Month: February 2010

“So my friends the time has come. Time to raise the roof and have some fun.” I’m not sure about the roof part, but I did accomplish a goal this week. I completed and made live my newest creation: http://danmorrismarketing.com

I love this LettersFromDan site, but like I said in one of my previous posts – your blog must have a theme to be ultimately successful financially. There’s so much clutter in this world that “randomness” often just doesn’t cut it. For example, how many men go straight to the Sports Section when they unravel the morning paper? There’s a reason it has its own section. I bet there are a TON of people that read the sports section and that’s it.

What are the chances they’d subscribe to the paper if sports stories were just randomly placed throughout the paper?

But LettersfromDan makes me smile – so I decided I’m not changing it – though I contemplated it for a long time. Ultimately, the only reason I wanted to change it was so clients and prospective clients had a place to “check me out” online. My adventures with Mark, thoughts on the different places I enjoy traveling and random opinions just didn’t fill that need.

Thus DanMorrisMarketing was born. And this week it is live. You’ll see some new stuff over there – but it will not serve as a constantly updated blog as I’ve intended this to be. So join me there. Join me here. In either case, I love that you’re reading and look forward to chatting with you soon.

(oh that first sentence, that was the opening line of “All night Long” by Lionel Richie – in case that’s haunting you right now).
🙂

Do you spend hours of time on Twitter?

Let me rephrase that.

Does Twitter mean something to your business?

If so, what would happen if Twitter went down? If you lost all of your followers? What would happen if someone started spamming from your account? (Could you imagine if someone started sending out porn links from the @microsoft “verified” account?) Do you have a contingency plan?

The fact of the matter is having a contingency plan is sometimes what makes and breaks a company. Let’s take a look at Toyota for example. They’re suffering some major PR bruising right now because they’ve failed to act timely and confidently in the face of their automotive problems.

Let’s compare that to Johnson & Johnson – the definitive contingency planning company. When someone reported they’d found a needle in their shampoo – J&J went into action. They’d already brainstormed that problem and had a book with the fix already written. Within a week they had all the affected shampoo out of stores and new “Needle-Free” labeled shampoo on the shelves.

We know that Twitter has become part of our business because you can barely watch any news program that doesn’t cite Twitter or invite you to comment on Twitter. More and more people are joining Twitter, following companies, brands and people and “believing” what is being tweeted. That being said, it’s also largely out of our control. Everyday, people are encountering twitter problems like:

• Spammers
• Lost Followers
• Lost Profile Photo
• Deleted Account
• or the inability to log-in among others

The key is to get the solution in your hands BEFORE you have a problem. For example there are two things you have to do to stop a spammer should they get access to your account. Unless you do both, you likely won’t stop them. And once you see spam with your name on it, how long do you have to fix it before your customers’ notice? Before they complain? Before they unfollow you?

I wrote a report called TwitterGlitch that highlights these problems, how to fix them, who to talk to at Twitter to get them fixed and even which third party “help desks” are monitored by Twitter.

The smartest thing you can do to protect your Twitter account is to click on “Profile” everyday and make sure all the tweets on your front page were left by you. And if you’re using Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, make it a habit to log-in to Twitter.com once per week to check your account log-in. Otherwise, get a copy of TwitterGlitch and have the solutions to your problems in your hands. Don’t make finding the solutions your second problem.

Last night I did something I haven’t done before. I took a product, created a website and started driving traffic to it in less than an hour. Now that is LEAPS and BOUNDS ahead of where I was a year ago, before the first NAMS conference.

Now I have shiny button syndrome, so perhaps, I shouldn’t have digressed from my original goals to get that done last night. But I came across a free “rebrandable” e-book from Kevin Riley. Normally I think I would have just set it aside for the time being, but Kevin mentioned that he put some “case studies” about how businesses use Twitter in the report.

Having just produced Twitter Glitch, I was immediately interested.  So I quickly read the report and actually thought it was pretty cool – excellent information – for Twitter users.  What was even better is that it was a “Free Report” I could give out on my own site.

A good part of this “hour” getting this executed was deciding how to give it away. I assumed I would “tweet” about its existence, but there still had to be a way for people to view it.  So where do I put it? In a new post in this blog? On Facebook? On a new webpage? As a bonus in TwitterGlitch? Hmmm. . .

I really wanted to use it to help build a list, but ultimately decided that a “Free” report should be free.  So I abandoned my desire to use an opt-in box and ultimately decided to create a new webpage on TwitterGlitch.com.  I may change that – and always can – that’s just what I did.

Now Kevin Riley does makes it easy to give away his reports. He provides you a webpage and even some e-mails so you can tell people about the free report. So I modified one of his webpages and created this page: http://twitterglitch.com/TwitterMeThis (take a look at it).  When you press the button, you get the report instantly! Voila!

So, I was quite excited by that. There’s no way I could have done that a year ago – and while that’s small potatoes to the experts, it makes me smile like an expert.

So Darren Crawford and I had an idea after seeing at least one person come away from NAMS without even a blog set-up.  We decided we’d start a weekly mastermind group for #NAMS folks.  The idea is simple really.

Once per week, we’ll put on a NAMS only, mastermind phone call. If you’re like me, you’re not ready to hire a VA until you’ve got some level of confidence and knowledge about the tasks. And I recall quite well that 1 year ago getting a blog set-up was a major hurdle. In fact, it wasn’t until NAMS that Cathy the WordPressWizard informed me about the difference between a WordPress.com account and a WordPress blog.

So, go to Free Weekly Mastermind.com and get in on the fun. Between the two of us we can get you from A – M, then we’ll make sure to have some guest experts on the calls with us to get us from M – Z.

There are many steps that never get taught at conferences – and for the most part – they shouldn’t be. So if you’ve never heard of nameservers, cron jobs, embed code, article automation, the 10x10x4 traffic strategy, TubeMogul, Onlywire, or the PrettyLinks Plugin – there’s a good chance this Mastermind call is for you.

If you know all that stuff, then join us so you can stretch our learning and we can try to stretch yours.

Sign up for the Free Weekly Mastermind.com Today!