more detailed than Media Michelle, so don’t hesitate to pile on the detail if it’s relevant and helps you form a richer picture of who you’re trying to reach.

How to use reader personas

Once you’ve got your reader personas developed, you can start to use them to guide your content development. For each persona you can come up with content ideas (blog posts or whatever) that meet the persona’s needs. You can edit and review content you’re creating with an eye toward how well it works for the target persona. And you can check your persona or personas periodically to make sure that your blog or content marketing efforts aren’t leaving any important audiences out.

Have you ever used personas for a blog or other content marketing efforts? If so, please share your thoughts and ideas in comments.

Why you (or others) should make time for social media

Mark Tosczak — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:11:39 +0000

Don't miss the train on social media. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1106949)

Have you heard these lines?

“There’s so much noise and clutter out there, it seems as though social media hasn’t really matured enough to be a useful tool.”

“Social media’s fine for some industries, but not ours.”

“I just don’t have time for social media.”

Or perhaps the line is some variation on one these. There are still plenty of professionals out there who don’t think social media is that important. If you’re trying to convince someone who says these kinds of things, here are five arguments to help you.

1. Isn’t networking important to you? I would imagine there are very, very few professionals in any field who would say networking with others in their field isn’t important to them. Explain to them that social media sites are a tool to network online, and that you can network more efficiently and with more people through social media than you can with traditional methods. That doesn’t mean you should completely abandon phone calls, luncheon meetings and industry events, but social media can be a powerful tool for your professional advancement.

2. You can do business over these channels. It probably won’t happen the day you first set up your LinkedIn or Facebook account, but you can do business through these social media sites. Particularly as you expand your network, learn to use the tools skillfully and connect with relevant people, you’ll find yourself using these sites to exchange communications that are directly relevant to your professional life. I don’t hesitate to connect through Twitter, Facebook and other channels to set up meetings, develop new business prospects or deal with speaking opportunities.

3. Weak ties might be as valuable, or more so, than close connections. One of the things that social media newbies often struggle with is the idea of being linked to a lot of people you don’t know well, or don’t know at all. However, some experts believe “weak” ties may actually be as valuable or more valuable in accessing audiences and information (such as job opportunities). Most of my job opportunities over the years have not come from my closest friends and colleagues, but rather from people who I had (at least at the time) rather weak relationships with. Social media allows you to develop many more of these potentially valuable weak ties.

4. More and more people are doing it. I don’t mean to say that people should adopt social media tools just because others are doing it. But what reluctant social media users should understand is that a larger and larger percentage of the population (and probably nearly all subpopulations) are using these tools. That means you have more opportunities to interact online with people who are important to you. It’s probably not a good idea to be in a shrinking minority of people not using these sites.

5. Social media can help you improve and influence your Google search results. Frequently, the first place I go when I’m trying to find information out about someone is Google. A quick Google search can pull up profiles on social media sites, articles you’ve written and blogs you’ve authored. Social media, in other words, can help you influence what people find when they search for you online. If you Google yourself now (yeah, it’s egotistical, but go ahead and try it) and you don’t like the results that come up, or if none of the results have anything to do with you, you can change that with social media.

What about you, gentle reader? What do you say to people when they tell you that social media isn’t important for them? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

How to strengthen your relationships

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:30:36 +0000

Have you reached out and touched people in your network lately? (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/616726)

In social media it’s easy to get caught up in mechanical ideas of what building and maintaining relationships is about. Are you pinging your network regularly? Are you sharing content, creating value? Are you thanking people? In marketing, we start quantifying these things: How many tweets, how many retweets, how many followers or subscribers or fans?

And that’s fine. Except that it’s all just a way of dancing around the real issue: relationships.

I got an email last week from an old acquaintance (which I haven’t returned yet — sorry Jamie, I will). We’re connected via LinkedIn and she wrote to tell me what was going on with her life and to ask what was going on with mine. She said that she was trying to do a better job this year of connecting with her network. Good for her.

All of us should steal that idea and do the same. It’s not numbers of friends, followers or subscribers that are ultimately important, it’s relationships. That’s why it’s called social media, and that’s where its power lies.

This isn’t just a soft and fuzzy “well isn’t that nice” issue either. The strength of your relationships and the strength of trust can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Many sales people understand this instinctively — they’ve always operated on the basis of relationships, trust and communication. Marketers are trying to take old mass media ideas of brand and integrate them with social media concepts around trust, reputation and relationships. It’s still a work in progress.

Dave Navarro published an interesting case study last week looking at short sales letters vs. long sales letters. It’s worth reading. The bottom line there with Laura Roeder‘s webinar is that she has spent a long time building trust and relationships with her community. That includes pushing out content for them (she publishes an email newsletter and a blog), but it also includes lots of interaction (look at her Twitter stream). Interaction is the bedrock of relationships.

So, let’s bring this down to some actionable stuff. Ask yourself these questions. Based on your answers, you should know what to do next to strengthen your relationships with your community.

Do you routinely say happy birthday to people? Facebook makes this easy.
Do you congratulate people in your community when they get promoted, get a job, win an award or achieve something noteworthy?
Look at your list of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. Who haven’t you talked to in the last few months? What’s stopping you?
Who do you need to meet for coffee or lunch or a drink?
You just read something interesting. Who in your community could benefit? Instead of sharing it as a status update (maybe in addition to), have you just sent it to that one person via email? Do this for one or two people a day and watch your relationships tighten up.
Are you being human? Are you sharing with your friends and colleagues what’s important in your life? Are you asking about and listening to what’s important in their lives? This might have nothing to do with what you or your friends actually get paid to do every day.

What else? How else can we all do a better job of connecting and reconnecting with people in our communities and networks? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

How to budget time for social media

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:30:27 +0000

You have limited time - use it wisely when it comes to social media. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1068015)

One of the challenges of social media is how to manage the amount of time that you could put into these activities. How much time, and how exactly you spend that time, will end up being a little different for everyone depending on your goals and strategy.

Here’s a framework to help you budget your time. This is especially helpful for personal branding and networking activities, where it’s harder (or seems harder) to just carve hours out of your workday for these activities.

Content creation

Do you blog? Do you write articles or white papers or create presentations that you share on Slideshare? What about podcasting? Creating original content can help you establish a brand and demonstrate your expertise and knowledge. It’s a very powerful strategy, and if you choose to use it you’ll want to set aside some time to focus on it.

How much content do you want to produce each week or month?
How much time do you need to devote to produce that content? How many hours is that each week and each day, on average?
When will you put in that time? During your lunch hour? In the early mornings or late at night? On the weekends? Decide when and put it on your calendar.

In my case I’m probably averaging about 10 hours a week on blogging right now. You don’t have to spend that much time, but consistency is important.

Listening and reading

It’s important to keep up with what’s going on in your industry — reading blogs, articles and books, listening to podcasts, and generally keeping up with new ideas and conversation. How much time you spend on this will vary depending on your industry and goals.

Accountants need to keep up with the latest tax law changes. Doctors have to try to plough through stacks of medical journals. I try to keep up with the flood of books on social media that are being published and the many, many blogs on the subject. Since it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of information available, it’s a good idea to decide how much time you want to spend on this.

What do you need to keep up with? Books, blogs, professional journals, other sources?
How many hours per week will you devote to this?
When will you keep up with these? At night before you go to sleep? Can you listen to podcasts and audiobooks on your iPod on the way to work?
Do you have a system to bring the most relevant content to your attention? Google alerts? RSS feeds? Some of the tips in this post on finding and sharing great content can help.

Conversation

Of course, social media isn’t very social if you’re not talking. That could include sharing content you find, responding to others in a variety of social media channels (including commenting on blogs), and even reaching out to people via email to connect offline. It also is the tool that allows you to turn mere online connections into actual relationships (whether they’re weak or strong).

1. What social media channels are most important for you? Twitter, Facebook, a specialized social media network on Ning or a forum devoted to your industry?

2. How much time will you spend on these channels? An hour a day? Three hours a week?

3. When will you spend that time? In short 15-minute bursts throughout the day? In a longer, more concentrated period a few times each week?

More tips

All of us have a limited time and energy, but the vast world of social media can suck up an enormous amount of that if we’re not careful. So here are some tips to manage that.

Focus. You probably have limited time, at best a few hours a days, to devote to this. So concentrated on the 20 percent of tools/sites/strategies that are going to yield 80 percent of your results. For me, these days, that means Twitter, writing blog posts and reading blog posts and books get most of my attention.

Be realistic. Don’t sketch out a plan that calls for 30 hours a week (almost a full-time job) of work on this, and then find out a month into it that’s it’s just too much. It’s better to start out with very modest ambitions. As you become more fluent with the tools, you’ll be able to increase your productivity by becoming more efficient and integrating these tools into your life.

Consider the rest of your life. If you’re going through a really busy period at work, going on vacation or caring for a sick family member, some of these actvities may temporarily take a back seat. That’s OK. Don’t burn yourself out or disregard other priorities just for the sake of keeping up with some ideal social media time budget.

Got ideas or questions on how to budget your time for social media? Please share them in the comments below.

How to figure out your blog’s USP

Mark Tosczak — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:45:50 +0000

It takes more than beauty to stand out. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/942854)

There are a lot of blogs out there. You’ve got to wonder — what makes your’s different? Why should anybody read it? If you don’t know the answer to that question, then your readers may have trouble figuring it out as well.

You need a USP — a unique selling proposition. Marketers develop USPs all the time for products and services. The USP helps define precise why a potential customer would choose that product or service over all the others. If you can define the USP for your blog, you’ll do a better job of persuading more people to read it and getting more people to subscribe or give you their email addresses.

Developing a USP is tough, but here are some questions to consider to get you thinking about it.

Your market

The first thing to do is to consider the market that you’re in.

What’s your market niche, topic or industry? What subject area are you focusing on? If you’re not focusing on a particular topic or theme (or at least restricting yourself to handful) it’s going to be a lot harder to define what value your blog delivers to some particular group of people.

What are others in your niche doing? Reading lots of other blogs in your niche and figuring out what they’re doing can be a bit depressing. The first time you do this, you might come to the conclusion that other bloggers are already doing everything that could be done. There may be folks writing about breaking news in your niche, some providing tutorials for beginners, others providing strategic guidance for advance practitioners. But keep looking and thinking. What’s not being done?

You

Once you’ve got a good grip on your market, it’s time to think about you (or, in the case of a company or organizational blog, your organization). You need to figure out what makes you unique, as that will probably figure into your USP.

What experiences — jobs, education, hobbies, attitude, values, experiences, nationality, skills, etc. — are you bringing to your blog? Imagine a group of new bloggers writing about fitness and weight loss. One’s a doctor, and knows how to find and cite the latest scientific evidence. Another is a fire fighter, and can talk about the challenges of eating right and exercising while working a stressful job. And another is a devout Christian, and can write about how fitness, nutrition and weight loss fit in with spiritual values and practices. Different backgrounds, and, I’m sure, different blogs.

What are you really good at? What are the things that you do that people in your life tell you you’re good at? Do any of those apply or relate in any way to your niche? (And if they don’t, do you need to reconsider your niche?) How can you bring that skill to bear on your blog? How can that skill be reflected in the content you create?

What fascinates you? A big part of a successful blog is passion and energy. Bring that to the table, and your writing will shine a little brighter, your posting schedule will be more frequent and the quality of your content will be higher. How can you incorporate what really fascinates you into your blog?

Your USP

Answer all those questions above (and maybe a few more that might occur to you along the way) and you might start to get a clearer idea of what your USP is. Here are a few more thoughts to help you crystallize your USP.

Can you combine two (or more) different elements (perhaps two parts of your background) to create a unique new persona? How about a Buddhist MBA productivity blogger, for example? Though someone probably has that one already tied up.

Is there a certain type of content not being provided (or not provided well) in your niche? Interviews, tutorials, data analysis? What’s not being done that you could do?

Can you bring a particular style or attitude to your blog? If all the other blogs in your niche are sincere and heartfelt, bring some humor to the niche.

Is it unique and will it sell? Finally, once you start to get an idea of what your USP could be, ask yourself: Is it unique and will it sell? You want to be honest with yourself here, though not so hard on yourself that you give up. But if your USP is not unique or it won’t sell, then you don’t have a USP. Back to the drawing board.

Have you successfully created a USP for your blog? If so, how did you go through the process? What tips do you have? Please share them in the comments below.

Changing my approach to Facebook

Mark Tosczak — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:22:31 +0000

Note: As I’ve mentioned previously, I challenged myself to write 30 posts in 30 days. I’ve not been as consistent with my blogging as I would have liked, so I’ve got to get a lot of blog posts published in the last couple of days. So, you’ll see several more posts than normal in the next couple of days. On Feb. 17, I’ll return to a normal schedule of three to five times per week. Please bear with me. Thanks!

Last year, I wrote a post called Why I’m becoming more promiscuous online, which explained my personal approach to social media and networking. Re-reading that, my philosophy and approach to social media hasn’t changed much, but I am making a tweak to it. I’m going to close off my personal Facebook account to people I don’t have some sort of real relationship with. Later this week, I’ll start unfriending people who I don’t know in real life or haven’t had some sort of interaction with. Here’s why.

Lately, I’ve started getting more and more friend invitations on Facebook from people I just don’t know. In some cases, they are friends with someone else I know, so there’s a chance I could run into them in my day-to-day life. In some cases, we don’t have any friends in common. I think some of them come from this blog. I’ve had my Facebook link posted prominently (the icon over on the right) for a while, in the last few weeks readership here has gone up dramatically. Some of those new readers have asked to connect on Facebook (and in some cases, I have).

But something else has happened in the last few months, also. My personal interactions and communications — information about my kids, my family and my connections to them — has increased. More relatives have connected with me online, and a lot of my Facebook activity has become more personal. I’m not feeling as comfortable about having that open to anyone who comes along. So with Facebook I’m altering my “promiscuous” approach and becoming more conservative.

The new MarkTzk.com fan page on Facebook

Still, I know a lot of people I might encounter online will still be interested in opportunities to interact on Facebook. So I’ve set up a Facebook fan page for that. The Facebook icon over in the right-hand column of this blog already points to it. I’m afraid there’s not much there yet, but I’ll start to gradually populate it with content over time, and I hope it becomes another place where we can talk about the topics and issues that this blog covers. I also plan to treat it as a kind of laboratory for experiments with Facebook marketing and Facebook fan page customization.

My LinkedIn and Twitter accounts will remain very open, so I’d still love to connect with you there. And if you know me from someplace other than this blog, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll remain friends on Facebook. See you at the fan page.

Dear email marketers – why don’t you love me anymore?

Mark Tosczak — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:15:54 +0000

Your unthinking emails could wash away my affection for you. (Photo source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1089948)

Dear Email Marketers,

I have to admit, in the beginning I was really infatuated with you. You had a cool web site with lots of great content. You had obviously spent a lot of time developing it, and it seemed like you were going to be pumping out more great content in the future. All you wanted was my email address. I wasn’t sure, but then there was that special offer: the enticing free ebook, discounts, special offers just for me. So I took the plunge and signed up for your email list. What the heck, I figured, you seem legitimate, and legitimate email marketers would honor a future unsubscribe request. And if that didn’t work, I could always mark you as spam.

At first it was good. You sent me updates, new content, emails that were genuinely useful and interesting. But over time, your ardor seemed to fade. The emails got shorter, the copy less engaging and less interesting. It seemed like, more and more, all you wanted me to do was click on that link and go read a sales page, watch an over-the-top promotional video or buy something else with my 15% off coupon (which isn’t so special when you’re sending me one every week). The interesting, engaging content that had attracted me at first? It was no longer there.

And then it got worse. I started getting these really short emails – “Hey, Mark, you’ve got to check out this link.” No explanation, no detail, nothing. Too often the link led to just another sales page.

Then there was the “Whoops, I made a mistake in yesterday’s email and sent the wrong link. Here’s the right one.” Yeah, right – that’s just another come on.

Or worst of all, the “keep this a secret.” Even though I know you’re sending the same email to many other people. C’mon, we both know there’s no secret. Do you really think that old copy writing trick fools anyone?

And about those subject lines carefully crafted to look as though they come from a friend. Sometimes they start with a “RE:” at the beginning to make it seem as though you’re replying to something I sent, or they have proper nouns spelled with lowercase letters to make it seem more casual. Do people really fall for that? Listen, as soon as I saw your email address, I knew you were a marketer, not a close personal friend.

That’s not all. Sometimes you sent me these emails that had nothing but images in them. Don’t you realize my email programs automatically block those images? I couldn’t even guess what you might be sending me without hitting that download images button. I admit, I’m in a hurry and I’ve got a lot of other email to get through, so sometimes I don’t bother. The email was never read.

And those emails from the upscale office supply company whose products I love? Lately, those have seen really cluttered. Too many pictures of too many products. What are you trying to sell me? The pens, the purses, the new line of notebooks? Don’t you know that most of what I’ve bought from you, and most of what I’m interested in, are the notebooks and paper? Why are you distracting me with all those things I’m not interested in?

What’s wrong, email marketer. Don’t you care about me anymore? Why aren’t you making an effort.

What, you don’t know how? OK, then, I’ll tell you what I really want:

1. Interesting, useful content — right in your email. Sure, I’m not always going to click through to your web site, though I know that’s what you really want, but at least I’ll continue to pay attention to your emails, and maybe click through another time.

2. Offers that are actually related to my interests. You already know them, don’t you? After all, I’ve bought things from you before, and you got my email address during those transactions. Please don’t make me go hunting through your promotional emails for what I really want.

3. Honesty. Drop the “I made a mistake” and “Let’s keep it between us.” I know you’re trying to sell me something (which I’m OK with, if it’s a quality product that I’m interested in). But I hate the deceptive writing intended to somehow manipulate me into doing what you want.

4. Regular emails, but not too frequent. I’m busy, I get a lot of email, and sending me something everyday is just too much unless you’re providing great content.

5. Uniqueness. When you send me the same thing every time, the same discount or coupon, it just looks like you’re not trying. And quite frankly, it’s boring. Why don’t you mix it up a bit and come up with some new ideas? That would get my attention.

I unsubscribed from some emails today — I wasn’t getting anything from them. But maybe that won’t happen to you. I want what I once got — engaging, relevant content. Maybe you’ll make some changes before it’s too late.

Sincerely,

Mark the Customer

p.s. Dear reader — What do email marketers need to do better to woo you? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Five tips for better tweeting

Mark Tosczak — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:17:35 +0000

Of all the social networks I’m a part of, Twitter is probably the one that gets most of my attention right now. I arrange meetings and phone calls through it, meet new people and reconnect with old friends, have fielded new business requests and reached out to journalists and other influencers. It is truly a powerful tool.

After sending more than 2,300 tweets, here are five tips that I think are likely to make your Twitter experience better for you and for the people following you.

1. Shout out. If you’re sharing someone’s blog post, take an extra minute to find the writer’s Twitter ID and then give that person credit in your tweet. The writer will appreciate knowing that you’re sharing his or her post, and you may get an opportunity to start a conversation with someone new.

2. Leave enough room for people to RT. I am still surprised by how few people pay attention to this, but it’s important if you want people to RT you. Don’t use 140 characters, aim for 120 or so.

3. Use a Twitter client. I like Hootsuite, and Tweetdeck for a close second, on a computer. On my Blackberry I’m using Ubertwitter. But you can use whatever you like (there are lots of options listed here). Most Twitter clients simply provide a better, richer experience than Twitter by itself does.

4. Be consistent, at least somewhat. Better to show up, at least for a tweet or two, on most days, than to be absent for days or weeks at a time. A little day-to-day consistency goes a long way in building up real relationships online.

5. List yourself in Twitter directories. There are a number of directories, such as Twibes and Twello, and you have a better chance of finding people with similar interests (and being found by them) if you list yourself in these directories. Search Google for Twitter directories or start with the list here.

Have some other tips? Please share your favorite Twitter tricks, tips and tactics in the comments.