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Chiefs do Tweet

Everyday I talk to many business people and, whilst they usually have a personal Twitter account, they can’t quite see how it could benefit them as a business tool.

So we need a frame for this; a context within which Twittering as a business makes sense.  Wikinomics and the trend towards mass collaboration in business is already upon us. The rules of this game are openness, sharing, socialising (peering) and acting globally. Marketing is moving towards peer to peer generated conversations (pull) rather than the ‘push’ of mass broadcast campaigns. 

Twitter is fuel for the fire of buzz and collaboration around your business or brand.  But to be successful in the world of ‘Business 2.0′  you need to be ready for a culture shock (perhaps): what matters here is openness, authenticity and transparency.  You have to be prepared to be yourself, and show the person behind your company.

Here are some tips on Twittering for business:

1. Embrace the new rules: make sure your Twitter presence (profile, picture etc) and your tweets show your organisation as non-hierarchical, open and authentic and transparent. Tweet regularly and include a mix of business, but keep it informal, and personal, revealing bits about your unique personality. People buy people, especially those they trust; openness, authenticity and transparency build trust.
2. People to people: Be informal, forget hierarchy. Social media breaks all that gumpf down. Show your personal side in your bio; reveal the person (at least have a photo of yourself).
3. Ask and ye shall recieve: It goes without saying that sharing information will increase your popularity. In fact sharing information and forwarding what you know is the new networking according to Harvard Business. All the best business networkers share to get ahead. You can do this on Twitter by retweeting (RT), sharing links (use URL shorteners such as bit.ly, not tinyurl), and advertising your (interesting) blog posts.  But you can also power up your sharing by asking. Ask your followers for advice, input, questions for research – of course, feel free to offer them little rewards in return!
4. Admit your mistakes: all great samurais do this, and all the best leaders in business. If you get it wrong, admit it
5. Get socialising: get to know your followers and socialise with them. Ask them questions and share their information. Use @, RT’s, direct messages (DM) to engage and you will get more out of your Twitter network.

Many CEOs are Twittering. Twitter is micro-blogging and leads to exponential sharing of information and news in no more than 40 characters – what business leader would not be attracted to that!!Check out the following for some good examples:

• Tim O’Reilly - Chief Exec O’Reilly Media
• Christine Perkett - Chief Exec of PerkettPR
• Michael Hyatt - Chief Exec of Thomas Nelson

Other posts you might like:

• Getting Your Head Around Facebook for Business
• Use the Science of Influence to Leverage your Network on Twitter
• 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Power up your Online PR

Maximise your influence for social network leverage

How can we use Twitter and maximise what we Tweet to extend our influence, increase our followers and delight those who are following us? By understanding and applying the science of influence to Twitter we can do all of this.

Firstly a little about the science of influence (bear with me, this bit is important). Robert Cialdini, a distinguished professor of psychology undertook a big study of professional influencers, and found that the skill of influence is captured by six universal factors :

• reciprocity – the desire to give something back to those that give to us
• likeness/rapport – People are easily persuaded by other people that they like (this is the basis of Viral Marketing after all). i.e. People are more likely to buy if they liked the person selling it to them.
• commitment and consistency – being congruent and authentic with our values
• scarcity – a desire to have those things of which there are less (i.e. original content)
• social proof – people want to follow the lead of people just like them and people will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, as a child have you ever run into the middle of a busy market square and just stood there and looked up into the sky? Remember the crowd that soon gathered to stand by you and look up into the sky to see what you were seeing!
• authority – if we claim to be an expert on some topic we are more likely to be successful at influencing others

The term social media and social network inherently implies the act of influencing. After all, why are teens suddenly the fastest growing Twitter group?  They are influenced by celebrities. Here’s how you can use the science of influence to leverage your social network on Twitter to achieve this:

1. Add value, educate or make people’s lives better in some way - Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to share a link and to add value. Use a link to a photo to illustrate your tweet (TwitPic), upload a video from your phone via an email to YouTube, use qik.com live video streaming from your phone. Also use Twitter’s retweet functionality to add value to your network, by retweeting those that add value to you.
2. Manage your followers –Use the power of reciprocity send them a DM tweet, offer to introduce them to your network (tweet intro), are they actively contributing to your network with regular tweets that are adding value, educating you or making your life better in some way?
3. Who are you following? – are they following you? Are you enough ‘like them’ for them to want to follow you? Monitor if they follow you, if they don’t and they don’t power up your network, should you unfollow them? Have a good ‘purge’ of who you are following every now and then
4. Power up your retweets:
   •  Use retweetable words: ask for help! Please retweet, use of ‘you’, mention the following words: blog post, help, how to 
   • don’t be boring – avoid idle ‘what are you doing’ ‘status’
   • make sure you use good grammar and spelling
   • work hard to write original content and be original
   • don’t swear or self-reference
   • 1pm to 11pm and Thurs/Friday are the best retweet times – focus your activity here
   • Monitor your retweets and @replies – so that you can track what’s working  (see a great post here on this)
5. Aim for quality not quantity – it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to get as many followers as possible, perhaps you feel that popularity is measured in how many thousands of followers you have? But, like everything in life it is quality not quantity that matters. Quantity will follow quality anyway. Aim for quality of:
   • followers 
   • following 
   • quality of content
6. Promote conversations – Twitter is a marketing tool to promote conversations around your brand, your company and/or your chosen topic areas. It is forcing a move in the culture of marketing from one-way broadcast campaigns to two-way conversations. So make sure that your conversations are truly two-way – and not rambling monologues, or boring rants:
   • Make an effort to find out what topics are trending and what people are interested in – use hashtags to monitor trending topics and twitter serach to search on keywords.
   • Use tweetdeck to manage multiple conversations and trending topics
   • Use keyword optimisation – so people can spot you on twitter search directories like wefollow and track you on twilert
   • Retweet other people using their words and giving your own personal authority/endorsement

Communication comes in two flavours: Communication and communication. Communication with big ‘C’ refers to the formal, planned communication programmes; the ‘big splash’, so to speak. By communication (small ‘c’) I am referring to the informal means of communicating with people: word of mouth, role models, mentoring, on the job training, one to one meetings etc. In organisations, we need both types of communication for communication to be powerful and most effective.

An interesting article in the New Scientist magazine, considers the transmission of communication through informal networks. Whilst this article puts an interesting slant on these ‘transmissions’ considering anything from moods (happiness, depression) to habit patterns and illnesses, what is interesting is the subconscious and rapid way that our peers influence our behaviour.

Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus. The fact that, seemingly, friends and peer groups are more influential than relatives or partners and spouses is even more pertinent to the transmission of communication at work. And gender is important, so the research claims: women observe and are influenced far more by other women and vice versa for men.

So what does this mean for organisational communication? There are two sides to this: the first that we need to recognise how powerful this transmission of ‘influence’ is in the organisation’s informal communication system. If employees are influenced more by those around them – in terms of attitudes, thoughts and behaviour – we need to know how to use this for positive influence in communication and change programmes. We also need to understand that this social influence can both hinder and help change communication programmes. And of course, what applies inside the organisation through informal social networks, applies even more powerfully outside the organisation. Think of the informal influence, negative or positive, that your salesmen, engineers and customer service staff have on your customers every day.

This influence is spread through a process of unconscious imitation – like the reflex action of our nervous system, this imitation by passes any conscious process and is performed highly efficiently by our brain and nervous system without any conscious interference or even awareness. Remember how infectious a smile is? I often walk around with a smile on my face, and I notice other people – complete strangers – smiling at me for no reason at all! I think they are nutters until i realise that they are simply and unconsciously copying me. This process of unconscious imitation – copying of behaviour – that we humans are so beautifully ‘wired up’ to do – facilitates in the ‘modeler’ (the person doing the copying) the experience of the emotion of the model. By copying that person’s smile with my body (facial expression, posture) i experience a ‘pale reflection’ of my model’s emotions. So by copying behaviours, I start to experience the attitudes, emotions and even thoughts of the person I am copying.

And what of the implication for organisational communications? By tapping into the ‘collective intelligence’ of social networks in the organisation we can ‘engineer’ the adoption and spread of new behaviour and cultural change. Viral Change (TM) offers a process for this, but it does require careful planning and facilitation (and an understanding of human behaviour) behind the scenes. Coupled with a strong ‘Communication’ programme, this can be a very powerful way to effect change and communication in organisations.

And what about applying this yourself? Whilst we might not be in complete conscious control of the process of social modelling, our brains take the shortcuts before we even know it; we can choose who we have around us who are likely to influence us. In 2009, do you want to be more happy or more depressed? More successful or more lazy? Whichever you prefer, think carefully about who you have around you – they might be more influential than you think!

Talk to us at Changeworks to find out how we use traditional and new media as well as behavioural change techniques to turn around performance and communication in organisations: info@changeworkscom.co.uk.